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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