To the credit side too must go the fact that references to Celtic geography and to local history are all as a rule accurate.  Of continental geography and history however the writers of the Lives show much ignorance, but scarcely quite as much as the corresponding ignorance shown by Continental writers about Ireland.

    The missionary methods of the early Irish Church and its monastic or semi-monastic system are frequently referred to as peculiar, if not unique.  A missionary system more or less similar must however have prevailed generally in that age.  What other system could have been nearly as successful amongst a pagan people circumstanced as the Irish were?  The community system alone afforded the necessary mutual encouragement and protection to the missionaries.  Each monastic station became a base of operations.  The numerous diminutive dioceses, quasi-dioceses, or tribal churches, were little more than extensive parishes and the missionary bishops were little more in jurisdiction than glorified parish priests.  The bishop's muintir, that is the members of his household, were his assistant clergy.  Having converted the chieftain or head of the tribe the missionary had but to instruct and baptise the tribesmen and to erect churches for them.  Land and materials for the church were provided by the Clan or the Clan's head, and lands for support of the missioner or of the missionary community were allotted just as they had been previously allotted to the pagan priesthood; in fact there can be but little doubt that the lands of the pagan priests became in many cases the endowment of the Christian establishment.  It is not necessary, by the way, to assume that the Church in Ireland as Patrick left it, was formally monastic.  The clergy lived in community, it is true, but it was under a somewhat elastic rule, which was really rather a series of Christian and Religious counsels.  A more formal monasticism had developed by the time of Mochuda; this was evidently influenced by the spread of St. Benedict's Rule, as Patrick's quasi-monasticism, nearly two centuries previously, had been influenced by Pachomius and St. Basil, through Lerins.  The real peculiarity in Ireland was that when the community-missionary-system was no longer necessary it was not abandoned as in other lands but was rather developed and emphasised.

"If thou hast the right, O Erin, to a champion of battle to aid thee thou hast the head of a hundred thousand, Declan of Ardmore."  (Martyrology of Oengus).

Five miles or less to the east of Youghal Harbour, on the southern Irish coast, a short, rocky and rather elevated promontory juts, with a south-easterly trend, into the ocean.  Maps and admiralty charts call it Ram Head, but the real name is Ceann-a-Rama and popularly it is often styled Ardmore Head.  The material of this inhospitable coast is a hard metamorphic schist which bids defiance to time and weather.  Landwards the shore curves in clay cliffs to the north-east, leaving, between it and the iron headland beyond, a shallow exposed bay wherein many a proud ship has met her doom.  Nestling at the north side of the headland and sheltered by the latter from Atlantic storms stands one of the most remarkable groups of ancient ecclesiastical remains in Ireland—all that has survived of St. Declan's holy city of Ardmore.  This embraces a beautiful and perfect round tower, a singularly interesting ruined church commonly called the cathedral, the ruins of a second church beside a holy well, a primitive oratory, a couple of ogham inscribed pillar stones, &c., &c.

    No Irish saint perhaps has so strong a local hold as Declan or has left so abiding a popular memory.  Nevertheless his period is one of the great disputed questions of early Irish history.  According to the express testimony of his Life, corroborated by testimony of the Lives of SS. Ailbhe and Ciaran, he preceded St. Patrick in the Irish mission and was a co-temporary of the national apostle.  Objection, exception or opposition to the theory of Declan's early period is based less on any inherent improbability in the theory itself than on contradictions and inconsistencies in the Life.  Beyond any doubt the Life does actually contradict itself; it makes Declan a cotemporary of Patrick in the fifth century and a cotemporary likewise of St. David a century later.  In any attempted solution of the difficulty involved it may be helpful to remember a special motive likely to animate a tribal histrographer, scil.:—the family relationship, if we may so call it, of the two saints; David was bishop of the Deisi colony in Wales as Declan was bishop of their kinsmen of southern Ireland.  It was very probably part of the writer's purpose to call attention to the links of kindred which bound the separated Deisi; witness his allusion later to the alleged visit of Declan to his kinsmen of Bregia.  Possibly there were several Declans, as there were scores of Colmans, Finians, &c., and hence perhaps the confusion and some of the apparent inconsistencies.  There was certainly a second Declan, a disciple of St. Virgilius, to whom the latter committed care of a church in Austria where he died towards close of eighth century.  Again we find mention of a St. Declan who was a foster son of Mogue of Ferns, and so on.  It is too much, as Delehaye ("Legendes Hagiographiques") remarks, to expect the populace to distinguish between namesakes.  Great men are so rare!  Is it likely there should have lived two saints of the same name in the same country!

    The latest commentators on the question of St. Declan's period—and they happen to be amongst the most weighty—argue strongly in favour of the pre-Patrician mission (Cfr. Prof. Kuno Meyer, "Learning Ireland in the Fifth Century").  Discussing the way in which letters first reached our distant island of the west and the causes which led to the proficiency of sixth-century Ireland in classical learning Zimmer and Meyer contend that the seeds of that literary culture, which flourished in Ireland of the sixth century, had been sown therein in the first and second decades of the preceding century by Gaulish scholars who had fled from their own country owing to invasion of the latter by Goths and other barbarians.  The fact that these scholars, who were mostly Christians, sought asylum in Ireland indicates that Christianity had already penetrated thither, or at any rate that it was known and tolerated there.  Dr. Meyer answers the objection that if so large and so important an invasion of scholars took place we ought have some reference to the fact in the Irish annals.  The annals, he replies, are of local origin and they rarely refer in their oldest parts to national events:  moreover they are very meagre in their information about the fifth century.  One Irish reference to the Gaulish scholars is, however, adduced in corroboration; it occurs in that well known passage in St. Patrick's "Confessio" where the saint cries out against certain "rhetoricians" in Ireland who were hostile to him and pagan,—"You rhetoricians who do not know the Lord, hear and search Who it was that called me up, fool though I be, from the midst of those who think themselves wise and skilled in the law and mighty orators and powerful in everything."  Who were these "rhetorici" that have made this passage so difficult for commentators and have caused so various constructions to be put upon it?  It is clear, the professor maintains, that the reference is to pagan rhetors from Gaul whose arrogant presumption, founded on their learning, made them regard with disdain the comparatively illiterate apostle of the Scots.  Everyone is familiar with the classic passage of Tacitus wherein he alludes to the harbours of Ireland as being more familiar to continental mariners than those of Britain.  We have references moreover to