Sigisbert separated from him at the foot of the St. Gothard, crossed eastward over the Oberalp
to the source of the Rhine, and laid the foundation of the monastery of Dissentis in the Grisons,
which lasts to this day.
St. Gall (Gallus), the most celebrated of the pupils of Columbanus, remained in Switzerland,
and became the father of the monastery and city called after him, on the banks of the river Steinach.
He declined the bishopric of Constanz. His double struggle against the forces of nature and the
gods of heathenism has been embellished with marvelous traits by the legendary poetry of the
middle ages.^114 When he died, ninety-five years old, a.d. 640, the whole surrounding country of
the Allemanni was nominally Christianized. The monastery of St. Gall became one of the most
celebrated schools of learning in Switzerland and Germany, where Irish and other missionaries
learned German and prepared themselves for evangelistic work in Switzerland and Southern
Germany. There Notker Balbulus, the abbot (died 912), gave a lasting impulse to sacred poetry and
music, as the inventor or chief promoter of the mediaeval Laudes or Prosae, among which the
famous "Media vita in morte sumus" still repeats in various tongues its solemn funeral warning
throughout Christendom.
Fridold or Fridolin, who probably came from Scotland, preached the gospel to the Allemanni
in South Germany. But his life is involved in great obscurity, and assigned by some to the time of
Clovis I. (481–511), by others more probably to that of Clovis II. (638–656).
Kilian or Kyllina, of a noble Irish family, is said to have been the apostle of Franconia and
the first bishop of Würzburg in the seventh century.
§ 24. German Missionaries before Boniface.
England derived its Anglo-Saxon population from Germany in the fifth century, and in return
gave to Germany in the eighth century the Christian religion with a strong infusion of popery.
Germany afterwards shook off the yoke of popery, and gave to England the Protestant Reformation.
In the seventeenth century, England produced Deism, which was the first act of modern unbelief,
and the forerunner of German Rationalism. The revival of evangelical theology and religion which
followed in both countries, established new points of contact between these cognate races, which
meet again on common ground in the Western hemisphere to commingle in the American nationality.
The conversion of Germany to Christianity and to Romanism was, like that of England, the
slow work of several centuries. It was accomplished by missionaries of different nationalities,
French, Scotch-Irish, English, and Greek. It began at the close of the second century, when Irenaeus
spoke of Christian congregations in the two Germanies,^115 i.e. Germania prima and secunda, on
the upper and lower Rhine; and it was substantially completed in the age of Charlemagne in the
eighth century. But nearly the entire North-Eastern part of Germany, which was inhabited mostly
by Slavonic tribes, remained heathen till the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.
(^114) See the anonymous Vita S. Galli in Pertz, Monumenta II. 123, and in the Acta Sanct., Tom. VII. Octobris. Also Greith,
Geschichte der altirischen Kirche ... als Einleitung in die, Gesch. des Stifts St. Gallen(1857), the chapter on Gallus, pp. 333
sqq.
(^115) αἱἐνται̑ς Γερμανίαιςἱδρυμέναιἐκκλησίαι. Adv. haer. I. 10, 2