ST. COLUMBANUS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 32, 15 December 1898, Page 31

ST. COLUMBANUS.

Columbanus was the son of respectable parents in the province of Leinster, where he was born about the year 535). Of his youth we have no account distinct enough to be relied on. The care of Lis early education was confided to a venerable and holy man named Senile, whose great piety and learning had acquired for him a high reputation. He found a refuge under the great St. Congal, in the monastery of Bangor, where in the course of time he became a monk. But a voice was calling him, like the voice of the people of Foclut to St. Patrick, or the voice that spoke to Abraham — ' Go out of thine own country, and from tby lather's house, into the land which I shall show thee.' The land was Gaul. Abbot Congal tried to detain him, but in vain, and he left, accompanied by twelve other monks, crossed Great Britain, and reached Gaul. Though the Catholic fai h was in existence m Gaul, it had made but little progress owing to the apathy of its prelates and to continued wars. The barbarity of paganism was crushing out the mild doctrines of Christianity, and even those who embraced its saving truths were fast relapsing into infidelity and paganism. Here was a wide field for the Christian zeal of our Saint — a field where millions of souls were to be saved from perdition. He travelled through Gaul for some time, preaching to he people, and exhorting believers to abandon their evil ways. His earnestness, his eloquence, and, above all, the humility and purity of his life, soon made a great impression on the people. The wicked were shamed and frightened from their evil ways, and the pagans began to forsake their useless gods. Columbanus' saintly labours were soon to be interrupted, and the close ot his lite to be harassed by persecutions. He became involved with the Gallo-Frank clergy, and afterwards with the King of Burgundy and the Queen Brunehault. Worn out by labours, persecutions, and wanderings of a long life spent in the service of Christ and in the endeavour to enlighten a barbarous people, he felt the approach of death and quietly retired to the seclusion of a cell which he had hollowed out of a rock, and laid his feeble body on his stone bed. He received the sacraments, bestowed his benediction upon his community, and then quietly slept in the Lord, at the venerable age of seventy-two, in the year 615.