Returning to Ireland, he landed at Drogheda, and built several churches on either side of the river Boyne. He then proceeded southwards to visit his brother-in-law, Engus, king of Munster, from whom he asked the island of Aran, that he might dwell thereon. The king was first unwilling to comply with his request; not because he was ungenerous, but because he had learned from S. Patrick "not to offer to the Lord his God any lands save such as were good and fertile, and easy of access." But S. Enda declared that Aran was to be the place of his resurrection; and at length the king made an offering of the island "to God and to S. Enda," asking in return the blessing of the saint.
Having thus obtained possession of what he rightly deemed a place of singular retirement, and well suited for the rigours of a penitential life, S. Enda returned to his brethren, and conducted them in safety to the island, which was then inhabited by Pagans from the adjacent coast of Clare. He divided the island into ten parts, and built thereon ten monasteries, each under the rule of its proper superior. He chose a place for his own residence on the eastern coast, and there erected a monastery, the name and site of which is preserved to this day in the little village of Kil-eany (Kill-Enda), about a mile from Kilronan. One half of the island was assigned to this monastery.
Then began the blessed days, when the sweet odour of penance ascended to heaven from the angelic band of monks, who, under the severe rule of S. Enda, made Aran a burning light of sanctity for centuries in Western Europe. "The virginal saint from Aran Island," as Marianus O'Gorman styles S. Enda, was to them a model of all the virtues of the religious life, but, above all, he excelled in the exercise of penitential mortifications. S. Cuimin of Connor tells us that:—
Enda loved glorious mortification
In Aran—triumphant virtue!
A narrow dungeon of flinty stone,
To bring the people to heaven.
"Aran," says Froude,[76] "is no better than a wild rock. It is strewed over with the ruins, which may still be seen, of the old hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which would pierce through the chinks of the walls.... Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping roof above them, was the chosen home of these poor men. Through winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine, generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at last lay down and died."
These miracles of penance were the first and immediate results of S. Enda's work in Aran.
It was in his life that these holy men had daily before them the personal realization of all they were striving after; he taught them to cherish the flinty dungeon and the dripping cave for love of the hard manger and the harder cross; he bade them dwell amid the discomforts and dreariness of their island home, because in the tabernacles of sinners the blessed majesty of God was daily outraged by the crimes of men. We cannot, indeed, describe the details of his life, for they have been hidden from human view, as it is becoming that such secrets of the Heavenly King should be hidden. But there yet survives the voice of one of those who lived with him in Aran, and in the ideal of an abbot which S. Carthage sets before us, we undoubtedly find re-produced the traits which distinguished the abbot of Aran-more, from whom S. Carthage first learned to serve God in the religious life. S. Enda was his first model of the "patience, humility, prayer, fast, and cheerful abstinence; of the steadiness, modesty, calmness that are due from a leader of religious men, whose office it is to teach in all truth, unity, forgiveness, purity, rectitude in all that is moral; whose chief works are the constant preaching of the Gospel for the instruction of all persons, and the sacrifice of the Body of the great Lord upon the holy altar."[77]