“Post octingentos viginti quinque peractos
Summi annos Domini terrae, aethrae, carceris atri,
Semine triticeo sub ruris pulvere tecto
Nocte bobus requies largitur fine laboris.”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COLUMBIAN SCHOOLS IN IRELAND.
| “I hold it truth with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things.” —Tennyson. |
I.—St. Columba’s Education.
Columba was the greatest saint of the Celtic race; and after St. Patrick, he is the most striking figure in our Celtic history. He was a poet, a statesman, and a scholar, as well as a great missionary saint—the apostle of many tribes, and the founder of many churches. His name is dear to every child of the Scottic race both in Erin and Alba; and what is stranger still, monk and priest though he was, his memory is cherished not only by Catholics but by Protestants and even by Presbyterians also.
His adventurous career has a strange dramatic interest of its own. He was fortunate too in finding a biographer, who has written his Life in a spirit of loving sympathy; and in our own times the biographer has found an editor to publish and illustrate his work with great learning and complete impartiality.[236]
Columba was a typical Celt, and seems to have been endowed by nature with all the virtues and many of the failings of the Celtic race. He was generous, warm-hearted, imaginative; he hated injustice and oppression; he was capable of the tenderest friendship, passionately fond of his native land, and filled with enthusiastic zeal for the propagation of the Gospel. Yet he had his faults. He was fiery and impetuous, impatient of contradiction, and too easily prone to anger and revenge. But this is his glory that with God’s help he conquered his faults; and therefore it is we love him because he is so human, so like ourselves in all things. It gives us greater confidence in the struggle, when we have a patron saint who can have compassion on our infirmities because he was tried like us in all things; and, if we are to believe the story of his life, not altogether without sin. It is well too that he should be for us an example of perfect penance; even as he schooled himself in patient endurance, and all other noble virtues.