heresies in Europe and Asia during the first ages of the Church,
and were the cause of so many social and political convulsions.
By adhering strictly---a little too strictly, perhaps--to their
traditional method of developing thought, they kept error far from
their universities, and presented, in the sixth, seventh, and eighth
centuries, the remarkable spectacle in Ireland, France, Germany,
Switzerland, and even Northern Italy, of numerous schools wherein
no wrangling found a place, and whence never issued a single
proposition which Rome found reason to censure. They were at that
time the educators of Christian Europe, and not even a breath of
suspicion was ever raised against any one of their innumerable
teachers. If their mind, in general, did not on that account
attain the acuteness of the French, Italians, or Germans, it was
at all times safer and more guarded. Even their later hostility
to the English Pale, after the eleventh century, was most useful,
from its warning against the teachings of prelates sent from the
English Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; and Rome seems to
have approved of that opposition, by using all her power in
appointing to Irish sees, even within the Pale, prelates chosen
from the Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, and Carmelite orders,
in preference to secular ecclesiastics educated in the great seats
of English learning.

Thus the Irish, by opening their schools gratuitously to all Europe,
but chiefly to Anglo-Saxon England, were not only of immense service
to the Church, but showed how fully they appreciated the benefits
of true civilization, and how ready they were to extend it by their
traditional teaching. Nor did they confine themselves to receiving
scholars in their midst: they sent abroad, during those ages, armies
of zealous missionaries and learned men to Christianize the heathen,