INTRODUCTION.
The History of the Ancient Irish Church has an importance of its own. It concerns not merely the Irishman who naturally desires to learn how Christianity came to be preached in his own land, for the subject is of scarcely less interest to the dweller in England or Scotland. The former finds in Ireland the counterpart of the old British Church, and traces to that island, besides, the source whence much of the Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon was first derived. As he marks how from time to time the English Church struggled for liberty—how, long before the time of the Reformation, the authority of the Pope was resisted or rendered only a grudging recognition—he will rightly trace this independent spirit to the tone originally given to the Church by the Celtic missionaries. The latter looks to the Church of Ireland as the parent Church of his own. The story of lona, and of the conversion of the tribes of Caledonia, is as much Irish as it is Scotch. But to the student of general Church History, Ireland is also important. Just as, in some unfrequented islands, types of animal and vegetable life exist which have become extinct elsewhere, and by study of these we may learn much of the former fauna and flora of places where all the conditions of life have changed: so Ireland retained rites and ceremonies and forms of
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