MISSIONARIES OF CHRISTIANITY 
all kinds ensued. Literature ceased to be read to a 
great extent, much less written. Education dropped 
to such a low ebb as to be almost a vanishing factor. 
The life of the spirit waned and bodily interests 
became paramount. A feverish restlessness in seek- 
ing after pleasure came to replace whatever culture 
there had been, and the world was in a very sad way 
indeed so far as the quest of the higher things that 
would make life really worth living was concerned. 
It was just as this period of decadence got well 
under way that St. Patrick, the apostle of the Irish, 
who in his younger years had been carried away 
from his home to be a slave herder of sheep in 
Ireland and had escaped, came back to bring Chris- 
tianity to this people whose character even in his 
captivity he had learned to admire so much. The 
conversion of the Irish people came without any 
bloodshed and in the course of a single generation 
Ireland, according to the old mode of expression, 
became ‘‘the island of saints and of scholars.”* 
The pre-Christian Irish had been famous as war- 
riors but also as bards and musicians. They had 
already created in the immediately preceding cen- 
turies a series of great epic poems besides the begin- 
nings of a folklore rich in mystical ideas and a pop- 
ular music that was destined to affect all the sur- 
rounding nations. Christianity came to turn the 
energies of the Irish that had been spent to a con- 
*This expression in the original Latin insula sanctorum et doctorum did 
not come from the Irish themselves, but was the name for their island com- 
monly used by the peoples on the continent. Indeed the Irish clung with 
peculiar affection to the name of Eire, or Erin, for their homeland. 
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