them absolutely from the laity. But as the church was part of the tribe, allegiance to her did not mean, as it came to mean in national life under Roman influence, that loyalty to the lay unit of society was incompatible with allegiance to ecclesiastical authority. This was due to the fact that to a considerable extent both were under the same cover of kinship.

But no church, especially a missionary church to the heathen with any appreciation of the necessity of discipline, could rest satisfied with an organisation resting on kinship. There are evidences throughout the Brehon Laws that the living part of the church, that section which in the Roman counterpart produced the successive monastic orders and afterwards the friars, tended to become a caste apart, building up for itself a hedge of privilege and caste ownership, which led to the change in the primacy of Celsus, who preceded the reformation of St Malachi.

The references to the church are comparatively few in all these Irish tribal writings, as the unwritten customary law settled matters between man and man outside church influence. But that the tribal church had influence is shown by the provision 10 that if a professional man, such as a poet or lawyer, who would almost certainly be a churchman, held lands in right of his profession, he might give two-thirds to the church.

Shut out from political influence by tribal formation, it is very probable that the extreme most modern equity in matters of contract, suretyship, and such matters shown in the Ancient Laws of Ireland was the form in which ecclesiastical influence, which was in close communication with Roman thought, even if it refused to submit to Roman authority, showed itself.11

If the tribal church lacked influence in politics, it did not necessarily follow that apart from politics social life was devoid of saintly piety. There is a very curious provision in the Ancient Laws of Ireland, the "abarta," that a workman on completing any work and delivering it to his employer should give it his blessing. 12 There was apparently a minimum wage at that time in Ireland, and if this blessing

was omitted, the workman was subject to a fine of a portion of his fee equal to a seventh part of an allowance of his food while employed, the food to which a workman was entitled being settled by law in proportion to the rank of the art or trade which he professed.

Its Independence of Rome.-There was no bias whatever towards Rome in the tribal church or medieval Ireland. On the contrary, it was a church, or rather a collection of churches, adversely independent of Roman ways of thought and action, dwelling scornfully apart from papal pretensions, and even in its decay expressing isolation of theological ideas.

Its organisation and its discipine wholly differed from that of Rome. Its system of double monasteries of men and women, frequently under the headship of a woman, was peculiar to it. "Wherever the apostles of Irish monasticism went,13 this form of organisation followed-not because it was one which originated and peculiarly belonged to the Irish" (but query, did it not ?), "but because it could live only in the purest spiritual atmosphere." 14 It was from these monasteries in Ireland and Wales that not only these islands but practically all Western Europe received spiritual Christianity.15

Furthermore, the Irish church differed sufficiently from Rome even in doctrine to produce some first-class heretics, as she afterwards produced first-class Roman ecclesiastics, such as St Malachi. They were not only heretics of the type of the great John Scotus Erigena, who could not reconcile the perpetuation of evil by punishment after death either with the omnipotence or the infinite goodness of God, but heretics such as Virgilius, the apostle of the rude Carinthian boor, who carried his opposition to orthodox Roman doctrine to the extent of believing in an Antipodes, in a people on whose heads the men of Europe were walking.

Nor did the Irish church either encourage the vogue of Roman pilgrimage, nor, to the sorrow of Ireland perhaps, a participation in the crusade which came about through Rome. "The stream of Saxon pilgrims set steadily to Rome. But the stream of Irish travellers set in other directions than that of Rome. Rome occupies the least share in their thoughts

and writings. Their liturgy and their hymns and their psalmody were their own. Every name of great note in the list of Irish saints or doctors abroad, save the one instance of Dungal, is found either in collision with Rome or taking a line wholly independent of her." 16

But the same writer points out that the ineffective Canterbury prelates of the first mission were as a door that opened a way for a spirit far more potent than their own; 17 the Roman church victorious, permitting no freedom of thought or spirit and working by its penalties with the English invader, drew the Irish within the magic circle; and if the Saxon had not been too insistent on his superiority and too anxious to force the conquest of the country with insufficient means, the schism of theology need not have been added to the schism of political and social life.18

There was no doubt an antipathy between the magnificent ecclesiastics who followed Henry and the Irish bishop who came on foot, followed by the one white cow which gave him milk for his support; between the church that represented obedience to far-reaching central authority and the church which represented missionary labours acknowledging no such authority. But it was an antipathy no more insuperable than that which divided St Margaret and St David from the Culdees. If the tact and true sympathy and appreciation of changing conditions which carried Scotland safely to unity had been shown in Ireland, there need have been no schism there. In Ireland all influences tended not to absorption but to division. By the seventh Canon of the Synod of Cashel, in 1172, all acts of religion were to be conducted according to the usages of the Anglican Church, a provision which could only be effective as far as the arms of the invader extended.

The provisions of the fourteenth century,19 that no Irishman was to have ecclesiastical preferment, and that no religious house in the pale was to receive Irishmen, while they encouraged the expansion of the wandering friars at the expense of the official church which could be better controlled, led, when the breach came between England and Rome, to the aligning of the Irish through the friars on the side of the dis

tant power from whom they could expect little oppression, a power often allied with the enemies of their near enemy, as against that near power from which they could expect nothing but treatment as outlaws; just as the men of the Orkneys and the Isles clung for so long to the distant King of Norway, who would only claim an often unpaid tribute against the brute force of the Scot king close at hand.

The Friars and the Reformed Clergy.-Communion with Rome, as represented by the Friars, came to them in its easiest form, a structure not confined to fixed dioceses, interfering as little as possible with their communal system, and their monastic church. The reformed Church, on the contrary, when the Reformation came, rested on the freedom of the individual to set society at defiance, not only in matters of opinion but in the acts resulting from them. This in itself was a very strong influence working against agreement; and it was helped by two other checks to unity: the one the violence of true theological hatred, which had not yet passed into the political and commercial stage; and the other the character of the first officials, who represented what afterwards became the most learned church of Berkeley, Usher, Todd, and Stokes.

Spenser, who complains of the Irish clergy because they followed tillage and other work, admits that no decent Englishmen came over to replace them; that the livings were very poor, the position of the English minister very dangerous; that the people could not understand him nor he them; and that these clergy were generally "bad, licentious, and most disordered." 20 It is a great wonder, he says, "to see the odds which are between the zeal of Popish priests and the ministers of the Gospel. For they spare not to come out of Spain, from Rome, and from Rheims, by long toil and dangerous travelling hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no reward or riches are to be found, only to draw the people unto the Church of Rome; whereas some of our idle ministers, having a way for credit and estimation thereby opened to them, and having the livings of the country offered to them without pains and without peril, will neither for the same, nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the

good they may do by winning souls to God, be drawn forth from their warm nests to look out into God's harvest, which is even ready for the sickle, and all the fields yellow long ago." He tells of the "ruined churches, whereof the most part lie even with the ground."

Not all the good work since done by the Irish Protestant church can undo the evil of the early conditions. The Irish church has become and remains only the church of the English alien, the people of the "running sore." It represented learning, but it was learning not available to the ignorance of people untaught by Rome; the piety and charity of its sons was that of an alien persecutor; it stood for the alien and the individual against the society. So it came to pass that, delivered from the offices of the church, and thrown back on the Mass, the Irish in this, as in all other things, drew apart from the men of the pale.

Long before the Reformation movement came to widen the breach, the two peoples had been forced by the action of the English officials to live apart, not only politically but in religious duties and worship; and when that movement had spent itself and any force that remained lay in the Roman reaction, of which the Papacy in Ireland took full advantage, the Anglo-Scottish garrison, engrossed by the prejudices of their game of Parliamentary party politics which supported them, made pretence that the religious danger yet existed, and by Test Acts and various other evil means persecuted for more than two centuries the Irish Roman Catholics, so as to drive from office and hinder in commerce dangerous rivals in trade.

Commerce.-The dwellers in Ireland, the meer Irish, who were not the rivals of the pale, were early trained to live apart also the life of trade and intercourse with other peoples.

This was inevitable in the early days of the occupation, before time and opportunity had been given to the English king for settlement and organisation of government and defence. Henry II. at his first coming had seized into his hands the seaports formerly in the hands of the Scandinavians, even from his own federal vassals.

There was nothing unusual or unexpected in such action.