harshly dealt with when sentenced to twelve years' exile among the Britons—particularly when it was left quite optional with himself whether the sentence was to be carried out or not.
When we come to the 'Rule' of Columbanus, we are on very different ground. We have none of the genial feasts made for the welcome of visitors; no killing of oxen for the common meal; but day follows day in one monotonous and continued fast, barely enough food for sustaining life being taken, and that consisting merely of vegetables, pulse, meal, and biscuit—only varied by a fast still more strict imposed as a punishment for some paltry offence. Brutal inflictions of the lash are threatened at every step. For speaking in a loud voice there were six stripes. The same punishment for not repressing a cough at the beginning of a psalm, or for omitting to say, Amen. For some offences, as many as two hundred stripes are ordered, to be given twenty-five at a time.
The difference between the two systems is so striking, that a doubt naturally arises in the mind as to whether Columbanus founded his rule on that Comgal after all. There is another possibility: that Bangor was not so very different from Iona, and that Columbanus, being dissatisfied with what he considered its laxity, left it for the purpose of following a stricter rule; and that these terrible whippings are of his own invention. At all events, it is pleasant to remember the picture that Adamnan gives of Iona, which shows us that whatever Bangor may have been, other places in Ireland were very far indeed from accepting such a tyranny as Columbanus would have wished to impose.
This excessive severity, repugnant as it is to all our ideas, was one of the great factors in the success
