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would think, for systematizing and perfecting conventual arrangements. We have even stronger proof of the non-necessity of conventual enclosure. In 633, nearly two hundred years after the enactment of the canon of St. Patrick, a General Council was held at Toledo. It was composed of sixty-two bishops, of whom five were metropolitans, and presided over by St. Isidore of Seville.[1] Now, the fifty-sixth canon ordained, “that women taking the habit from the bishop need not enter a convent, that they were religious to all intents and purposes, and that they could not marry”. Even so late as 721, the like legislation was necessary. Whoever married the wife of a priest, even after his death, incurred excommunication.[2] If, then, in Spain, that is supposed to have received the faith from the apostles, in France, even in Rome, the mother of churches, legislation about a married priest became necessary nearly three hundred years after the like legislation in Ireland immediately after its conversion, what wonder we meet, and I never met with it more than once, with the mention of a priest’s wife during the life of the cleric? It meant generally that the wife either died before the ordination of the husband, or, as 7n our case, that she died morally by taking the religious veil. We may suppose, from the practical turn of St. Patrick, that he trained the youth for the altar, and prevented the necessity of pressing the old into the service of the Church. But the Church still would legislate for what would be but of rare occurrence, for what would happen only once or by a miracle.[3] The churches of Elvira, Toledo, Orange, Arles, Tours, Agde, and Orleans used language more calculated to excite our suspicion of their love of ecclesistical celibacy than what was used in the Irish Church, and yet they unflinchingly upheld clerical celibacy.
The Irish Church “was a free Church, too”. It was
