The Life and Writings of Saint Columban

IN THE ISLAND OF SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.

The Providential Mission of the Early Irish Church.

THE Wandering of the Nations! What a medley of images this word calls up in our mind. It carries us back to the sunset of the old civilization; we rest for a while in the twilight, then grope about in the night, and emerge at last into the dawn — gray, indistinct, undefined — of a new social order.

As the great St. Benedict was one day seated at the gate of his monastery on the hill of Cassino, he saw approaching him a figure clad in royal robes. It was Totila, the greatest of the Ostrogoths after Theoderic, who came to the prophet of the Apennines, as Odoacer had come to the Austrian Hermit, Severinus, to ascertain what destiny Heaven had in store for him. “You have done much evil,” answered the Saint, “ you do it still every day; it is time that your iniquities should cease. You shall enter Rome; you shall cross the sea; you shall reign nine years, and the tenth you shall die ”. Totila was deeply moved, and, adds St. Gregory, “ from that time on he was less cruel ”. History tells us how the prediction came true. Totila fell in battle against Narses in 552. Teias snatched the sword from the hands of the dying hero, but he too fell, and with him the Gothic empire. When Benedict beheld in vision the fall of the Goth, there loomed up, in the background, the dim outline of a fierce barbarian horde. Long beards swept their bosoms. Over the Alps they poured. Italians and Greeks were blown before them like chaff before the whirlwind. Monte Cassino lay in their way, and it was razed to the ground; but the lives of the inmates were spared, because the Patriarch had prayed for them. This was in 583, when St. Benedict had already been enjoying the reward of his labors for forty years.