Before the close of the sixth century, 3,000 monks followed the rule
of St. Corngall at Bangor; and in the seventh century, St. Carthage
made Lismore famous and St. Kevin attracted pious men from afar to
his lonely retreat in the picturesque valley of Glendalough.

And there were holy women as well as holy men in Ireland. St. Brigid
was held in such honor that she is often called the Mary of the Gael.
Even in St. Patrick's day, she had founded a convent at Kildare,
beside which was a monastery of which St. Conleth was superior; and
she founded many other convents in addition to that at Kildare. Her
example was followed by St. Ita, St. Fanchea, and many others; and if
at the close of the sixth century there were few districts which had
not monasteries and monks, there were few also which had not convents
and nuns.

Nor was this all. Fired with missionary zeal, many men left Ireland
to plant the faith in distant lands. Thus did St. Columcille settle
in Iona, whence he converted the Picts. Under his successors, St.
Aidan and his friends went south to Lindisfarne to convert
Northumbria in England; and the ninth abbot of Iona was the saintly
Adamnan, whose biography of St. Columcille has been declared by
competent authority to be the best of its kind of which the whole
Middle Ages can boast. Nor must it be forgotten that the monasteries
of Luxeuil and Bobbio owed their origin to St. Columbanus; that St.
Gall gave his name to a town and canton in Switzerland; that St.
Fridolin labored on the Rhine and St. Fursey on the Marne; and that
St. Cathaldus was Bishop of Tarentum, and is still venerated as the
patron of that Italian see.

And if we would know what was the character of the schools in which