IN the case of every nation we can trace certain large effects that were directly due to influences which came to them from without. In the development of our own country we are reminded at every stage of her history of what she owed to the community of nations of which she has been a member. In the earliest period of her history that is known to us we find the missionaries of the Celtic Church of Ireland spreading light in certain portions of her territory. By the time she became a distinct kingdom she was open to all the influences that went to mould the different nations of Christendom, and to her contact with these nations she owed feudalism and the Catholic Church the foundations of the mediaeval societies. Her Reformation of the sixteenth century was not self-originated, but was due to a European movement. So in the eighteenth century the prevailing type of religion, known as Moderatism, was born of the speculations of thinkers who were not her own sons.