PREVIOUS CHAPTER - NEXT CHAPTER - HELP     

CHAPTER 1 A NEW AGE FROM THE NORTH.

THE opening of the fifth century brought with it changes of transcendent magnitude and importance in Europe. For ages the arms of the South had overflowed the countries of the North, but now the tide of conquest had turned, the North was bearing down on the South, and that haughty.

Power which had subjected to her scepter so many tribes and realms, was about to suffer in her turn the miseries of foreign invasion, and taste the bitterness of a barbarian yoke. These changes were preparatory to the erection of a kingdom which was destined to flourish when the victories of Rome had crumbled into dust.

We must here pause in order specially to note the deadlock into which the affairs of the world had come at this great turning- point of its history. Its three leading nations are seen to be unable to advance beyond the point at which they had now arrived. Hence the necessity of bringing new races upon the stage if the human march was to go forward. This extraordinary position of matters must be taken into account and distinctly apprehended if we would intelligently follow the course of succeeding events; and especially if we would understand the place of the Scots in general history, and the part they were selected to fulfill in the cause of Christian civilization and constitutional liberty. It is here that we find the key of modern history.

Till this epoch the business of the world had been left in the hands of the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman. These were its three leading nations. The march of all three was towards the same goal, but they approached it on separate lines. The world’s work was too onerous to be undertaken by any one of them singly, and accordingly we see it partitioned among the three, in fit correspondence with the age in which each flourished, and the peculiar idiosyncrasy with which each had been endowed.

Each rendered a distinct, and, in truth, brilliant contribution to the world’s one work. The Jew came first; for his share of the mighty labor had respect to the foundations. He presented us, although in figure and symbol, with a system of spiritual truth, to which we have been able to make no material addition, and which we accept as by far the mightiest instrumentality for regenerating the race, and building up society. The Greeks followed, furnishing us, by means of their great thinkers, with the laws of thought, and molding for us, by their great orators, the most melodious of the tongues of earth. Last of all came the Roman. After the spiritual and the intellectual had been supplied by his two predecessors, the Roman added the political. He gathered the scattered races into one empire, and taught them to be obedient to one law. So far the work was done, but done only up to a certain point. At this point the workers found themselves arrested, and farther progress impossible to them; but though they left their great task incomplete, the world never can forget what it owes to those who sowed the first seeds of that rich inheritance of truth and knowledge and liberty which awaits it in the future.

These three workers- the Jew, the Greek, the Roman had brought the human family to the confine of a new age, but they were unable to conduct them across the boundary. At the portals of this new era they must demit their functions as the pioneers in the human march, and from the van, which they had occupied till now, they must fall into thereat, and leave to others a work which they were no longer able to carry forward. In truth the very fitness of these three nations to do the world’s work in the times that preceded the advent of Christianity, made them unfit for doing it in the times that followed that great revolution. All three had been engrossed with the forms of knowledge, rather than with knowledge itself. They had seen and handled only the images or pictures of truth. This in process of time produced an intellectual and moral incapacity to apprehend the verities which lay hid beneath the forms and symbols with which they were versant. The Jew would have given us a religion of the letter, but he never would have given us a religion of the spirit. The Greek would have given us a philosophy of syllogism, but never would he have given us a philosophy of fact. And the Roman would have given us a polity shaped by a power outside society, but not a polity springing from forces acting from within- a polity in accordance with the will of Caesar, but not in harmony with the rights and wishes of humanity. In a word, the Jew never would have evolved Christianity, nor the Greek the Baconian philosophy, nor the Roman constitutional government.

Under this incapacity did all three labor, hence the arrest of the world; nor was it possible for it to resume its march till fresh races had come forward to break through the trammels in which long custom had enchained the old nations. The Jew had lived two thousand years amid ceremonial ordinances and ritualistic observances. These had become to him a second nature: they were to him what the senses of seeing, hearing, and handling are to the soul; and should he be cut off from the means by which he held intercourse with the spiritual world, truth would be placed beyond his reach, and he would account himself condemned to dwell in a world of utter isolation.

He would have resisted the change as he would have resisted the destruction of truth itself,- for to the Jew the change was equivalent to the destruction of truth. Had it depended on the Jew, the Temple would have been still standing, the sacrifices of bullocks and rams still burning on its altar, and the sublime doctrines of Christianity still shining dimly through the veils of ceremony and type.

His syllogistic philosophy had as completely enslaved the Greek as his ceremonial religion had lettered the Jew; and the former equally with the latter needed emancipation. The Greek was familiar with but the form of wisdom. His philosophy was a philosophy of ingenious speculations and syllogistic reasonings. It assumed as its basis not the ascertained facts of the natural and moral worlds, but the conceptions or dreams which had their birth in the minds of the great thinkers who stood at the head of their respective schools. Lyrics of melting sweetness, epics of thrilling and tragic grandeur, statues of dazzling beauty, philosophies theoretically perfect, only lacking foundation in nature, the loves, revels, and battles of gods and goddesses that did not exist, celebrated in an empyrean, which was as unreal and imaginary as the divinities with which the Greek imagination had peopled it: all this and much more the Greek could and did give us; but a science with enough of truth and substance in it to form a solid basis for the arts of life, such as those which the modern world has at its service, the Greek could not give us, because he turned away from the quarter where alone the materials for such a science are to be found. He refused to look at nature. Shirking the patient induction of facts, and the careful registration of laws, he set his imagination to work, and that enchantress found for him the materials on which his wondrous intellect worked, and out of which it wove these brilliant but baseless philosophies, which dazzled the world before the advent of Christianity.

And so was it as regards the Roman. He excelled all the nations that had been before him in the order and organization of his empire, but that very organization at last fettered his mind, stereotyped all his ideas in that special department of the world’s work which had been committed to him ; and henceforward the farther progress of the race under the Roman became impossible. His empire was but a vast political machine for carrying out the will of one man. His scheme of government took no cognizance of individual rights; it did not train the citizen in independence and selfgovernment; it made no provision for gathering up and combining the myriad wishes of the people into one supreme sentiment or will, and making that the governing power. The day of constitutional and representative government was yet afar off. The despotism of Rome was perhaps the most lenient, the most equitable, and the most moral despotism which has ever, either before or since, flourished upon the earth. It was a despotism, nevertheless, and the more its organization was perfected, the more complete and irresistible that despotism became, being but the vehicle for carrying into effect that one will which the empire made supreme, yet all rights, over all liberties, and over all consciences. The government of Rome, although unrivaled in point of organization among the governments of the ancient world, could, by the very necessity of its constitution, only work downwards,- it never would have elevated the masses into selfgovernment; it never could have given liberty.

Thus all three nations, at the period we speak of, had come into a deadlock.

The Jew could not get beyond Moses; the Greek could not advance beyond Plato; and the Roman could not rise above Caesar. The Jew, while the spell of ritualism was upon him, would never have worked his way to the doctrine of Justification by faith. The Greek, bound in the fetters of syllogism, and not daring to stray beyond the narrow confine of his own ratiocination- that unfathomed and inexhaustible well of wisdom in his eyes- never would have given the world the mariner’s compass, the printing press, the steam- engine, and the mechanical and chemical arts, which so abundantly minister to the comforts and elegance’s of modern life. And the Roman, with the yoke of imperialism on his thoughts, would never have introduced the era of free parliaments and constitutional government. Here, then, the world had halted, and over this same spot we should have found it anchored today had not a new objective revelation been made to all three- to the Jew the Cross; to the Greek, Nature; and to the Roman, Society.

But the old nations were not able to enter the new road now opened to them. The Jew disdained to accept the religion of the Cross. The Greek showed equal contempt for the teaching of Nature. And the Roman refused to make his government conformable to the laws and rights of Society. The enchaining power of habit, the blinding prestige of past achievement, and the pride of high attainment, incapacitated all three for compliance with the great intellectual and spiritual revolution, which was needed if the world was to advance. The Greek and the Roman were no more able than the Jew to become as a little child, that they might enter this new kingdom.

The Great Ruler, therefore, made choice of a new race, and into their hands was the world’s farther progress committed- a race, which having no past to forget, and no acquisitions to unlearn, might sit down, docile and obedient, at the feet of new and better instructors, and in process of time resume the work at the point where their predecessors had left it.

Such a race was at that hour growing up amid the forests of northern Europe. That race was strong in those very points in which the Greek and Roman peoples were weak. Self- reliance and the passion of individual freedom were powerfully developed in them; and when, as afterwards happened, the Divine graft of Christianity, and the human product of Greek and Roman culture, came to be incorporated with that hardy stock, the result in due course was a race of more varied faculty, and capable of a wider and higher civilization than any nation that had yet flourished on the earth. Hence that great revolution, which divided the ancient from the modern times: a revolution in which the heavens and the earth that had been of old- to use the sublime metaphor in which the Hebrew Seers had foretold that grand transition- were taken down, and the ecclesiastical, the literary and the political firmaments shaken and removed. We behold the world of the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman dissolving in ruins, that the new heavens and the new earth of spiritual Christianity and constitutional liberty may be set up.

CHAPTER - THE SERVICES OF THE SCOTS TO CHRISTIANITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

THE Scots are missing from the roll of barbarous nations that descended from the North in the fifth century upon the Roman empire and overturned it. Historians have been careful to enumerate the other races that left their homes in the deserts of Scythia at this eventful epoch, and journeyed southward on a mission of transcendent consequence to the world, though unknown to themselves. The Huns, the Vandals, the Lombards, and other nationalities whose existence was unknown till the gates of the North opened and suddenly revealed them to the world, all figure in that terrible drama. But the Scots have been passed over in silence. Yet the truth is that the Scoti ought to have stood at the head of this roll, inasmuch as they formed the van of the procession, and had an important part to play in the great revolution that followed the advent of these races.

This omission on the part of historians is not surprising. The Scots came early, in fact, pioneered the movement. We are accustomed to connect this uprising of the fresh, unbroken, vigorous barbarism of the North upon the effeminate and corrupt civilization of the South with the fifth century. As a general date this may be accepted as accurate, for in that century this great ethnical movement was in full flood, but in truth this upheaval of the nations neither began nor ended in the fifth century. It had been begun before the Christian era. Rome was yet in her zenith: along the vast sweep of her frontier no enemy dared show himself; and, far as her eye could gaze into the wildernesses beyond, sign of danger there was none. Yet even then the first contingent of what was to grow in the future into a myriad host, was on the move, but their march was with steps so noiseless that Rome neither heard nor heeded their advance; and when at last she came to have some knowledge of their peregrinations, the matter had no interest for her.

Looking with eyes of pride, she deemed their movements not deserving her notice. The Scots were to her but a tribe of herdsmen and fighters, wandering hither and thither in quest of richer pastures, or it might be of more exciting combats. It was not likely that they would court battle with her legions. With the warrior tribes of Scythia, their neighbors, they might engage, but surely they would never invite destruction by thrusting themselves upon the bosses of her empire; -so did Rome reason. In what a different light would she have viewed the matter had Fate lifted the curtain, and shown her behind this little vanguard the terrible and almost endless procession of barbarous nations that was to follow- the Frank, the Goth, the Suevi, the Ostro- Goth, the Hun, the Vandal, the Lombard, and others from the same mysterious and inexhaustible region. In the southward march of this little company of Scoti the mistress of the world would have heard the first knell of her empire.

The descent of the Scots from the North was divided by considerable interval from that of the other nations. This is another circumstance that has prevented historians viewing the Scottish race as an integral part of the great irruption of the Scythean nations. The Scots left their original settlements probably about the times of the first Caesar; but it was not till the last emperors had filled up the cup of Rome’s oppression, and of the nations’ endurance, that the full stream of northern invasion began to flow.

The four or five centuries that intervene betwixt the appearance of the Scots on the scene, and that of the hordes which were the last to issue from the gates of the North, do not affect the character of the movement, or invalidate the claim of the first, any more than it does that of the last, to be ranked as actors in this great providential drama. The Scots opened it in truth. They were sprung of the same stock as those who succeeded them; their dwellings had been placed under the same iron sky; they had buffered with the same northern blasts; they had tasted privation, and learned endurance on the same sterile earth; the same mysterious impulse acted on them that moved the others; and we are shut up to speak of them as part of that great torrent of emigrants which may be variously described as warriors or as missionaries, according as we view the work- destruction or restoration- they were sent forth to execute.

Another circumstance which tended to mislead historians, and to hide from their view the connection of the early Scottish immigration with the great movement which required centuries for its accomplishment, and which was so prolific in ethnical and political changes, was the comparative smallness of the numbers of the Scots. They were a mere handful compared with the swarms- countless as the sands of the sea- that followed them. This hid the importance of the movement from the age in which it took place, and has helped to conceal its peculiar character and preeminent significance from succeeding times. A contemporary historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, speaks disdainfully of the Scoti as “wanderers,” whose migratory steps and shifting encampments it were bootless attempting to follow. Today on this stream, tomorrow on the banks of that, as the necessities of water and pasturage demand, but ever holding on their course, by slow stages, to the south, and summer by summer drawing nearer the line guarded by the victorious standards of Rome. Even should they cross that line, why should Rome take alarm, or tremble for her empire? Her realms are wide enough surely to afford water and pasturage to the flocks of those roaming herdsmen without greatly taxing her own resources. Or should they drop their peaceful pursuits, and transform themselves into warriors, were they likely to cause undue dismay to the legions, or put their valor to any severe test? A capable statesman would have read this apparently trivial incident differently. He would have seen more in it than met the eye; and instead of counting the number of those he saw, he would have essayed to compute the millions or myriads he did not see, and which lay concealed in the dark recesses of the north. The appearance of these roving bands gave sure intimation that there were forces at work in the heart of the Scythean nations that might yet breed danger to Rome. They warned her to set her house in order, for she should die and not live. Who could guess how many swarms, far larger than the present, the same vast, populous, but unknown region might send forth; and having once tasted the corn and wine, the milk and honey of the south, it would not be easy to compel these hungry immigrants to go back to the niggard soils and scanty harvests which they had left behind them.

But able statesmen was just what the Rome of that age signally lacked. It is always so with empires fated to fall. Decay is seen at the council table before it has become manifest in the field. Corruption creeps in among the senators of a State, then discipline and valor forsake its armies. But even had Rome been as plentifully as she was sparingly supplied with sagacious statesmen, it is hard to say whether any forecast could then have been formed of the danger that impended. That danger was new; it was wholly unknown to former ages. Till now the ethnic stream had flowed in the opposite direction. The South had sent her prolific arms northward to people the empty spaces around the pole. That the tide should turn: that the North should pour down upon the South, overwhelming the labors of a thousand years in a flood of barbarism, and quenching the lights of science and art in the darkness of a northern night, was what no one could then have presaged. The Roman sentinel who first descried on the northern horizon the roving tents of the Scottish herdsmen, and marked that morning by morning they were pitched nearer the frontier he guarded, had the coming hailstorm prognosticated to him, but he could not read the portent. He failed to see in these wanderers the pioneer corps of a mighty army, which lay bound on the frozen steppes of the north, but which was about to be loosed, and roll down horde on horde on the fair cities of Italy, and the fruitful fields of the Romans.

In the march of these nations we see the advent of a new age. The world, as we have already said, had stopped, and had a second time to be put in motion. We now see it started on lines that admitted of a truer knowledge and a more stable liberty than it had heretofore enjoyed, or ever could have reached on the old track. But first must come dissolution. Much of what the wisdom and labor of former ages had accumulated had now become mere obstruction, and had to be cleared away. This was a work to which the nations of the classic countries would never have put their hands. So far from destroying, they would have done their utmost to preserve the splendid inheritance of law, of empire, of religion, and of art, which the wisdom, the arms, and the genius of their fathers had bequeathed to them.

But no veneration for these things restrained the children of the savage North. The world of Greek art and Roman power, into the midst of which they had been so suddenly projected, fell beneath their sturdy blows.

Like a great rock falling from a lofty mountain, so fell the Gothic tribes upon the ancient world. Codes and philosophies, schools and priesthood’s, thrones, altars, and armies, were all prostrated before this rolling mass of northern barbarism, broken like a potsherd, ground to dust; and thus a political and mythological order of things, which, might otherwise have lingered on the earth for long centuries, and kept the nations rotting in vice and sunk in slavery, was swept away.

It has been customary to raise a wail over the destruction of letters and arts by the breaking in of this sudden tempest. But, in truth, letters and arts had already perished. It was not the Goth that wrought this literary havoc, it was the effeminate and dissolute Roman, it was the sensuous and enslaved Greek. The human intellect was no longer capable of producing, hardly even was it capable of appreciating, what former ages had produced; and never, to all appearance, would the world have recovered its healthy tone but but for the new blood which the northern races poured into it.

Nor had the world lost only its literary and artistic power, it had lost still more signally its moral rigor. The records of the times disclose a hideous and appalling picture. They show us a world broken loose from every moral restraint, greedily giving itself to every form of abominable wickedness, and rushing headlong to perdition. Greek and Roman society was too rotten to sustain the graft of Christianity. It was on that old trunk that it was set at first, and there its earliest blossoms were put forth; but the stock to which it was united lacked moral robustness to nourish the plant into a great tree which might cover the nations with its boughs. That plant was already beginning to sicken and die; the living had been united to the dead, and if both were not to perish the union must be broken, and Christianity set free from its companion which was hastening to the tomb.

It was at this juncture that the Goths came down and saved the world by destroying it.

The work of bringing in the new age consisted of two parts. The Old had to be broken up and removed, and over the field thus cleared had to be scattered the seeds from which the New was to spring. This work was partitioned among the newly arrived nations. To certain of them was assigned the work of demolition. To others the nobler part of reconstruction. The fiercer of these tribes were to slay and burn. But when the Hun, the Vandal, and the Goth had done their work, the Scots were to come forward, and to lay, not by the force of arms, but by the mightier power of principles, the foundation of a new and better order of things.

But they must, first, themselves be enlightened, before they could be lightbearers to a world now plunged into the darkness of a two- fold night.

They had to stand apart, outside the immediate theater on which the tempests of barbarian war were overturning thrones and scourging nations, till the sword had done its work, and then their mission of reconstruction would begin.

It may startle the reader to be told that it is to this little pioneer band of northmen, the Scots to wit, that the modern world owes its evangelical Christianity. This may appear a too bold assertion, and one for which it is impossible to find authority or countenance in history. Let the reader, however, withhold his surprise till he has examined the trains of proof we have to lay before him, and we venture to anticipate that before he has closed the volume he will find himself shut up to the same conclusion, or at least he will find himself much nearer agreement with us than he now deems possible.

The honor of preserving Christianity, and transmitting it to modern times, is commonly awarded to Rome. She, herself, claims to have performed this great office to the nations of Europe. The claim has been so often advanced, and so generally concurred in, that now it passes as true, and is held a fact that admits neither of challenge nor of denial. It is nevertheless a vulgar fallacy. The history of all the ages since the era of the Gothic invasion refuses to endorse this claim, and assigns the honor to another and far humbler society. An error of so long standing, and which has come to be so generally entertained, can be met only by the clear, full, and continuous testimony of history; and this we shah produce as, stage by stage, and century by century, we unfold the transactions of churches and nations. But it may not be amiss to glance generally at the subject here.

What do we see taking place as soon as the Gothic tempests have come to an end, and something like settled order has again been established in Europe? From the sixth century onward pilgrim- bands of pious and earnest preachers are seen traversing the various countries. In the midst of perils, of poverty, and of toil, these scholars and divines- for they have been taught letters and studied scripture at the feet of renowned teachershave come forth to enlighten races which have been baptized but not instructed, which have bowed before the chair of the Pontiff, but have not bowed before the cross of the Savior. We behold them prosecuting their mission on the plains of France, among the woods of Germany, and in the cities of Italy. Scarce is there tribe or locality in the vast space extending betwixt the Apennines and the shores of Iceland which these indefatigable missionaries do not visit, and where they do not succeed in gaining disciples for the Christian faith. As one generation of these preachers dies off, another rises to take its place, and carry on its work; and thus the evangelical light is kept burning throughout these ages, which were not so dark as we sometimes believe them to have been, and as they certainly would have been but for the exertions of these pious men. The monkish chroniclers have done their best to bury the memory of these simple evangelists, by disguising, or perverting, or wholly expunging their record; but we trace their footsteps by the very attempts of their enemies to obliterate them, as also by the edicts of popes to suppress their missions; and especially do we see their traces in the literary and theological writings they left behind them in the various countries they visited, and which modern research has drawn forth from the darkness of the museums and convents to which they had been consigned, and where for ages they had slumbered. We have a farther monument of the labors of this great missionary host in the training institutions which they planted in France and Germany and the north of Italy, and which existed for centuries as nurseries of missionaries and schools of evangelical light, but which eventually fell as evangelical posts, and were seized and made the foundation of Romish institutions.

Who sent forth these missionaries? From what school or church did they come? Was it Rome which commissioned those evangelists to teach the ignorant and savage tribes she had received within her fold, and on whose persons she had sprinkled her baptismal water, but whose hearts she had not purified by communicating to them a knowledge of the truth? No! these preachers had never visited the “threshold of the Apostles.” Rome disowned them. They had come from the missionary schools of Iona and of Ireland. They were Scotsmen from Ireland and Scotland- the two countries which were at that time the common seat of the Scottish nation.

These northern evangelists soon find coadjutors. As they pass on through the countries of Europe they kindle in the hearts of others the same missionary fire that burns so strongly in their own. Little parties of natives, whose souls their words have stirred, gather round them, and take part with them in their work. We see them opening schools on the Rhine, in the forests of France, and south as far as the Alps; gathering the native youth into them, and having instructed them in divine things, they send them forth to instruct their countrymen. It was thus that the rill of living water from Iona, as it flowed onward, widened into a river, and at last expanded into a flood which refreshed the thirsty lands over which it diffused its waters.

These missionaries from the Scottish shores had not a little to do, we cannot doubt, with that remarkable awakening which the eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed in the south of France, and which drew whole populations to the Evangelical faith. Along the foot of the Alps sounded forth the same gospel which had been preached on the shores of the lake of Galilee in the first century; and the provinces of Languedoe and Dauphine became vocal with the lays of the Troubadours, who published, in their rich and melodious language, the evangelical tenets. Next came the sermons of the Barbes; and lastly there appeared in the field a yet more potential instrumentality, which at once quickened and consolidated the movement.

This was the translation of the New Testament into the Romance language; believed to be the earliest vernacular version of modern times. The printing press was not then in existence; and copies of the Romance New Testament could be produced not otherwise than by the skill of slow and laborious scribes: but a speedier and wider diffusion was given the truths of the inspired volume by the traveling Troubadours, who recited them in song in the towns and villages of southern France. Barons, provinces and cities joined the movement, and it seemed, as if in obedience to the summons sent forth from Iona, the Reformation was to break out, and the world to be spared three centuries of spiritual oppression and darkness.

But the morning which it was believed had already opened, was suddenly turned into the “shadow of death.” The most astute of all the retired chiefs who have ruled the world from the Vatican now stood up. With Innocent III. came the crusades. Armies of soldiers and inquisitors poured down from the Alps to extinguish a movement which menaced the kingdom of Rome with ruin. The smiling provinces of Languedoc and Dauphine were converted into deserts. The crusaders, armed with sword and torch, reddened the earth with blood, and darkened the sky with the smoke of burning towns. But this terrible blow did not extirpate this evangelical movement. In countries more remote from the seat of the Papal power, the missionary still dared to go forth sowing the good seed; and here and there, in convents, or in forests, or in the shady lanes and nooks of city, individual souls, or little companies, enlightened from above, fed in secret on the heavenly bread, and quenched their thirst with living water. So did matters continue till the days of Wycliffe. Wycliffe and his Lollards took up the work of the Elders of Iona. After Wycliffe came John Huss; and after Huss came Luther, and with the rising of Luther the darkness had fulfilled its period. Before expiring at the stake, Huss had foretold that a “hundred years must revolve,” and then a great voice would be heard, and to that voice the nations would give ear. The words of the martyr did not fall to the ground. The century passed on amid the thunders of the Hussite victories. And now the number of its years are complete, and the skies of Europe are seen to brighten, not this time with an evanescent and transitory gleam which after awakening the hopes of men is to fade away into the night, but with a light that is to wax and grow till it shall have attained the splendor of the perfect day. Such are the historic links that connect the first missionary band that is seen to issue from Iona in the seventh century, with the great army of evangelists and teachers, with Luther at their head, which makes its appearance in the sixteenth century.

What share has Rome in this work? Her claim is, that she is the successor of the apostles, and that to her the nations were committed, that she might feed and rule them. Where is the seal and signature of this? If she is the Light of the world, and its one Light as she claims to be, it must be just as easy to trace her passage along the ages as it is to trace the path of the sun in the firmament. The one can no more be hidden in history than the other can be hidden in the sky- their beams must reveal both. Where is the splendor Rome sheds on the World? We do not mean the splendor of power, of wealth, of authority; of that sort of magnificence there is more than enough: but where is the splendor of knowledge, of piety, of truth, of holiness? We see her exalting her chief bishop to the throne of Caesar, and, to maintain his state as a temporal monarch, enriching him with the territories, and adorning him with the crowns of three kings whom she had conquered by the arms of the Franks. Entered on the road of worldly ambition the Roman church makes for herself a great position among the princes and nations of Europe. She has armies at her service; her riches are immense, her resources are boundless; but what use does she make of her brilliant opportunities and vast influence? We see her building superb cathedrals, setting up episcopal thrones, loading her clergy with wealth and titles; but what efforts does she make to instruct and Christianize the ignorant and superstitious nations of the north who had now come to occupy southern Europe, and whom she had received within her pale?

Where are the mission- schools she founds? where are the preachers she sends forth? and where are the copies of the Scriptures which she translates and circulates? The new races, though under the crook of the Christian shepherd, are still substantially the same in heart and life as when they lived in their native forests. They have been led to the baptismal font, and entered on the church rolls, but other Christianization they have not received from Rome.

From the fifth century onward any assistance which Christianity received from the Church of Rome was incidental. The order established at the beginning was Christianity first, and the church second. But after the fifth century, to take the latest date, that order was completely inverted.

Henceforward it was the church first, and Christianity second. The main and immediate object was lost sight of. Instead of a spiritual empire which should embrace all nations, and be ruled by the scepter of the Heavenly King, Rome aspired to build up a monarchy which should excel that of Caesar, with a loftier throne for her earthly head, and wider realms for her sway, and she recognized Christianity only in so far as it might be helpful to her in the execution of her vast project. She soon came to see that an adulterated Christianity would serve her purpose better than the pure and simple gospel, and she now began to work her way steadily back to old paganism. It was the speediest way of procuring reverence in the eyes of barbarous nations, and of reconciling them to her yoke. These were the conversions which illustrated the power of the “church” in the sixth and seventh centuries.

This was the Christianity which the Church of Rome propagated east and west, and which she transmitted to modern times. This was the Christianity which she sent Boniface to preach to the Germans; and this, too, was the Christianity which she missioned Augustine and his monks to proclaim to the Saxons. This is the only Christianity which we find in the Church of Leo X., at the close of the dark ages, when the new times were about to open in the Christianity which Luther found partly in the Old Bible of the Erfurt Library, and partly in the proscribed doctrines of Wycliffe and Huss.

The Christianity of the age of Leo X. was Paganism. The demoniac worship and hideous vices of the age of the Caesars would have been rampant in Europe at this day, but for the great missionary enterprise of the seventh and following centuries which had its first inception in the school and church of Icolmkill. An utter arid desert would the middle ages have been but for the hidilcn watcrs, which, issuing from their fountain- head in the Rock of Iona- smitten like the ancient rock that the nations might drink- flowed in a thousand secret channels throughout Europe. True, there were individual souls who knew the truth and fed upon it in secret, and who lived holy lives. But they were the exceptions, and their fight is all the sweeter and lovelier from the dark sky in which they are seen. We speak of the general drift and current of the Roman Church. The set of that current, as attested by the policy of her popes, and the edicts and teaching of her councils, was away from Apostolic Christianity, and steadily and with ever increasing velocity and force towards the paganism of old Rome.

The laudations which the monkish chroniclers have pronounced on the Roman Church can avail but little in the face of the public monuments of the times which are overwhelmingly condemnatory of that church. These chroniclers naturally wished to glorify their own organization, and their knowledge of Christianity being on a par with that of their church, they wrote as they believed. But we cannot make the same excuse for later historians, who have been content to repeat, one after the other, the fables of the monkish writers. They ought to have looked with their own eyes, instead of using the eyes of the “holy fathers,” and they ought to have interpreted more truthfully the monuments of history, which are neither few nor difficult to read; and if they had done so they would have been compelled to acknowledge, that if Christianity has been preserved and transmitted to us, it has been preserved and transmitted in spite of the efforts of Rome, continued through successive centuries, and perseveringly put forth to disguise, to corrupt, and to destroy the Christian faith.

There is another service which the laudators of the Roman Church have credited her with, but which we must take leave to challenge. She preserved and transmitted, say they, letters and arts. They are loud in praise of her fine genius and the patronage she lavished on men of letters, and they are pleased to compare her taste and enlightenment with the Vandalic barbarism, as they style it, of the Reformation. History tells another tale, however. The unvarnished fact is, that under the reign of Papal Rome, letters and arts were lost, and what the “church” suffered to be lost to the world she never would have been able to recover for it. The vulgar imagination pictures medieval Europe astir from side to side, with busy hives of industrious monks, who devote their days and nights to original studies, or to the transcription of the writings of the ancients. The picture is wholly imaginary. We see the monks busy in their cells; but about what are they busy? With what occupations do they fill up the vacant spaces in the weary routine of their daily functions? Who are their favorite authors? What books lie open before them? Of this learned and studious race, as the imagination has painted them, few have Latin enough to understand the Vulgate. Not one of them can read a page of the Greek or Hebrew Bible. The sacred tongues have been lost in Christendom. The great writers of Pagan antiquity have no charms for the ecclesiastics of that age. They take the parchments to which the grand thoughts of the ancients had been committed, and to what use do they put them? They “palimpsest” them, and over the page from which they have effaced the glorious lines traced by a Homer or a Virgil, they gravely write their own stupid legends.

It is this they preserve letters! What fruit has come of the toils of the laborious race of school- men, who flourished from the twelfth to the fourteenth century? The modern world has long since pronounced its verdict on that mass of ingenious speculation which they have transmitted to us, fondly believing that they were leaving a heritage which posterity never would let die. That verdict is-” rubbish, simply rubbish.” It is utterly worthless, and is now wholly disused, unless, it may be, to back up a papal brief, or to furnish materials for the compilation of a text- book for some popish seminary. A few names belonging to those ages have survived; but the great multitude have gone into utter oblivion. Bede, and Anselm, and Lafranc, and Bernard, and Aquinas, and Abelard, and a few more have escaped extinction. But what are these few when distributed over so many ages! What are six or a dozen stars in a night of a thousand years!

The truth is that we owe the revival of letters to the Turk; but the sense of obligation need not oppress us, seeing the service was done unwittingly. It was no part of the Turk’s plan to make it day in the West, when his arms plunged the East into night: yet this was what happened. When Constantinople fell in the fifteenth century, the scholars of the Greek empire sought refuge in Europe, carrying with them the treasures of antiquity. These they scattered over the West. A new world was unfolded to the eyes of men in Europe. The original tongues of the Scriptures, Hebrew and Greek, were recovered. The immortal works of ancient Greece and Rome were again accessible. These were eagerly read and studied: thought was stimulated, mind strengthened, the age was illuminated by a new splendor, and modern genius, kindling its torch at the lamp of ancient learning, aspired to rival the great masters of former days.

The Reformation arriving in the following century the movement was deepened, and its current directed towards a higher goal than it otherwise would ever have attained. But it must be noted that the Renaissance broke on no Europe bathed, as the result of the genial patronage of Popes, in the splendor of letters and arts; it rose on a Europe shrouded in intellectual and spiritual darkness. We must except Celtic literature and art, of which many monuments still remain scattered up and down in the museums and libraries of Europe,- the attesting proofs of the refinement that accompanied the great missionary enterprise of which we have spoken. This Celtic art was indigenous to Scotland, and in simple beauty was excelled by no art of any country or age. But the new learning which the Renaissance brought with it found only a limited number of patrons and disciples among the hierarchy of Rome. We must go to the camp of the Reformation to find the scholars of the age. At Wittenburg, not at Rome, was the true seat of the Renaissance. The Grecians and Hebraists, the jurists, historians, and poets of the time are found among the reformers. The court of Leo X. was rich in dancers, musicians, players, jugglers, painters, courtesans, but it had little besides to boast of. When the Pope sought among his theologians for some one to proceed to Germany and extinguish the rising flame of the Reformation, he could find only Dr. Eck and Cardinal Cajetan, and the armor of these champions was shivered at the first onset of Luther, and they were fain to shelter themselves from the piercing shafts of his logic behind the aegis of the papal authority. The Pope can hardly claim Raphael and Michael Angelo. True, they worked for him, and took his wages- as they were entitled to do- but they declined submission to his creed. The same may be said of the two earlier and mightier names, Dante and Petrarch: they were Protestants at the core. Rome meted out persecution to them when alive, and appropriated their glory when dead. To do the Popes justice, however, they have enriched the world with one work of prodigious magnitude, the Bullarium, to wit. It is a monument of their labor; we wish we could add, of their charity.

It is with sincere regret that we find ourselves unable to write things of a “Church” which has stood so long before history, which has occupied so unrivalled a position, and which has enjoyed unequaled opportunities of benefiting the world. But we dare not credit her with services which she never performed, nor award her praise which is the due of others. The hour draws nigh when she must descend from the place she has so long occupied. Her descent into the grave is determined by a law as fixed and unalterable as that which brings the mid- day sun in due course to the horizon. Seen in the light of that terrible hour, even she must remoter that the record of her past should contain so little to awaken in her the hope that the nations will mention her departure, and that the ages to come will mention her name with respect and reverence.

CHAPTER - A SECOND MORNING IN SCOTLAND.

WE have seen the Goths summoned from their native forests to shake into ruin the “heavens” and the “earth” of the ancient world. These structures had served their end, and must now be removed to make room for a political and social constitution better fitted for the development of the race, and the wider and more varied career on which they were about to enter. So vast a change could not be accomplished without the destruction of much that was intrinsically valuable, as well as of much that was no better than superannuated lumber. It was a world that was to be destroyed.

The authority of ancient schools, the sanctity of ancient religions, and the prestige of ancient empires, round which had gathered the glory of arms and of arts- on all had doom been pronounced, and all must go down together into destruction, and lie whelmed in a common ruin. Like the house of the leper, the old world of Paganism and paganized Christianity must be razed to its very foundations, its stones and timber removed, and the ground on which it stood purified by fire, before the new structure can safely be set up.

For two whole centuries the sky of Europe was darkened by storm after storm. The northern hail did its work with impartial and unpitying thoroughness. It fell alike on Pagan shrine and Christian sanctuary, on Arian and orthodox, on the man of equestrian rank and the tiller of the soil, on the proud trophies of war and the beautiful creations of genius. What the Hun had spared the Vandal destroyed, and what escaped the rage of the Vandal perished by the fury of succeeding hordes. The calamity was tremendous, and seemed irreparable. Yet no shock less terrible could have lifted the world out of the groove in which it had been working three thousand years, in the course of which it had so stereotyped its methods, both of thought and of action, that progress had become impossible to it. If affairs had been left to their ordinary course, instead of pushing boldly on into the future, the human race would have dwelt with morbid tenacity upon its past, ever attempting to come up to the tide- mark of former achievement, but ever falling short of it, yet working on under a growing languor, till, wearied out by its abortive efforts, it would have sunk at last into the slumber of senility and dotage.

We have seen races first stagnate, then rot, and finally pass out of sight. “Turkey is dying for want of Turks.” The exhaustion, physical, intellectual, and moral, which is rapidly converting into a desert a region once so populous in men and cities, and still so highly favored by nature, would have been the fate of both the Eastern and Western worlds. The work of Rome in years to come would have been to bury the nations she had conquered; and this task performed, there would have remained to her but one other, even that of digging her own grave and celebrating her own obsequies. This catastrophe, which so surely impended over the world, was averted by the terrific blasts which rushed down upon the dying nations, bringing life upon their wings, by mingling or replacing the corpse- like men with new races, whose bodies were hardy, whose minds wore no fetters, who courted danger, loved freedom, and who saw before them the inspiring vision of a grand future.

A comprehensive survey of the whole terrible drama, from the first bursting of the northern barrier to the final settlement of the ten Gothic kingdoms, warrants the conclusion that the latter and nobler half of the work, that even of building up and restoring, was allotted to the Scots. The other races, it is true, were permitted to share so far in the good work of restoration, though the burden of their mission was mainly to destroy. The Franks, the Lombards, and the Ostro- Goths set up in their several provinces the landmarks of political order after the deluge had subsided.

The new Italian race resumed the work of the ancient Greeks, following them longo intervallo in the arts of music, of sculpture, and of painting.

The Franks, too, though not till after the renaissance, aspired to imitate the old masters in the drama, in history, and in philosophy. The schoolmen of the twelfth and the succeeding century strove to awaken the mind of Europe from its deep sleep, by speculations and discussions which were as ingenious and subtle as they were unquestionably barren of fruit. But in truth the glory of these ages was outside the Gothic world. It was then while the modern European intellect lay folded up, or rather had not yet opened, that the Saracenic genius blossomed. The renown of this people in arms was succeeded by a yet higher fame won in the fields of the severer sciences. To their knowledge of algebra and chemistry they added an enviable acquaintance with ancient letters and learning, and no country did they conquer on which they have not left the marks of their original intellect and their exquisite taste. All these laborers contributed to the setting up of the modern world. And yet into how small a compass have all these labors now come. The Saracenic noon, which shed a short but brilliant day on the south of Europe. and the north of Africa, has set in the night of Islam. The political institutions of the Goths, found to be incompatible with the modern liberties, are now in course of removal. Even their architecture, the earliest and the loveliest product of the northern mind, is unsuited for a worship in spirit: and its imposing majesty and grandeur can never again be united with utility unless adoration should be replaced with pomp, and a worship of soul by a ceremonial performed solely by the body. But there is one notable exception to the stamp of futility and transitoriness borne by all the labors of the world from the fifth to the fifteenth century. And these were ages during which man never rested. He toiled and warred: for in truth, there was a seed of unrest at the heart of the nations, a principle of agitation at the center of Europe, which made it impossible that its kingdoms should know repose. This incessant conflict and friction would have worn out the world a second time but for one remarkable fact, which merits our attention; for it is here that we discern the first signs that the storm is to abate, and that out of the night of dark ruin is to emerge the fair morning of a new creation.

Among the new races now occupying Europe, there was one race of marked and peculiar idiosyncrasy. This race had been the filet to leave their original country- the spacious region which stretched northward from the Rhine and the Danube, and which was then the dwelling- place of numerous but as yet nameless nations. There the earth, held in the chains of winter, save for a brief month or two in the year, brings few of its products to maturity; but the same rigors that stunt the creations of the vegetable world, nourish into strength the body of man. From this land of shrubless plains and icy skies came the Scots, with frames of iron, and souls of singular intensity and ardor. To care for their flocks, or do battle with their enemies, was alike easy and welcome to them. Today, it was the more peaceful part of the shepherd or husbandman which they were called to enact; tomorrow, it was that of the invader and warrior. Thus did they journey onward: feeling the attraction which every new day brought with it of richer pastures, and fearing no enemy who might dispute their advance.

Their wandering steps brought them to the Rhine. Its banks were not yet clothed with the vine, nor its waters reddened with the slaughter which Caesar was to carry into this region of physical beauty, but tragic memories, at a future day. An extemporized fleet of canoes and rafts transports their families, their camp equipage, and their numerous herds across the “milk- white” river: and now the tops of the Vosges attract their eyes and draw them onward. From the summit of these hills the grassy plains of Gaul are seen spreading out at their feet. Their flocks now depasture the plains which the Soane and Rhone water, and on which the Burgundians are afterwards to find a seat. The Pyrenees are the limits of their farthest wanderings to the south, and from the shores of Spain they pass across the sea to Ireland. in that thinly- peopled country they find room for themselves, and abundant pasturage for their flocks,- and here their long journey terminates; but only for the time, for after a few centuries they cross the channel to a land destined to be their final home, and to bear permanently their name.

By- and- by this people began to addict themselves to other pursuits. In the parts into which they have come the first disciples of the gospel, fleeing from the sword of the Roman emperors, have found refuge. From these early Christians they learn a purer faith than any they have brought with them from their northern home. It is now that it begins to be seen that to them a higher mission has been assigned than to the other tribes, which by this time have begun to pour down upon the Roman empire. To the latter it had been said, “Go scatter the fires of judgment over the earth;” to the Scots was the command given, “Go forth and sow the seeds of new and better institutions.” For a work of this importance a special preparation was needed. The seed with which the fields, plowed by the sword, was to be sown, had to be got ready. A remote and solitary retreat, from which the sound of battle and the wrangle of the schools were shut out, must be found for the future “of Europe.” With a view to this the Scots were not permitted to settle within the limits of the empire. They were passed on from country to country, and at last were compelled to fix their permanent home at what was styled “the extremities of the earth.” There they could pursue without distraction their work of preparing the seed for their future sowing. The rising glory of the Roman church could not dazzle them; the Greek and Oriental philosophies, which had begun again to fascinate so many minds, could not withdraw them from the study of that one Book with which they were here shut in. Their thoughts were left free; their conclusions were unfettered; and their theology, drawn from its original source, was the same with that which the twelve fishermen had brought from the shores of Galilee in the first century. Christianity had lost its power in the schools of Alexandria and Jerusalem; but it recovered its first purity and vigor in the silence of Iona; and, when all was ready, its disciples came forth from their school amid the western seas to preach throughout Europe a purified and reinvigorated gospel. It is the men whom we see in the seventh and following centuries traversing Europe in the simple attire of sandals, of pilgrim staff, and long woolen garments, who turned the tide a second time in the great conflict betwixt Christianity and Paganism.

Victory had forsaken the standards of Christianity in the seats of her first triumphs. The theories of Origin had covered the East with anchorites; Rome was planting the West with colonies of monks. From the school of Iona came forth missionaries and teachers who laid anew the foundations of law and order. These were the first builders, after the Gothic deluge, of the “new heavens and the new earth,” wherein were to dwell the inductive sciences, the constitutional liberties, and a purified Christianity; and, wherever in after ages these blessings shall extend, it will be acknowledged that the march of the new civilization was led by the missionaries of Iona.

Other causes, too, operated in the way of perfecting the isolation of the Scots during this eventful and formative period of European history. At nearly the same time when the Romans were taking their final departure from Britain, the Scots were crossing the Irish Channel to take possession of that country which was to be the permanent seat of their nation.

Immediately consequent on these movements, came another great change which tended still farther to limit, if not extinguish for the time, the intercourse betwixt Scotland and the Continent, and especially betwixt Scotland and that city which was now to reign by her arts as her predecessor had reigned by her arms. The Frank rushed down and occupied Gaul. Next came the Goth, who pushed his bands across the Pyrenees into Spain. Thus, suddenly a wall of barbarism arose between the Scots and the nations of the Continent. That wall kept them separate for well nigh two centuries. The cessation of intercourse betwixt them and their continental neighbors is strikingly marked by the mystery, and even awe, with which the writers of the period refer to Britain when it happens to them to mention its name. They speak of it as a land which men trembled to visit, which was overhung by a cloud like that of night, and in which walked the doleful shapes which haunt the darkness. But, in truth, nothing better could have happened for British Christianity. Barbarous tribes were rushing to and fro upon the continent of Europe, giving its cities to sack, its fields to devastation, and extinguishing the lights of human learning and divine revelation. In Rome, the ancient saying was being fulfilled, “the day goeth away.” The churches, now beginning to gather beneath her scepter, sat in deep eclipse. She had wandered from the evangelical path, and could not show the true road to others. Nevertheless, in proportion as she became unfit to lead, the more ambitiously did she aspire to that high office. It was at this moment, when the prestige of her great name, and the arts she had begun to employ, might have wielded a seductive influence upon the Christians of Britain, that this partition wall of heathen barbarism suddenly rose between them and Rome. For two whole centuries they were shut in with the Bible- the book which Augustine boasted had in his day been translated into all the languages of the world.

They drew their system of Christian doctrine from the Scriptures, and they framed their simple ecclesiastical polity on rules borrowed from the same divine source. They asked Rome to tell them neither what they should believe, nor how they should govern themselves. They had found a better instructor, even the Spirit speaking in the Scriptures; and they neither owed nor owned subjection to any authority on earth.

These two centuries of isolation were a singularly fruitful period in Britain, and in particular in the northern half of the island. They were a spring- time thrice welcome after the long dark winter of heathenism which had gone before. Christianity, indeed, had been planted in the country some centuries previously, but its organization was feeble, the times were unsettled, the spirit of ancient Paganism was still in the air; and, as the result of these hostile influences there had set in a period of decay. But now there came a second morning to Scottish Christianity. That morning broke on our country not from the Seven Hills; it descended upon it from the skies.

Vigorous evangelistic agencies sprang up, one after the other, on our soil, by which the Christianization of our land was carried to its northern- most shore.

The tempests of Gothic invasion were overturning the Roman empire in continental Europe; and although it could not be said to be peace in Britain, yet, compared with the furious storms that were raging abroad, the convulsions that agitated the atmosphere of our country might almost be termed a calm. We had no Attila or Alaric, but the Picts from the north, and Scots from Ireland, were making periodic raids into the British kingdom of Strathclyde; and the pagan Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, were ravaging the eastern border of England. Nevertheless, in the midst of these convulsions and alarms, the good work of evangelization went on in our land, and the foundations of the Christian Church were laid deeper than before.

Great Christian individualities now appear on the historic stage. Of some the names still survive; and we can form to ourselves a tolerably welldefined picture both of the men and the work which they did. At the earlier epoch, that is, the first Christianization of Scotland, although we were conscious that the light was growing, we could not discern the agencies by which it was being spread. But it is different now. Great personalities stand out before us in connection with the evangelization of our country. Simple in life and courageous in spirit, they are seen prosecuting their work with devoted zeal in the midst of manifold confusions and perils. We see them establishing centers, from which they attack and subjugate the heathenism of the surrounding district. We see them kindle with strategic tact a line of lights at certain intervals from end to end of our country; and the evangelic day steadily grows in brightness from the appearance of the first beacon on the shores of the Solway; to that greater lamp which burned at Iona, and in such splendor, that its light, shining beyond the shores of Britain, penetrated the darkness of Gaul, of Germany, and of regions lying still farther north.

No authority outside our island, no foreign church or bishop, originated or directed this movement. It arose on our own soil, and was carried out by our own sons. Its authors sought no permission to preach, to baptize, to plant churches, and to rule them, even from Rome. Their anointing was from a higher source. One of the earliest evangelists, as we shall afterwards see, is reputed to have visited Rome, with what benefit to himself or to his work is not apparent; but with this exception, the early Scottish preachers of the gospel learned it from the Bible, sitting at the feet of native doctors, who sent them forth to teach others so soon as they judged them qualified and to whom they returned to tell how they had sped in the discharge of their commission.

Thus the Church of Scotland, placed in isolation, and growing up under native tutorship, was independent from the first. She was free born. It never occurred to her to ask right to exist from any foreign church whatever. She found that fight in her Heaven- bestowed charter; and the confirmation of a hundred pontiffs, or a hundred councils, would not have added one particle of weight to it. She honored the Church of Gaul, and she honored the Church of Rome, though her esteem of the latter might have been less, had she stood nearer to it and known it better; and she adopted what she believed to be good wherever she found it; but she called no church “mistress” in the way of framing herself on its model, much less of submitting to its government.

While affirming the historic fact of the independence of the British churches of the period, we must add that it does not concern us to establish that the early Church of Scotland was not prelatic; nor does it even concern us to establish that it was Presbyterian. The men of that day are not our rule; their opinions and their actings do not bind us. We go higherhigher in time, and higher in authority- for examples to follow, and models on which to frame ourselves. It is the pattern shown to us on the page of the New Testament, and it alone, with which we have to do. There is our exampler. The early Scottish evangelists may have done right or they may have done wrong; that determines nothing as regards the divinely appointed method of conducting the affairs of what Holy Scripture calls the “kingdom of heaven.” We have here to do with the question only as a historic one. And all history attests that the plan of evangelization adopted by the earliest founders of the Scottish Church was simple, that it was the plan which they judged best adapted to the circumstances of their country, and that in following it out they acted with conscious and perfect independence of all exterior authority. Details will come before us afterwards. Meanwhile it deserves our notice, that by the opening of the seventh century the Church of Scotland was so consolidated in both her doctrine and her autonomy, that she was able to resist the wiles of Rome, which now, the wall of separation thrown down, approached her more closely than ever, and in vastly enhanced power. The stamp of independence impressed thus early on the Scottish Church she long continued to retain. Like the disciple, when she was “young she girded herself and walked whither she would ; “like him too, when she was old, she stretched out her hands and another bound her, and carried her whither she would not. But the memory of her youth returned: the spirit of old days descended upon her; and under the influence of that spirit the fetters on her arms became but as “green withs,” and rising up she came forth from captivity to challenge more boldly than ever her birthright, which was Freedom.

CHAPTER - NINIAN- SCENE OF HIS YOUTH- CONVERSION- FIRST EVANGELISTIC LABORS OF EVANGELISING.

THE breath of a new life was moving over the land. This new life created new men. The new men constituted a new society. Till this time hardly had there been social life in Scotland. There had been chiefs, clans, nationalities, and these nationalities had formed combinations and alliances for war; but the elements which conspire for the creation of social and civil life were lacking. Each man in his innermost being dwelt apart. Christianity, by imparting a common hope, brought men together, and summoned into being a new and powerful brotherhood. Around this new society, all interests and classes, all modes of thought and of action began to group themselves. On this root grew up the Scotland of the following ages. Three great personalities- great they must have been since they are seen across the many ages that have since elapsed- lead us onward into the wide field of Scottish history.

The first Scottish individuality that stands out distinct and bold before us is NINIAN. He was born in Galloway towards the middle of the fourth century; the exact year of his birth, no biographer has ventured to fix. A Briton by blood, he was a subject of the emperor by birth, seeing his native district was comprehended in the Roman province of Valentia, of which the boundaries were the Clyde on the north, and the Solway or Roman wall on the south. On the west it extended to the Irish Sea, and on the east it was coterminous with the Roman province of Bernicia. Ninian’s father was a British king. So has it been affirmed. But we have not been told where the dominions of this king lay, and in the absence of any information on the point it is not easy to conjecture. The limits of the Roman empire extended at that time to the shores of the Clyde; and it seems vain to look for the kingdom of Ninian’s royal father on the south of that river. And it would seem equally vain to look for it on the north of it; for beyond the Clyde was the region of the Picts. There seems, therefore, no room for such a potentate as some have conjured up to grace the descent of the earliest of Scottish evangelists. “When you hear of Ninian being a king’s son,” says Alford, naively, “consider that it is the language of legendaries who are very liberal in bestowing that title. By it they understood the princes and petty chiefs of the provinces of whom Britain in every century had plenty.”

The statement of Camerarius, that he was the son of a small chieftain, best accords with the facts of his life as well as with what is known regarding the state of society at the time. It was evidently no common home in which Ninian grew up. His education had more than the usual care bestowed upon it. He enjoyed advantages of home training and foreign travel which would never have fallen to his lot had he been peasantborn.

The landscape on which the youthful eyes of the future evangelist rested was thinly inhabited and poorly cultivated, and apt, when the scud came up the Solway from the Irish Sea, to look a little gloomy. It was a rolling country of knolls and Woodlands and grazing grounds, traversed by silvery rivulets which flowed into the Solway, beyond whose broad placid stream rose the dark hills of Westmoreland. It was dotted, moreover, by the mud huts, or dry- stone houses of the inhabitants. In the midst of these poor abodes there rose, but at wide intervals, edifices of a somewhat more pretentious character. These more imposing structures were churches; and they owed their attractiveness rather to the contrast they offered to the humble dwellings around them, than to ally grace of architecture, for their construction was of the simplest and rudest kind. Their wall of wattles, plastered with clay, was surmounted by a roof of thatch. So humble were the sanctuaries of the early Britons.

The district had already been Christianized. It had now for some centuries been under the civilizing influences of the Romans, but its religious life had ebbed of late, and the sway of Rome was now becoming dubious and intermittent. As a consequence, the inhabitants passed their lives amid frequent alarms and wars. The Picts and Scots hovered on their northern border, ever on the watch for a favorable opportunity for a raid into the debatable land betwixt the two walls. Such opportunities were of but too frequent occurrence, as the wretched inhabitants knew to their cost. The midland Britons had leaned for defense on the sword of Rome; the Roman Power was now about to withdraw; and left without protection in the presence of fierce and warlike enemies, the Britons greatly needed the invigorating power of a revived Christianity to inspirit them to withstand their invaders. It would still farther tend to the security and quiet of the Britons if they should carry the olive branch of a religious revival into the wild country on the north of them. The Christianization of the region would moderate if it did not bridle those furious blasts that ever and anon were bursting in from Pictland, and which left traces so frightful on the unhappy country lying betwixt the Clyde and the Solway. Such, possibly, were the views with which Ninian began his evangelization.

We behold Ninian at the opening of his career. What were the stages of his inner life previous to his coming forth as a public teacher? This is precisely what his biographers have not told us. We would have been well content to have been without the account of the miracles with which they have credited him, if only they had given us some of his experiences and wrestlings of soul. No one comes forth on such an errand as Ninian’s, and at such a time, without having undergone a previous, and, it may be, prolonged and severe mental discipline. So was it, as we shall see in the sequel, in the case of one of the greatest of his successors, and doubtless it was also so in the case of Ninian himself. But the length and severity of his inward training we have been left to conjecture. “Our saint,” says one of his biographers, “was in infancy regenerated in the waters of baptism; the white garment which he then put on he preserved unsullied.” The business of his conversion is here dispatched in two sentences; but the process described is too summary, and, we must take leave to say, too mechanical to satisfy us of its reality. It is light, not water, that renews the soul. We should like to know how the light entered, and by what stages Ninian passed to the full apprehension of those great truths which alone can impart to the soul a new- life, and open to it a new destiny. His parents, professedly Christian, had told him, doubtless, that Christ was a Savior. This was a fact which it was pleasant for Ninian to know, even as it is pleasant for one in health to know that there is a physician within reach, although he feels no present need to avail himself of his skill. But one day Ninian fell sick- sick at heart, sick in soul; and he saw that his sickness was unto death- eternal death. Already he felt its sting within him, and a horror of great darkness fell upon him. The morning came, brightening the waters of the Solway, and scenting the flowers that grew along its banks, but now its coming brought no joy to his spirit. What availed these delights to one who felt himself encompassed by a night on which no morning would ever rise? He hid himself from the face of companion and friend. He communed with his own heart, and wept in the silent glen or by the solitary sea- shore.

It was now that the fact, heard before, returned to his memory, with new and infinite significance, even that there was a physician who could heal the soul. He threw himself at the feet of this physician, and was healed. A new life had entered into Ninian. He had been born again into a new world.

Ninian now looked with new eyes upon the world of men and women around him. He saw that they too were sick unto death, even as he himself had been, though they knew it not. How could he forbear pointing these unhappy multitudes to that same physician who had wrought the “miracle of healing” upon himself? The multiform misery under which his native province groaned confirmed and intensified his resolution to make known the good news to its inhabitants.

The Christianity of the second and third centuries, which had created not a few beautiful lives, and fostered the order and prosperity of the province, was rapidly declining. There were still pastors in the church, doubtless, but they exercised a shorn influence, and they ministered to dwindling flocks.

Of the population not a few had forsaken the sanctuary for the grove, and were now worshipping at the altars under the oaks. The counsels of scripture and the maxims of experience had been alike disregarded, and the Druidic shrines which the fathers spared to cast down, had become a snare to the sons. On every side was heard the loud laugh of the scoffer and the ribald jest or profane oath of the open profligate. Meanwhile disaster was gathering round the province. The Romans were retiring beyond the southern wall; and with their retreating steps was heard the advancing tread of the Picts and Scots. No longer held in check by the legions, these fierce marauders were breaking over the northern boundary, and inflicting untold calamities on the men of Valentia. The unhappy Britons were in an evil case. The night was often made terrible by the flames of burning raths, and the morning ghastly by the hideous spectacles it disclosed, of the inhabitants slaughtered, or carried captive. Fordun says:” 0 vengeance of Heaven, exclaims Geoffrey, for past wickedness! 0 madness in the tyrant Maximus, to have brought about the absence of so many warlike soldiers! . . .The enemy plied them (the Britons of Galloway) unceasingly with hooked weapons, wherewith the wretched populace were dragged off the walls, and cruelly dashed to the ground. . . .Then they speedily summoned the peasantry, with whose hoes and mattocks, pickaxes, forks, and spades, they all, without distinction, set to work to dig broad clefts and frequent breaches through the wall, whereby they might everywhere readily pass backwards and forwards.” f178 It was amid scenes like these that the daily life of Ninian was passed. What could he do to lessen the weight of a misery so intolerable? Such, doubtless, was the question he asked himself as he listened to the oftrecurring tale of rapine and slaughter. He could not recall the legions, nor could he chase from the northern frontier the hordes that were crowding to it and swarming over it. But might he not do something toward restoring the manhood of the Britons, who, instead of facing courageously their foes, were sending their “groans” to Rome for help. He knew enough to understand that Christianity is by far the mightiest creative power in the world. Rome had withdrawn her aegis; might he not replace it with the gospel, that nurse of bravery as of virtue? Such were the aims with which Ninian entered on his work.

The transition involved a great sacrifice of ease. His youth had been passed in the tranquil pursuit of knowledge, surrounded by the comforts, if not the elegancies of home. The quiet of the study, and the delights of the family, must now be forsaken, and he must brace himself for thankless labor among a rude and semi- barbarous population. The Romans were retiring, and the thin lacquering of civilization which they were leaving behind them had been purchased at the cost of the enervation of spirit which their long dominancy had engendered, and the love for Italian vices with which they had inoculated the simple natives. Moreover, Ninian’s missionary labors must be performed on a field liable to the sudden incursions of war, exposing him to daily peril, and compelling him to be the frequent witness of the agonizing sights which war brings in its train. Nor could he flatter himself that his mission would be welcomed by his countrymen, or that either his person or his message would receive much consideration or reverence at their hands. They were returning to the altars of the Druid, and were in no mood to receive meekly the reproofs he might find it necessary to tender to them for their apostasy. They were more likely to deride and scoff than to listen and obey. It was an evil time. The early glory of the British church had faded. When the altar of the Druid smoked in the land, the Britons were saying, it was better with us than now. There was then no ravaging Pict, no slaughtering Scot. But since the old shrines had been cast down, we have never ploughed our fields, or reaped our harvests in peace. We will return to the service of our fathers’ deities. With returning superstition had come dark minds, reprobate consciences, inhuman dispositions, and violent deeds. Such were the men among whom Ninian went forth to begin his missionary labors.

At the hands of the presbyters or bishops- for these two names were then employed to designate the same men and the same office, that, to wit, of the pastor of a congregation- at the hands of the presbyters and bishops that remained in these degenerate times to the British church of Valentia, did Ninian receive ordination. A late writer, speaking of the British church of that period, tells us that “a regular hierarchy with churches, altars, the Bible, discipline, and the creeds existed,” in it, and that “we know this from many sources.” We are not told what these sources are, and we are unable to conjecture. But till we do know we must take the liberty to believe that this “hierarchy” in the early British church is a work of pure imagination. We possess a contemporary, or nearly contemporary description of the British church of Valentia in Ninian’s day. We refer to the “Confessions of Patrick,” written a few years later. There we can see only two offices, those of presbyter and deacon, in this church. If this is the “hierarchy” which this writer has in his eye, we grant that it did exist; but let it be noted that this is the simple hierarchy or order of the New Testament church: not the pompous gradation of offices and dignities which the Church of Rome instituted in the fourth century. That this was the order of the church of Valentia in Patrick’s day, appears from the fact that his father was a deacon, and his grandfather a presbyter; and of higher offices he says not a word; and such, doubtless, was the order of that same church in Ninian’s day. The existing state of things, as revealed in the rccords of the time, make it undoubted that Ninian went forth to begin his evangelisation among his countrymen, holding no ecclesiastical rank save that of plain presbyter, or, to use the alternative designation, bishop. Had Ninian been a monk of thetwelfth century he would have gone to Rome to seek consecration, and on his return would have perambulated his native province in miter and crosier, followed by a suitable train of ecclesiastical subordinates. Ailred of Rievaux, who wrote his life in the twelfth century, when Gratian of Bologna was embodying the forgeries of Isidore in his “Decretum” as historic facts, does indeed send Ninian all the way to Rome for authority to teach the ignorant people of his native province the gospel.

And Alford detains him not less than twenty- four years in Rome, and occupies him all that while in the study of the doctrine and discipline of the Western Church. Such are the astounding statements of his twelfth century biographers. That Ninian should deem a period of twenty- four years requisite to qualify him to preach to his simple countrymen, or that he should wait till a generation had passed away before returning with the evangelical message to Britain, is what is capable of belief only in the century in which it was first advanced- the century that accepted the Isidorean forgeries, and made them the foundations of Canon Law. We offer no refutation of these statements. Their huge improbability, indeed absurdity, place them beyond the need, we had almost said beyond the possibility of refutation. f181 What plan did Ninian follow in his missionary labors? None of his biographers have introduced him to us as he appeared while engaged in his ordinary every- day work. Ailred invests him with a halo of miracle; and seen through this luminous haze, his figure appears of more than mortal stature. A preternatural glory, according to Ailred, now broke on the wilds of Galloway. These moorlands became the scene of the same mighty works, which were wrought in Galilee when the Messiah opened his ministry. Ninian healed the sick, opened the eyes of the blind, cleansed the leper, and raised the dead. These stupendous acts conquered the incredulity and disarmed the hatred of his countrymen to the Gospel. So says his biographer, with an air so simple and confiding, as to leave no doubt that he firmly believed the truth of what he wrote, and could hardly deem it possible that any one should question the miracles of the saint. There will be only one opinion, we should think, among our readers, regarding these astounding statements; and yet some of Ninian’s modern biographers seem half inclined to believe that the saint did, indeed, possess miraculous powers, and that the extraordinary acts attributed to him by Ailred are not altogether fabulous.

The real Ninian, however, was simply a home missionary. In the circumstances of his time and country, he could be nothing else. Had we met him in his daily round of labor, we should, most probably, have seen nothing at all remarkable about him; nothing materially different from the same functionary whom we see, in our own day, prosecuting his labors in our city lanes and amid our rural hamlets. Had we understood his ancient tongue, we should have found Ninian telling to his countrymen the same message which the colporteur and the missionary carry to the outcasts of our own age. Truth acts upon the mind in essentially the same manner in every age- the same in the fourth as in the nineteenth century; and the teacher who would combat vice and dispel ignorance must adopt radically the same methods, whatever his era; or if there be aught of difference, it must be on the side of greater simplicity and directness in early ages than in later times. The men of Ninian’s day were rude, the times were calamitous, and, if the missionary really aimed at grappling to purpose with the gross ignorance and daring wickedness that surrounded him, the more simple his methods, and the less he burdened and lettered his message with forms and conventionalities, the greater would his success be. We credit Ninian simply with earnest piety and ordinary sense when we say that he resembled much more the home missionary of our own day than the stoled, tonsured, and girdled functionary of the twelfth century. Ninian went forth among his countrymen not to enlighten them touching the prerogatives of him who assumes to keep the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to tell them that the “Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” That such a message, delivered in a loving, earnest spirit, was followed by conversions, we cannot doubt. The fruits and monuments of his ministry remain even to this day.

CHAPTER - NINIAN VISITS ROME- HIS JOURNEY THITHERROME IN NINIAN’S DAY.

BY-AND-BYE there comes a change over Ninian. The simple missionary of Galloway sets out on a visit to Rome. So do all his biographers relate, though none of them on what seems perfectly reliable authority. As we see him depart, we fear lest Ninian may not return the same man he went. The Church of Rome was just then beginning to forsake the. simple path of the Gospel for the road that leads to riches and worldly grandeur. As yet, however, her early glory was in good degree around her, although the prestige of the old city on the Tiber, and the rank to which her pastor had by this time climbed, was filling the air of western Christendom with a subtle, intoxicating element, which was drawing to Rome visitors from many lands who felt and yielded to the fascination. Of the number we have said was Ninian. Damasus, in whom the papal ambition was putting forth its early blossoms, then filled the Roman See. The pontiff welcomed, we cannot doubt, this pilgrim from the distant Britain. He saw in his visit an omen that the spiritual sway of the second Rome would be not less extensive than the political dominion which the first Rome had wielded.

This journey painfully convinces us that even in Britain, Ninian had begun to breathe Roman air. This is seen in the motives attributed to him for undertaking this journey to “the threshold of the Apostles.” He began to suspect that the Christian pastors of Britain did not know the true sense of Scripture, and that he himself was but imperfectly grounded in it, and that should he go to Rome and seat himself at the feet of its bishop, he would be more thoroughly instructed, and the Bible would reveal to his eye many things which it refused to disclose to him in the remote realm of Britain.

We know of nothing in the Bible itself which warrants the belief that it is a book which can be rightly understood in but one particular spot of earth, or truly interpreted by only one class of men. It bears to be a revelation to mankind at large. “There is nothing more certain in history,” says Bingham, “than that the service of the ancient church was always performed in the vulgar or common language of every country.” From her first foundation it was the pious care of the church, when a nation was converted, to have the Scriptures translated into the tongue of that nation. Eusebius says, “they were translated into all languages, both of Greeks and barbarians, throughout the world, and studied by all nations as the oracles of God.” f183 Chrysostom assures us that “the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Persians, the Ethiopians, and a multitude of other nations, translated them into their own tongues, whereby barbarians learned to be philosophers, and women and children, with the greatest ease, imbibed the doctrine of the gospel.” Theodoret asserts the same fact, “that every nation under heaven had the Scripture in their own tongue; in a word, into all tongues used by all nations in his time.” f185 The long residence of the Romans in the country had familiarized the provincial Britons with their tongue, and had access to the Word of God in Latin, and, doubtless also in Belgic or Armoric, if not British Celtic. The Bible till now had been regarded as a book for the world, to be translated, read, and interpreted by all. But towards the opening of the fifth century it began to be whispered that this was an erroneous and dangerous opinion.

Only episcopal insight, and especially Roman episcopal insight, could see all that is contained in this book. Ordinary Christians were warned, therefore, not to trust their own interpretations of it, but to seek to have it expounded to them by that sure and unerring authority which had been appointed for their guidance, and which was seated at Rome. It is easy to see with what a halo this would invest that old city on the banks of the Tiber, and with what authority it would clothe its pastor. It was the first step towards the withdrawal of the Book, and the installing of the Roman bishop in its room as the sole dictator of the faith and the sole lord and ruler of the consciences of men.

These arrogant assumptions would seem to have gained so far an ascendancy over the missionary of Galloway, that he forsook for a while his labors among his countrymen who so greatly needed his instructions and guidance, and set out towards the eternal city. He crossed the Alps, it is said, by the Mons Cenis pass,- in those days a rugged path that wound perilously by the edge of black abysses, and under horrid rocks and gathering avalanches. His biographer, Ailred, in enlarging on the motives which led him to undertake this journey, speaks of him as assailed by the temptation “to throw himself on the resources of his own mind, to trust to the deductions of his own intellect, either from the text of Holy Scriptures, or the doctrines he had already been taught. For this he was too humble.”

Shielded by his humility from the snare to which he was exposed, that even of exercising the “right of private judgment,” Ailred makes Ninian break out into the following soliloquy, expressive of ideas and sentiments altogether foreign to the fourth century, but which had come to be fully developed in the twelfth, when Ailred puts them into Ninian’s mouth. “I have in my own country,” Ninian is made to say, “sought him whom my soul loveth, and have not found him. I will arise: I will compass sea and land to seek the truth which my soul longs for. But is there need of so much toil? Was it not said to Peter, thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it .9 In the faith of Peter then, there is nothing defective, obscure, imperfect: nothing against which evil doctrine or perverted sentiment, the gates as it were of hell, could prevail. And where is the faith of Peter, but in the See of Peter?

Thither, certainly, I must go, that leaving my country, and my relations, and my father’s house, I may be thought worthy to behold with inward eye the fair beauty of the Lord, and to be guarded by his temple.” f186 There was now at Rome a galaxy of talent, which, doubtless, helped to draw Ninian thither. Jerome, and others, whose renown in learning and piety filled Christendom, and has crossed the ages to our own days, were then residing in that city. These men had no sympathy with the rising tide of superstition, or the growing ambition of the popes; on the contrary, they strove to repress both, foreseeing to what a disastrous height both would grow if allowed to develop. But their presence dignified the old city, and the simple grandeur of their character, and the fame of their erudition, shed upon Rome a glory not greatly inferior to that of its first Augustan age. It was natural that Ninian should wish to see, and to converse with these men.

The Itineraries and the Roman roads, portions of which are still traceable on the face of England, enable us to track the route by which Ninian would travel. Starting from Annandale, he crosses the Solway and traverses the great military way to Carlisle. Thence he would continue his journey along the vale of the Eden and over the dark hills of Stanemoor. We see him halt on their summit and take his parting look of the mountains amid which he had passed his youth. As he pursued his way, many tokens would meet his eye of the once dominant, but now vanished, power of the Druids. Here and there by the side of his path would be seen oak groves felled by the axe, dolmens overturned, and stone circles wholly or in part demolished.

Even in our day these monuments of a fallen worship are still to be beheld in the north of England: they were doubtless more numerous in Ninian’s time.

Resuming his journey, Ninian would next cross the moorlands that lie on the other side of the Stanemoor chain. The Roman road that runs by Catterick would determine his path. Traversing this great highway, not quite obliterated even yet, and then doubtless in excellent condition, seeing it led to the main seat of the Roman government in Britain, Ninian in due course arrived at York.

This city was then one of the main centers of Christianity in Britain. It had its schools of sacred and secular learning; nevertheless its predominant air was still Roman. It had its courts of Roman judicature, its theaters, baths, mosaic pavements, and tutelary shrines within the walls; and suburbs in the Italian style. It was honored at times with the presence of the Emperor. It was, in fact, a little Rome on English soil. From York our pilgrim would proceed by the well- frequented line of Wattling Street to London, and thence to Sandwich, where he would embark for Boulogne.

Ninian’s steps are now on Gallic earth. He beholds around him the monuments of an older civilization than that of his native Britain. Pursuing his way he arrives at Rheims, a city which, in little more than a century afterwards, was to witness the baptism of Clovis, an event which gave to the “church” her “eldest son,” and to France the first of its Christian kings.

Lyons is the next great city on his route. Here Ninian’s heart would be more deeply stirred than at any previous stage of his journey. The streets on which he now walked had been trodden by the feet of Irenaeus: for Lyons was the scene of the ministry and martyrdom of that great Christian Father. Every object on which Ninian’s eye lighted- the majestic Rhone, the palatial edifices, the crescent- like hills that wailed in the city on the north- all were associated with the memory of Irenaeus, and not with his memory only, but with that of hundreds besides, whose love for the Gospel had enabled them to brave the terrors of the “red- hot iron chair:” the form of death that here awaited the early disciples of Christianity. As Ninian ruminated on these tragedies, for they were of recent occurrence and must have been fresh in his knowledge, he accepted these morning tempests, now past, as the pledges of a long and cloudless day to Christian France.

Alas, Ninian did not know, and could not Forecast, those far more dreadful storms that were to roll up in the sky of that same land in a future age and drench its soil with the blood of hundreds of thousands of martyrs.

Not long does Ninian linger on this scene of sad but sublime memories.

Again he sets forth. His steps are now directed towards those white summits, which, seen across the plains of Dauphine, tower up before him in the southern sky, and admonish him that the toils and perils of his journey are in a measure only yet beginning. The Alps were already passable, but with extreme difficulty and hazard. The legions, marching to battle, and the merchants of the Mediterranean coast, seeking the markets of Gaul, had established routes across them; but to the solitary traveler the attempt to climb their summits was an arduous and almost desperate one. He was in danger of stepping unawares into the hidden chasm, or of being overtaken by the blinding tourmette, or surprised and crushed by the falling avalanche. Nor were their precipices and whirlwinds the only perils that attended the traveler in these mountains. He ran the farther risk of being waylaid by robbers or devoured by wolves. These hazards were not unknown to Ninian. His journey must be gone nevertheless. Classic story, and now the tale of Christian martyrdom, had made the soil of Italy enchanted ground to him. But a yet greater fascination did its capital wield.

That city had cast out its Caesar, but it had placed in his seat one who aspired to a higher lordship than emperor ever wielded. These gates Ninian must enter, and at these feet must he sit. Accordingly, joining himself, most probably, to a few companions, for such journeys were now beginning to be common, we see him climbing the lofty rampart of rocks and snows that rose betwixt him and the goal of his pilgrimage, and their summits gained, he descends by an equally perilous path into the Italian plains. The Goth had not yet entered that fair land, and Ninian saw it as it appeared to the eye of the old Roman. The bloom of its ancient fertility was still upon its fields, nor had its cities lost the chaste glory of classic times. But the flower of Italy was Rome, the fountain of law, the head of the world, and now the center of the Christian church; and Ninian hastens his steps thither.

We behold the missionary of Galloway at the “threshold of the Apostles,” as the church of the first parish in Rome now began to be magnificently styled. Here the greatest of the Apostles had suffered martyrdom, and here thousands of humble confessors had borne testimony to the faith by pouring out their blood in the gladiatorial combats of the Coliseum, or at the burning stakes in the gardens of Nero. But now the faith for which they had died was triumphing over the paganism of the empire, and the churches of the west were crowding to Rome and laying their causes at the feet of her bishop, as if in acknowledgment that their homage was justly due to her who had fought so terrible a battle, and had won so glorious a victory.

Such, doubtless, were the thoughts of Ninian as he drew nigh to the eternal city. We know the overpowering emotions with which a greater than Ninian, eleven centuries later, approached the gates of Rome. Ninian entered these gates, not, indeed, unmoved, but with pulse more calm, and mind less perturbed, than the monk of Wittenberg. In Ninian’s day the Papacy was only laying the foundations of its power, and laying them in a well- simulated humility; in Luther’s age it had brought forth the topstone, and its vaulting pride and towering dominion made it the wonder and the terror of the nations.

How did Ninian occupy himself in Rome? How long did he sojourn in it?

What increase did he make in knowledge and in piety from all that he saw and heard in the capital of Christendom? To these questions we are not able to return any answer, or an answer that is satisfactory. The mythical haze with which his mediaeval biographers invest him is still around him. In their hands he is not the missionary of the fourth century but the monk of the twelfth; and if we shall relate, it is not necessary that we shall believe all that they have told us of his doings in Rome. He was shown, doubtless, the prison in which Paul had languished, and mayhap the bar at which he had pleaded. He was taken to the dark chambers in the tufa rock beneath the city, which had given asylum to the Church during the terrible persecutions of her infancy. He saw the basilicas being converted into churches; and in the transformation of the ancient shrines into Christian sanctuaries, he beheld the token that the great battle had gone against paganism, despite it was upheld by all the authority of Caesar and by all the power of the legions. The descendants of those who had lived in the catacombs were in Ninian’s day filling the curial chairs of the capital, and the tribunals of the provinces, or leading the armies of Rome on the frontiers. The orations of Chrysostom, the “goldenmouthed,” and the writings of Augustine, were supplanting the orators and poets of pagan literature. These auspicious prodigies- the monuments of the irresistible might with which Christianity was silently obliterating the ancient pagan world, and emancipating men from the bondage in which its beliefs, philosophies, and gods had held them- Ninian did not fail to mark. These victories he could contemplate with an unmixed delight, for in their train no nation mourned its liberties lost, nor mother her sons slaughtered. They enriched the vanquished even more than the victor; and they gave assurance that the power which had subdued Rome would yet subdue the world.

But there were other things to be seen at Rome fitted to awaken a dread that a new paganism was springing up, which might prove in time as fomidable a rival and as bitter a persecutor of the Gospel as that whose decay and fall was to be read in the deserted altars and desolate fanes of the metropolis. Crowds were flocking to the catacombs, not fleeing from persecution like their fathers, but seeking to enkindle their devotion, and add merit to their services, performed in the gloom of these sanctified caverns. The supper was celebrated at the graves of the martyrs: the dead were beginning to be invoked: art, which is first the handmaid, and next the mistress, was returning with her fatal gifts: the churches were a- glow with costly mosaics and splendid paintings. But the “holy of holies” in Rome was the tomb in which slept the Apostles Peter and Paul. Their bodies, exempt from the law of corruption, exhaled a celestial odor, able to regale not the senses only, but to refresh and invigorate the spirit. Thither, doubtless, was Ninian conducted, that he might return to his own country fully replenished with such holiness as the bones of martyrs and the mystic virtue of sanctified places can confer.

But what of the new truths and deeper meanings with which Ninian hoped his understanding was to be enlightened, when, lifting his eyes from the page of Scripture, he fixed them on the holy city of Rome, and set forth on his journey to it? Some things met his gaze in Rome that were indeed new, and which, if they did not minister to his edification, we may well believe, excited not a little his surprise. The temples which the followers of the humble Nazarene had reared for their worship, presented by their magnificence a striking contrast to the wattle- built churches of Galloway!

And then came the pomp of the church’s services: the rich and costly vestments of the clergy ! the splendid equipages in which they rode out! the luxurious tables at which they sat !- all these things were new to him.

Compared with the golden splendor in which Ninian found the Roman Church basking, it was but the iron age with the Church in Scotland.

Ninian saw something in Rome more magnificent still. There he beheld, with wonder, doubtless, the blossoming power of her chief bishop; fed by riches, by adulation, by political power, and the growing subservience of the western churches, the Roman prelate was already putting forth claims, and displaying an arrogance which gave promise in due time of eclipsing the glory of the Caesars. And not unlike their shepherds, were the flocks of the Eternal City. The members of the church, not slow to follow the example set them, were delighting in pomps and vanities. The days were long past when the profession of Christianity exposed one to the sword of the headsman, or the lions of the amphitheater. The bulk of the professors of that age had succeeded in converting religion into a round of outward observances, which cost them far less pain than self- denial and sanctification of heart.

The bishop and clergy of Rome at the time of Ninian’s visit have been pictured to the life by historians of unimpeachable veracity, eye- witnesses of the men and the scenes which they describe. Let us enter the gates which those writers throw open to us, and observe what is passing within them. It is the year 366. We find Rome full of violence, war is raging on its streets; the very churches are filled with armed combatants, who spill one another’s blood in the house where prayer is wont to be made. What has given rise to these sanguinary tumults? The Papal See has become vacant, and Rome is electing a new bishop to fill the empty chair. Two aspirants offer themselves for the Episcopal dignity- Damasus and Ursinus. Both are emulous of the honor of feeding the flock; but which of the two shall become shepherd and wield the crook, is a question to be determined by the sword. Damasus is backed by the more powerful faction of the citizens; and when the struggle comes to an end, victory remains with him. He has not been elected to the chair in which we now see him seating himself -he has fought his way to it and conquered it, as warrior conquers an earthly throne, and he mounts it on steps slippery with blood. He has fought a stout if not a good fight, and his miter and crook are the rewards of victory. The choice of the Holy Ghost, say the scoffers in Rome, has fallen on him who had the biggest faction. So do contemporary historians tell us. “About the choice,” says Ruffinus, speaking of the election of Damasus and describing what was passing before his eyes, “arose a great tumult, or rather an open war, so that the houses of prayer, that is, the churches, floated with man’s blood.” The historian Ammianus Marcellinus has drawn a similar picture of Rome at that time. The ambition that inflamed Damasus and Ursinus to possess the episcopal chair was so inordinate and the contest betwixt them so fierce, that the Basilica of Sicinius, instead of psalms and prayers, resounded with the clash of arms and the groans of the dying. “It is certain,” says Marcellinus, “that in the church of Sicinius, f188 where the Christians were wont to assemble, there were left in one day an hundred and thirty- seven dead bodies.” The historian goes on to say that when he reflected on the power, the wealth, and the worship which the episcopal chair brought to its occupant, he ceased to wonder at the ardor shown to possess it. He pictures the Roman prelate in sumptuous apparel proceeding through the streets of Rome in his gilded chariot, the crowd falling back before the prancing of his steeds; and after his ride through the city, he enters his palace and sits down at a table more delicately and luxuriously furnished than a king’s. Baronius admits the truth of this picture, when he replies that Marcellinus, being a pagan, could not but feel a little heathen envy at the sight of the Christian Pontiff eclipsing in glory the Pontifex Maximus of old Rome. And as regards the “good table” of the bishop, Baronius rejoices in it “as one who delighted,” says Lennard, “to hold his nose over the pot.” Again we find the pagan historian counseling the Christian bishop thus: “You would consult your happiness more if, instead of pleading the greatness of the City as an excuse for the swollen pride in which you strut about, you were to frame your life on the model of some provincial bishops, who approve themselves to the true worshippers of the Deity by purity of life, by modesty of behavior, by temperance in meat and drink, by plain apparel and lowly eyes;” a piece of excellent advice doubtless, which, we fear, was not appreciated by him of the “western eyebrow,” as Basil styled Pope Damasus.

When these sordid humors, to speak leniently of them, infected the Head, what was to be looked for in the clergy? With such an example of pomp and luxury daily before their eyes, they were not likely to cultivate very assiduously the virtues of humility, abstinence, and self- denial. The Roman clergy of the day, it should seem, were devoured by a passion for riches, and that passion was fed by the wealthier members of their flocks, whose profuse liberality ought to have more than satisfied their avariciousness. A stream of oblations and gifts flowed without intermission into the episcopal exchequer. Not on the dignitaries of the church only did this shower of riches descend; it fell in almost equal munificence on many of the lower clergy. It was the practice of the time for the matrons and widows of Rome to choose a cleric to act as their spiritual director. The office gave occasion to numerous scandals and gross abuses. The pagan Protestratus, the consul of the city, could afford to be jocular over the subject of clerical magnificence. “Make me bishop of Rome and I shah quickly make myself a Christian,” said he to Damasus, putting his satire into the pleasant form of a jest. Jerome, who was then in Rome in the midst of all this, was too much in earnest to give way to pleasantry. It was indignation, not mirth, with which the sight filled him. He denounces the salutations, the cozenings, the kissings, with which these reverend guides flavored their spiritual counsels. He describes, in terms so plain that we cannot here reproduce them, the devices to which the clergy had recourse to win the hearts and open the purses of their female devotees. He addresses his brother ecclesiastics now in earnest admonition, now in vehement invective, and now in keen sarcasm. The world aforetime honored them as poor, now the Church blushed to see them rich. “There are monks,” says Jerome, “richer now than when they lived in the world, and clerks which possess more under poor Christ than they did when they served under rich Beelzebub.” But grave admonition and cutting sarcasm were alike powerless. The rebukes of Jerome, instead of moderating the greed of the clergy, only drew down their hatred upon their reprover; and soon he found it prudent to withdraw from the metropolis, which he styles “Babylon,” and to seek again his cave at Bethlehem, where, no longer pained by the sight of the pride, ambition, and sensuality of Rome, he might pursue his studies in the quiet of the hills of Judah.

Even the Emperor Valentinian found it necessary, by public edict (A. D. 370), to restrain the wealth and avariciousness of the ecclesiastics. More striking proof there could not be of the extent to which this contagion had grown in the Church. The edict was addressed to Damasus, and was read in all the churches of Rome. The emperor prohibited, under certain penalties, all ecclesiastics from entering the houses of widows and orphans.

And, farther, it was made illegal for one of the ecclesiastical order to receive testamentary gift, legacy, or inheritance from those to whom he acted as spiritual director, or to whom he stood in religions relations only.

The money or property bequeathed by such illegal deeds was confiscated to the public treasury. This edict had respect to the clergy alone; and it is worthy of notice that it proceeded not from a pagan persecuting ruler, but from a Christian emperor. Its significance was emphasized by Jerome, when he pointed out that of all classes, not excepting the most sunken, this edict singled out and struck at the ecclesiastical order. “I am ashamed,” said he, “to speak it: but the priests of idols, stage- players, charioteers, and courtesans, are capable of legacies and inheritances; only clergymen and monks are disabled from inheriting. Neither do I complain of the law, but grieve to see that we should deserve it.” Approving the wisdom of the law, Jerome yet bewails its utter inefficiency. The avarice of the clergy baffled the vigilance of the emperor. The law stood, but methods were devised for circumventing and evading its enactment. Donations and deathbed bequests to ecclesiastics continued, only they reached them in a more circuitous way. They were made over to others, to be held by them in trust for clerical uses. This law was renewed by succeeding emperors in even stricter terms. Theodosius and Arcadius attempted to grapple by statute with this great evil, but the churchmen of the day were fertile in expedients, and the patriotic intentions of these legislators were completely frustrated. Legal enactments cannot reach the roots of moral maladies. The thirst for gold on the part of the clergy continued unabated; and with the increase of superstition, the disposition to load priests and monks with the good things which they professed to have renounced, grew stronger, baffling not only legal restraints but the sanctity of personal and family obligations. Eight centuries later the evil had come to such a head in England that the sovereigns of that country found it necessary to revive the spirit of the laws of Valentinian and Theodosius. These statutes came just in time to prevent the absorption of the whole landed property of England into the “Church,” and by consequence, just in time to save the people from inevitable serfdom, and the public order and liberties from utter destruction.

To return to Rome, where Ninian was still sojourning, the growth of ecclesiasticism and the decay of piety went on by equal stages. The citizens of the metropolis and of Italy generally were leading careless and luxurious lives. They had invented a devotion which could be slipped on or off at pleasure. A few moments were all that was needed to put them into a mood fit for the church or for the theater.

They passed with ease from the secular games to the religious festivals, for both ministered an equal excitement and an equal pleasure. They thought not of what was passing on the distant frontier. There the Scythian bands were mustering, prepared to take vengeance on the mistress of the world for centuries of wrong endured at her hands. The Romans deemed themselves far removed from danger under the aegis of an empire the prestige and power of which were a sufficient guarantee, they believed, against attack or overthrow. Rome was entering on a new and grander career. There awaited her in the future, victories which would throw into the shade those her generals had won in the past. She had linked her destinies with Christianity; and that would never perish. She had become the seat of a pure faith, and this, it was presumed, had imparted to her a new life and a higher intellectual vigor. Her bishop was filling the place of Caesar. Her city was consecrated by the labors and blood of martyrs.

Within her were the tombs of the apostles, and their protection would not be wanting to a city in which their ashes reposed. Bishops and Presbyters, as of old kings and ambassadors, were crowding to her gates. The churches East and West were beginning to recognize her as umpire and judge by submitting their quarrels and controversies to her decision. The barbarous nations were beginning to embrace her creed and submit to her sway; and surely her children in the faith would never come with armies to destroy her. If ever they should appear at the gates of Rome, it would be to bow at the footstool of her bishop, not to rifle her treasures and slay or carry captive her citizens. In all sides were prognostications of growing power and extending dominion. Deceived by these signs of outward grandeur, the Romans failed to note the cloud of barbarian war which was every day growing bigger and blacker in the northern horizon.

CHAPTER - NINIAN RETURNS TO BRITAIN- VISITS MARTIN OF TOURSBUILDS A CHURCH AT WHITHORN.

NINIAN returned to Britain before the storm burst. He stands once more amid the scenes of his youth. It is the silver tides of the Solway, not the yellow waves of the Tiber that flow past him: and over him is spread the hazy canopy which encircles the brown moorlands of his native land, not the vault of sapphire light which is hung above the vineterraced hills and marble cities of Italy. This brilliance of earth and air he left behind him when he crossed the Alps. But Ninian knows that there is a better light than that which kindles the landscapes of southern countries into glory; and the supreme wish of his heart is to diffuse that light over his native Britain, and carry it into every mud lint and wattlebuilt dwelling of his beloved Galloway; and if he shall succeed in this he will not envy Italy those natural splendors in which it basks, and in which it so far transcends the dusky plains of the land of his birth.

The statement may be accepted as true, that on his way back to Britain, Ninian visited Martin of Tours. This doctor was beyond doubt a man of capacious intellect, of large and bold conceptions, of resolute will, and, we may add, of fervent piety. His genius stamped itself not only upon his own age, but also upon the ages that came after him. He aimed at elevating society by exhibiting to it a new, a grand, and a striking model of selfdenial.

We must be permitted, however, to caution our readers when we speak of these great fathers, by asking them to bear in mind that their greatness was relative rather than absolute. The general level of knowledge and piety in those ages was low, and men like Martin towered, therefore, all the more conspicuously above their fellows. Their contemporaries were somewhat prone to worship what seemed so far above themselves. It behooves us at this day, in taking the real measure of these giants, as they seemed to the men of their own age, and still more to the chroniclers of succeeding centuries, to reflect that we view them through the mythical and magnifying clouds of the Middle Ages; and the effect of being seen through such a medium may be fairly judged of when we say that the biographer of Martin, Sulpicius Severus, relates of him, that he was made bishop of Tours (A. D. 371) for the benevolent act of raising two men from the dead. Christianity was then young, and it breathed its spirit of youthful enthusiasm into some of its disciples. We, at this day, walk by precedents; we inquire for the “old paths.” There was room in that day for bold, original, and untried experiments; and it was ill this way that Martin of Tours put forth his great powers, and sought to benefit his age.

After Jerome, Martin of Tours was the great patron and promoter of monachism in the West. It seemed to him the one only cure for the great evil of his age. He could not help contrasting the self- indulgent, easygoing lives of the Christians of the West with the austerities practiced by the anchorites, amid the sands of Nubia, or the rocks of Arabia Petraea; and he sought, by transplanting the monastic system into Gaul, to restore the moral tone of society. Martin would have better succeeded had he restored the purity of the church’s worship, and the rigor of her early discipline, the decline of which had occasioned the universal laxity and corruption he bewailed. Instead, he grafted on the church an order unknown to primitive times. He did not, however, transplant the monachism of the Thebaid into the West without very materially modifying it. In the East eremitsm had been an utterly idle thing. The hermit could not have benefited the world less, if instead of retiring to his cell he had gone to his grave. Eastern eremitism was even a more idle thing than the idleness Martin sought to cure by it. The monachism of Gaul was not recluse and solitary, but social and operative. The members of the new brotherhoods worked together in the way of diffusing Christianity, or of reviving it in the particular localities in which their branches or houses were placed. The days of monastic greed and dissoluteness were yet remote; and, meanwhile, these religious confraternities were in a measure “the hearth of a new national life.” In a society becoming every day more demoralized, they were, in some cases, missionary institutes; in others, schools of letters and philosophy; and in others, examples and models of agricultural industry, f193 -and not unfrequently, all three in one.

Martin, as a matter of course, could communicate his views to Ninian; and Ninian would as naturally defer to the great doctor then in the zenith of his fame. The missionary of Galloway became a convert to monachism as an agency for combating the corruption and dispelling the ignorance of the age. On these lines he would henceforward work on returning to his native land. Accordingly, before leaving Tours he arranged with Martin that masons should follow him into Scotland and build him a sanctuary in which he might celebrate worship with more solemnity than aforetime. Were there no workers in stone in Scotland? Doubtless there were, but they were unskilled in the architecture such edifices as Ninian now wanted for the worship of the Britons. A church of wattles had contented him aforetime but now he had been to Rome, and he must needs frame his worship somewhat more on an Italian model. He had at the feet of Pope Damasus; and though he had not changed the substance of his Christianity, he had changed somewhat the outward forms of its expression. His piety bore about it henceforward a Roman flavor. The experts arrived from Tours in due time, and the building was commenced. rose at Whithorn, on the north shore of the Solway, on rocky promontory jutting boldly out into the Irish Sea. was constructed of white stone; hence its name, Candida Casa, the white house. Martin of Tours died while it was in course of erection, and this fixes its date at the year A. D. 397. It was dedicated to Martin, and is believed to the first edifice of stone which was built for the worship of God in Scotland.

No better site could Ninian have selected as a basis from which to carry on his missionary labors. His field of service within the two walls. This was the ten, tory, of others in Britain, the most exposed to the tempests of invasion and war. Now it was the Picts and Scots descended upon it from the North to spoil the fair fields of the provincials; and now it was the Romans who hurried up from the South to drive back the plundering hordes and rescue the lives and properties of the helpless natives. It is hard to say whether the spiritless people suffered more from the ravaging Pict, or from their ally the Roman. When battle raged, Ninian could retire to his promontory, and there find sanctuary; and when the storm had passed, he would again come forth and resume his labors. For though the promontory of Galloway formed part of the debatable land, it was really outside of it, so far as concerned the incursions of plundering armies. It ran off to the south- west, stretching far into the tides of the Irish Channel, and was surrounded on all sides by the sea, save on the north where it joins the mainland. Its southern and western sides present a wall of precipitous cliffs, inaccessible to the invader, though they open in creeks in which a boat, pressed by the tempest, may find shelter. The remote and difficult character of the locality gave it exemption from the inroads of war, though the echoes of battle sounded almost continually in its solitudes. The Romans in their progress northward passed it by, seeing nothing in the lonely woodclad projection to make them diverge from their line of march; and when the mountaineers descended to rob the harvests and barnyards of its neighbors, they concluded, doubtless, that there was nothing in the barren promontory to reward a predatory visit, and so they, too, left it untouched.

It was lying in its native raggedness when Ninian took possession of it. It was covered with thick forests, amid which dwelt a tribe of native Britons, to which Ptolemy gives the name of Novantes, and which he tells us had built two towns, clearing, doubtless, a space in the forest, and constructing their houses with the timber which had grown on the site. The names of the two towns were Rerigonium Leucopibia. f196 Let us recall the scene as it presented itself to the eyes of the apostle of Galloway as he went and returned on his missionary tours. From the highest point of the promontory the view is extensive and imposing. At our feet are the waters of the Irish Channel laving the headland all round, save on the north where it expands into the mainland. Across a narrow reach of sea, looking distinct and near, are seen the mountains of the Isle of Man, rising before us out are identical in meaning, signifying Whitehouse. The first is of Greek derivation, the second Latin, and the third Saxon, from aern, house. of the ocean. Turning to the north the eye falls on the successive headlands of Galloway, ranged in line along the coast, and running onwards to near Portpatrick. Following their rugged tops, the eye rests on the hills of Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, and Dumfries shires, which are seen, ridge behind ridge, swelling up from the shores of the Solway.

The view to the east completes the picture. Spread out before us is the coast of Cumberland, with its nestling bays, and its white houses gleaming on the beach; and behind is the waving and picturesque line of its blue hills.

Such was the chosen retreat of Ninian. Its clothing was not so rich as in our day. It wore its natural wildness and ruggedness, but its varied panoramic beauty of ocean and bay, of headland and mountain, was the same then as now.

Here, then, we behold Ninian establishing his headquarters, and rounding a college or school of missionaries, or monks, as they now began to be called, though we must be careful not to confound them with the class that bore this name in after ages. That Ninian continued to labor in the cause of his country’s Christianity we cannot doubt, but the change his views had undergone was followed, doubtless, by some change in his modes of working His methods were now more histrionic. He made less use of oral instruction, and relied for results more on the celebration of church services, after the pattern he had seen abroad. He had gone to Rome to be better instructed in Holy Scripture. Was its meaning clearer to him now?

Did it open, as never before, and disclose hidden treasures of grace and wisdom? Or, rather, was there not now a shadow on the page of the Bible which dimmed its light, and made Ninian imagine that he was gazing into profounder depths when he was only looking through an obscurer medium? We much fear that so it was, in part, with the apostle of Galloway, after his return from Rome; for when popes and synods are accepted as the interpreter of the Bible, the Spirit, who is the divine interpreter, withdraws.

CHAPTER - EASTERN MONACHISM- SCOTCH MONACHISMARRANGEMENTS AND STUDIES IN CANDIDA CASA-NINIAN’S LAST LABORS AND DEATH.

NINIAN’ S visit to the metropolis of the Christian world had, doubtless, enlarged his knowledge of men, and made him more exactly informed as regards the actual condition of the churches of Italy and France. It gave him an opportunity of judging for himself how the current was setting at the center of ecclesiastical affairs, and afforded him, moreover, a near view of the men, the fame of whose names was then filling the Christian world.

He could not but feel how little successful he was in his search for the simplicity and humility of early days; and he must have noted the contrast, sufficiently striking, betwixt the lowliness in which Paul had preached the gospel in this same city, and the pomp in which Damasus, who claimed to be the apostle’s successor, filled the chair and performed the duties of the Roman pastorate. Nor could he fail to observe what an affluence of music and painting, of festival and ceremony, was required to keep. alive the piety of the age, and how successful the Christians of Rome were in combining pleasure with devotion. But what mainly drew his eye, doubtless, was the striking phase which was passing upon the Christian world. This was the rage for monachism. Speaking of the number of the monks of Egypt, Gibbon sarcastically remarks, that, posterity might repeat the saving, which had formerly been applied to the sacred animals of the same country, That in Egypt, it was less difficult to find a god than a man.” A colony of the disciples of Antony, the patriarch and leader of the Egyptian hermits, made their appearance at Rome a little before Ninian’s visit. Their savage appearance excited, at first, astonishment and horror, which, however, speedily passed into applause, and finally, into imitation.

Senators and matrons of rank, seized with the new enthusiasm, converted their palaces and villas into religious houses; and frequent monasteries were seated on the ruins of ancient temples, and in places still more unlikely. A monastery arose in the midst of the Roman forum. Its inmates were here environed by no desert, unless it were a moral and spiritual one.

The first preachers of the gospel were sent forth into lands teeming with inhabitants, and cities crowded with population. They were the salt of the world; and how else could they perform their function but by mingling with the mass of mankind? The new champions of Christianity and propagators of the Gospel retired to the desert and burying themselves in its solitudes, held converse with only the wild beasts of the wilderness. The good this accomplished for Christianity is at least not obvious. He who would disperse the darkness must hold aloft the light, not hide it under a bushel or bury it in the caves of the earth. He who would subdue the wickedness around him must grapple with it, not surrender the field to the enemy, by abandoning the combat. It is contact and conflict with evil that gives the finishing touch to the nobility and purity of human character. It is a low and selfish Christianity which has no higher aim than one’s own perfection and happiness. No higher aim had the thousands of eremites who peopled the deserts of the East. Monachism at the best was an intensely selfish and self- righteous thing. It exacted, moreover, from its rotaries, but little real self- denial. To sleep on a bed of stone, to make one’s daily meal on herbs, and to drink only the water of the spring, is no extraordinary stretch of selfmortification. We are not sure that the hermits that swarmed in the deserts of Syria and Egypt in Ninian’s day did not find a hazy pleasure in this sort of life. But to toil among the wretched and fallen; to put up with the thanklessness or the hatred of those whom one seeks to turn from the paths of ruin; or to endure the reproach and loss which fall to the lot of the man who stands up against the evil though fashionable courses of the world,- that is real mortification, and it is also the highest style of Christianity. The Christianity that began to be popular in Ninian’s day was not of this sort. It lacked bone and muscle; and instead of seeking to stem the tide of evil, it retired to sleep and dream in the sunny air and quiet solitudes of Egypt and Palestine, and left the great world to go its own way. It was said of old, “a living dog is better than a dead lion.” We may repeat the saying with reference to monachism. One single man girded for Christian service would have been worth more than all this multitude of somnolent monks.

It is creditable to Ninian, coming from Rome, where this folly was beginning to be held in repute as the perfection of the Christian life; and coming, too, from the feet of Martin of Tours, who was introducing this type of religious life into France, though, as we have already said, in a modified form; that he instituted in Galloway, not a monachism that would retire to its cell, and shut itself up from the people whose conversion it professed to seek, but a monachism that would walk abroad, traversing the length and breadth of Galloway, would mingle with the peasantry, visit them in their huts, and join itself to them as they pursued their labors, and by patient instruction and loving admonition, reclaim them to the “old paths” in which their fathers walked, but from which the sons had turned aside. The task before Ninian was not that of a first- planting of Christianity in Galloway. Earlier, if humbler, missionaries had kindled the light in this region two centuries before Candida Casa rose on the promotory of Whithorn. But much had gone and come since. The unsettling influences of war, the corrupting example of the Roman soldiery, and the difficulty attending access to the fountains of knowledge,- all worked together to the effect of well- nigh obliterating the traces of the early evangelization of the region, and left it nearly as dark as before the first missionary had set foot in it. The roots of Druidic paganism were still in the soil; the unsettled times favored an after- growth of this branch of heathenism, and the altars in the groves were being rebuilt; and with the old worship returned the old impieties. There followed a dismal train of evils- war, robbery, massacre, and famine. These occurrents sharply castigated but did not reform this degenerate race.

The work was too great for Ninian alone. It must be his first care to create a staff of fellow- laborers. The monastic institutions of the age suggested perhaps the first idea of the method by which he must proceed in gathering round him a fitting agency for his contemplated evangelization. His institution must not be exactly of the sort of those now rapidly rising all over the East: for what good would a colony of drowsy monks, entrenched on the promontory of Withorn, do the ignorant natives of Galloway? The monasteries of Martin in Gaul came nearer Ninian’s idea of the community he wished to found. But history presented him with a still better model. He knew that there had flourished in ancient Israel schools of the prophets, and that the youth trained in these seminaries did not waste their energies in the desert, or shirk the duties of manhood and citizenship under the mantle of the prophet. Nothing that appertained to the good of their nation was foreign to them. They mingled with their countrymen, courted hard service, studied the law this hour, and cultivated their plot of ground the next. They taught in the synagogue and in the school. They went their circuit, instructed, reproved, and warned, as occasion required, and thus kept alive the spirit of the nation, and delayed, though they could not avert, its ultimate degeneracy. It was to these ancient and sacred models that Ninian turned back in search of a pattern to work by. He would revive the “schools of the prophets” on British soil, only borrowing from the monasteries of Gaul such alterations and improvements as the country and the age made necessary, and grafting the new appliances on the ancient Hebrew institution.

We are able thus to picture the interior of Candida Casa. It is at once a church and a school; a house of prayer on Sabbath, a scene of catechetical instruction on week day. The youth that here assemble to Ninian belong probably to all three nations- the Britons, the Picts, and the Irish Scots.

They forget their nationality at the feet of their teacher. Their Christianity makes them one. They are fettered by no vow of obedience. They are voluntary recruits in the evangelical army; and the same devotion that led them to enroll in the corps makes them submissive to the commands of its general. Nevertheless there must needs be a prescribed order in the little community, and that rule all must walk by; otherwise the household will get into confusion, and the school of Candida Casa be broken up. Each portion of the day has its allotted task: there are hours for sleep, hours for devotion, hours for study, and hours for recreation or manual labor. Care is taken that there shall be no lost time. Horologes had not yet been invented, nevertheless the inmates of Candida Casa could measure the march of the hours with wonderful precision. They could read the movements of time on the great clock of nature. The first gleam of light on the summit of the mountains of the Isle of Man was the signal for quitting their dormitories, and commencing the labors of the day. The slow march of the western shadows up the sides of the Kirkcudbright hills announced in like manner the approach of the hour for retiring to rest. So did they pass the summer months. In winter they rose before the sun, and waited, in devotion or in meditation, the slow coming of the day. When its brief hours had sped, and evening had dropped her veil on the face of the Irish Sea, and wrapped in darkness the tops of the Cumberland and Dumfriesshire hills, they would prolong their labors far into the evening.

The main business of the monastery was study. Its inmates were there to prepare for public work, and all the arrangements of the institution were with a view to that great practical end. They had bidden adieu to the world, not, like the eastern anchorites, for ever, but only for a while, that they might come back to it better fitted for doing it service. They could serve it only by knowledge; and they made haste to learn, that they might the sooner begin their work of teaching. The hours were precious, for every day their countrymen were straying farther from the path of true knowledge and heavenly virtue.

What were the branches that occupied the attention of the youth in Ninian’s college, and what was the length of their curriculum? These are two points of great interest, but, unhappily, no history, and no tradition even, have transmitted to us any information respecting either of them. It is probable that the subjects studied were few, and that the curriculum was short. It was then “the day of small things” as regards philosophical and theological studies in Britain, and the two great universities of England might not be flattered were we to assign to Candida Casa the honor of being their pioneer. It is probable that the Scriptures, either in British Celtic, or in Latin, were the text book in this humble seminary. Jerome’s translation of the Bible, the vulgate, was already in existence; and the familiarity of the British youth with the Latin tongue, through their intercourse with the Romans, would enable them to peruse it. If the scholars of Ninian drew their theology from this fountain alone, that theology would be of crystalline purity.

What other source than the Scriptures had the first evangelists who planted the gospel on the ruins of Paganism? The works of Augustine, too, were finding their way into Britain, and it is possible that copies of some of the writings of this father may have enriched the monastery of Candida Casa.

Numerous other commentaries were beginning about this time to make their appearance, and were being circulated throughout the Christian world. Whether these expositions traveled so far as Britain we cannot say.

If they failed to reach our shores, their absence could be no cause of regret.

They only made dark what the Bible had made clear. They contained a large admixture of the Platonic philosophy. Their authors, not content with the natural and obvious meaning of Holy Writ, searched beneath its letter for allegorical and philosophic mysteries; and instead of discovering the “deep things” of revelation, brought to light only the follies of past ages.

They created a kind of twilight which was neither the Pagan night nor the Christian day. The Platonic philosophy was the upas tree of the Church of the fourth century.

After the Scriptures the oral instructions of Ninian were doubtless the staple of the educational means of the young evangelists who gathered round him. If to have trodden the path is one’s best qualification for being the guide of others, Ninian was well fitted to preside over the youth of Candida Casa. He had himself gone every step of the way along which he was to conduct them. He had sat in darkness, and knew how to lead them out of night. He had served on the mission- field on which their lives were to be passed. He had stood in the midst of the ignorance, the misery, and the vice of his countrymen, and he knew the patience needed to bear, and the courage needed to grapple with this host of evils. He knew how to equip those young soldiers for the battle into which he was about to send them forth. They must put on the armor of light; they must grasp more ethereal weapons than those with which earthly warriors fight. Moreover, he would fortify them beforehand with suitable counsels, so that they might not be taken by surprise when they encountered unexpected obstacles, nor grow faint- hearted when they saw that victory was not to be so easily or so speedily won as they had hoped. Having clothed them in armor suited to their warfare, that even of both dogmatic and pastoral theology, as then known, he gave them their staff, their water bottle, their woolen robe, along with his benediction, and sent them forth.

But what of the theology of Candida Casa? Was it a well of knowledge undefiled, or was it slightly tinctured with the Platonic philosophy? And what of the president of the institution? Was Ninian still the humble missionary, or was there now about him just a little affectation of prelatic arrogance and rule? It is possible that these things Ninian might have unconsciously brought with him Rome. Ecclesiastical history presents us with not a few melancholy examples of men who have passed from light into darkness, and from a first into a second and deeper darkness, believing all the while that they were advancing into clearer light. Many have thus fallen who have been altogether unconscious of declension. The change begins, not in the understanding, but in the heart- that fountain of life and death. The heart, beginning to disrelish the light, says, “It is not good.” The understanding hastens to support the choice of the heart, and says, “The light is not sufficient.” At this stage the man turns inward in search of a clearer light in himself than the light which has been stored up in the Sacred Volume. He finds it, as he believes, in his own consciousness or inward judgment concerning things. “This,” he says, “is a clearer and surer light than any without me. I feel it; it is within me; I am sure of it. It cannot mislead, and I will guide myself by it.” By this light within him, he tests the light without him. He inverts the true order; he puts the human above the divine; he makes his reason or the reason of other men, the church for instance, the judge and test of the light of revelation. From the moment that the exterior light, the one infallible guide is forsaken, the man rushes onward, with the full consent of heart and understanding, from error to error, never doubting that he is advancing from truth to truth. Each successive error is held to be a fresh discovery of truth; and each successive shade, as the darkness deepens around him, is welcomed as a new and brighter illumination. The delusion becomes at last complete, and the unhappy man, having wandered out of the way of understanding, “remains in the congregation of the dead.” These are the mementos and monuments- very solemn and terrible they are- that meet one’s gaze, at every short distance, on the highway of ecclesiastical history.

But we have no reason to think that the change Ninian’s views had undergone was of this sweeping character. What must have helped to retain him within the old landmarks was his devotion to the cause of his country’s evangelization. While sojourning at Rome, he could hardly avoid being somewhat influenced by the two rising forces of the time, the platonic philosophy and the old pagan ritual, but once back again in his own country, and face to face with its ignorance and vice, Ninian must have felt how short a way philosophic fancies and ritualistic ceremonies could go as a cure of these evils. If his understanding was somewhat dimmed, the fervor of his spirit was not extinguished. The fire within him continued to burn to the close of his life. We have no contemporary record of the reformation which Ninian accomplished, but there is enough of traditional and monumental proof to satisfy us that the change he effected was great, and that the school of prophets which he established at Whithorn continued, after he had gone to his grave, to be a center of evangelical Christianity which diffused its light all round over a very wide area.

Bede has credited Ninian with the conversion of southern Picts, and says, that the glory is his of spreading the light of Christianity over that whole region of Scotland, which extends from the Clyde to the foot of the Grampian mountains, and in this the monk of Jarrow has been followed by all who have written on the life and labors of the apostle of Galloway.

But we know that the venerable chronicler is mistaken when he makes Ninian the first apostle of the Picts. There were earlier missionaries in those parts than the men of Ninian’s school and time, though possibly Bede, in an unhistoric age, knew nothing of them, and was not unwilling to have it thought that the first light that shone on our country came from that city from which Ninian had just returned. There is undoubted historic evidence for the fact that the southern Picts were christianized two centuries before Ninian flourished. The Gospel outran the arms of Rome, and won victories where Rome reaped only defeats. The terrible persecutions that broke out, first, under Domitian, and finally, under Dioclesian, forced many of the Christians to flee beyond the Roman wall into Pictland, carrying with them the light of Christianity. Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian of Carthage, and Origen, the men of the widest information and highest character of their day, in clear and unmistakable words affirm the same thing. Our own Buchanan, who is better informed on these matters, and whose judgment is more reliable than many of our late writers on early Scottish affairs, tells us that Donald I. (about 204) not only himself professed the Christian religion with his family, but used his influence to extirpate the superstition of the Druids and plant Christian teachers throughout his dominions; though his efforts were greatly hindered by his wars with the Romans. In these good labors he was followed by King Crathilinth in the end of the same century, and by his successor Fincormachus (A. D. 312- 350), in whose reign “the Gospel did flourish in purity and in peace.” These facts violently conflict with the assertion that Ninian was the first planter of Christianity among the southern Picts. f200 But though we refuse to Ninian the honor of being the first to open the door of the evangelical kingdom to the Picts we willingly concede the probability of his having effected a much needed revival of religion in that nation. Matters had recently changed greatly for the worse in Pictland. The Romans contrived to sow dissension betwixt the Picts and their allies the Scots. The latter were forced to leave the country for a time and pass over into Ireland. The Romans seeing the Picts weakened by the departure of their companions in arms, fell upon them and exacted bloody satisfaction for the many raids they had made into the region beyond the wall. There followed confusion in both Church and State in Pictland. These were the sorrowful scenes that were passing before the eyes of Ninian. He knew well the miserable estate of his neighbors, and if he did not go in person, he would not fail to send missionaries from Candida Casa to reanimate the spirits of the people, borne down by so many calamities, and to restore the churches fallen into ruins amid the factions and wars which had overwhelmed the State. It is true that hardly could one bring with him a worse recommendation to the Picts than that he came from Rome, and bore a commission from thence. Rome they regarded as their mortal enemy; they were contending daily in battle against her as the invader of their country and the destroyer of their liberties, but affliction lay heavy upon them, and they listened to the missionaries of Ninian despite that their teaching mayhap bore about it a savor of Rome. So far we are able to concur in the statement of Bede, but not farther. Ninian revived but did not plant Christianity among the Picts.

We return to Candida Casa. On the promontory of Withorn, looking forth upon the Irish Sea, the waters of the Solway at its feet, rises the fair white temple which the orthodox masons of Martin of Tours had reared as the first stone- shrine of the evangelical faith in our land. It attracts the eye of the mariner as he pursues his voyage up the Irish Channel. “What building is this,” he asks, “so unlike all else in this land?” and he is told that “it is the church and school of the Apostle of Galloway.” He carries tidings of it to Ireland. From across the sea come the young Scots of Ulster to take their place with the British youth at the feet of Ninian; and from this Missionary Institute, as it would now be called, go forth trained evangelists to spread the light of the Gospel on both sides of the Irish Sea. There is a doubtful tradition that Ninian’s last years were passed in Ireland, and the 16th of September is sacred to his memory in the Irish calendar. We incline, notwithstanding, to think that the life and labors of Ninian closed where they had been begun. He died, it is said, in the year 432; but this too is only conjecture.

Ninian left behind him a name which continued to grow in brightness during the succeeding centuries. Other doctors arose to fill his place, now vacant, at the head of Candida Casa, and this establishment, under the name of the “Monastery of Rosnat,” continued for a considerable time in great repute as a school of Christian doctrine and a nursery of religious teachers. When we reflect how few are the recorded facts of Ninian’s life, it is truly marvelous to think with what a fullness and vividness of personality he has stood these fifteen centuries before the Scottish people.

He owes this distinct and life- like individuality, in part at least, to this immediate background. Behind him hangs the prehistoric darkness, and this sable curtain makes him stand out bold and full in the eyes of posterity. But there must have been in the man himself elements of power to make an impression so profound that it has never been effaced from that day to this.

His name is still a household word in his native Galloway. The tourist stumbles on churches and memorials bearing his name, north and south- in short, in almost every part of the country. His biographers of the Middle Ages have thrown around him the glory of miracle. Ninian had no need of this legendary apotheosis. His true miracle was his work accomplished in so dark an age and amongst so rude a people.

Of the last hours of Ninian we have no record, not even a tradition. That his end was peace we cannot doubt. Let us hope that as he neared his setting the dimness of Rome departed, and that the clear unclouded light of the Bible returned and once more shone around him. When the rumor spread that the missionary of Candida Casa was no more, we can well imagine there was mourning over all the land. From north and south devout disciples, who in former days had sat at his feet, assembled to carry their revered master to the tomb, sorrowing that they should hear his voice no more. Pict and Scot met with Briton around his grave, and the solemn act in which all three took part of committing his mortal remains to their last resting- place enabled them to realist their essential unity, and the oneness of their faith. He was buried probably on the scene of his labors, but no man knoweth of his sepulcher to this day.

We have seen in Ninian a missionary, but a great missionary; a little swayed, it may be, by the rising fashions of his age- monachism and ceremonialism- but his heart notwithstanding in the right place, and ardently set on the enlightenment of his countrymen and the redemption of his native land from the twin powers of ignorance and superstition- in short, one of the three mighties in Scotland that preceded the Reformation as Reformers of the church and champions of Christianity. These three were Ninian, Patrick, and Columba.

CHAPTER - PALLADIUS- PELAGIANISM- PALLADIUS SENT TO THE SCOTS IN IRELAND- REJECTED BY THEM. DIES AND IS BURIED AT FORDUN.

PALLADIUS is the next name in which the history of Scotland runs on. He comes upon the stage as Ninian is disappearing from it. The life and labors of Palladius are amongst the most obscure of which history has deigned to take notice. We see him dispatched from Rome on an important mission to the British Isles. We do not doubt that he arrives in due course on our shores, but when we search for his footsteps in our country, no traces can we discover of his presence, and the first monument on which we light of his having ever been in Scotland is his burial- place at Fordun, in the Mearns. So shadowy a personage could have no claim to appear on the historic page were it not that his name stands connected with a noted heresy which arose at that period, and which was beginning to corrupt the simplicity and dim the early glory of the Church in Britain.

There was then a great fermentation of ideas going on at the center of the religious world. It was now as when the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea, and creatures of new and monstrous shape lifted up their head above the waves. The appearance of Christianity had awakened into temporary life the worn- out energies of the Pagan world. The action and interaction of the Greek, the Roman, and the Asiatic mind, and the struggles of old and expiring systems to graft themselves on the living stock of Christianity, and so prolong their existence under a new name, gave birth to numerous and diverse theories in which the gospel was modified, or metamorphosed, or altogether subverted. Among other heresies which arose at this time was Pelagianism.

The exposition of Pelagianism belongs to the province of the theologian rather than to that of the historian. Nevertheless the purposes of history require that we offer a sketch of the general features and character of this system. It will show how the current is setting, and what are the thoughts that occupy the men of the age, if we attend a little to this matter.

Pelagianism has as its central proposition that man’s free- will is unimpaired, that no influence fetters or dominates his choice between good and evil, and that he has all the power he ever had, or needs to have, if he chooses to put it forth, to will and to do what is spiritually good. In short, that man now is as perfect as Adam was when he came from the hand of his Maker. One sees at a glance that this is a doctrine which cannot stand alone, and that it must needs be buttressed on all sides by cognate ideas and propositions. Pelagianism sweeps the whole field of theological science, and urgently demands that all within that field shall be brought into harmony with itself. In other words, it demands a remodeling of the gospel as a remedial scheme. It is clear that a perfect man can have known no fall, and it is just as clear that he can need no Savior. The authors of Pelagianism, therefore, felt themselves bound, in consistency, to deny the fall in the Scripture sense. They admitted, indeed, that Adam had sinned, but they maintained that I the consequences of his sin were restricted to himself, that he did not transmit either guilt or corruption to his posterity, and that though he died, death was not a penalty, but a natural evil. They farther taught, as a necessary consequence of their main and central doctrine, that every human being comes into the world with as pure a nature and as free a will as Adam possessed in innocence. So much for the back- look in the case of Pelagianism.

Turning to its forward aspect, it was seen to have attendant upon it, on this side also, certain very serious consequences. If man is not in bondage to guilt and corruption, where is the need of a Redeemer? If he retains his original perfection, where is the need of the Spirit to renew him? Is he not able to save himself? His understanding, as clear as Adam’s was, shows him what is good; his will, as unfettered as was that of the first man, enables him to choose good; he has but to walk straight on and he will without fail inherent life eternal. Such are the conclusions at the two extremes of this system, and no other conclusions could such a middle position have, logically and consistently, save these- a denial of the fall on the one side, and a denial of the atonement on the other. Pelagianism was Greek thought in a Christian dress. The essence of the theology of Pelagius was the ethical development of man, as the Greeks taught it, resulting at last in perfection, and attained simply by his own natural powers.

Pelagianism was the boldest defiance which had as yet been flung down to Christianity. Its rise marks a noted advance in the war, already organized, in which the Gospel was fated to struggle century after century for the redemption of the race. Pelagianism was a change of front in that war- in truth, a march back to old Paganism. All previous heresies had assailed Christianity from the Divine side, by impugning the rank or the nature or the person of its Author, the second person of the adorable Trinity. This assailed Christianity from the human side, by underrating the injury man sustained by the Fall, and representing his nature as so perfect as to need no renewal. The policy pursued till now had been to lower Deity; the plan henceforward followed was to elevate humanity- to lift up man into a position in which he should not need the aids of Divine grace. All subsequent heresies have grown out of the Pelagian root; they have been but modifications or developments of Pelagianism. But we touch the verge of polemical theology, and must again return within the lines of history.

The Romans quitted our country about the year 410. Their departure was followed by a century of darkness, and during that dreary period we are left without historic guides, or guides that we can follow, their facts are so few, and their fables are so many. It was during this century that the Pelagian heresy broke out. It arose at Rome, but it had for its author a native of Britain. That author was surnamed Morgan, a Welshman, it is supposed, who, after the manner of the times, had Latinized his name into Pelagius. f202 Pelagius had as his fellow- laborer in the work of propagating the heresy which bore his name an Irishman called Celleagh, or Kelly, who too, following the fashion of the day, dropped the Hibernian appellation, and assumed the more classic term of Coelestius. 2 Morgan and Kelly, or, as they chose now to be called, Pelagius and Coelestius, were the first two promoters of this heresy. Its real author, however, if we may believe Marius Mercator, was Rufinus, who having instilled his pernicious principles into the minds of his two disciples from the British Isles, sought through them to give currency to his opinions while he himself remained in the background.

Morgan and Kelly, or as we shall henceforth call them, Pelagius and Coelestius had arrived in Rome before the year 400. Sound in the faith, and blameless in life, they were honored with the friendship of the eminent men then living in the Metropolis of Christendom. Their reputation for talent and learning was great. Though Pelagius gave his name to the heresy he was not its chief propagator. This unenviable distinction fell to the lot of his coadjutor Coelestius. The latter was of noble birth; and being a man of acknowledged ability, and possessing, moreover, the quick wit of his countrymen, he stood forth at the head of the sect as its facile princeps, and the most successful expounder of its peculiar tenets. Jerome, who was at Rome when the Pelagian heresy broke out, opposed it with characteristic rigor. He could find no name to vent his contempt of it but the scathing epithet, “puls Scotorum,” that is, Scotch porridge, or Irish flummery.

Morgan, he compared to Pluto, and Kelly to his dog Cerberus, hinting at the same time that of these two infernal divinities the “dog” was better than the “king,” and the “master rather than the disciple of the heresiarch.”

Pelagius and Coelestius went forth to spread their doctrines at an hour dark with portents of coming evil. On the northern frontier of the empire was seen the avenging Goth; the twilight of the Middle Ages was already darkening the sky of the world; and more ominous still, the “shepherds” of the church slumbered at their post. Drowned in worldly pleasures, they gave no warning to the flocks over which it was their duty to watch. The two apostles of Pelagianism, finding the field free to them, divided Christendom betwixt them. Pelagius selected the East as his field of labor, Coelestius turned his steps toward the West. The latter crossing the sea announced to the famous churches of Africa that he had come to emancipate them from the slavery of the Fall, and the enfeebling doctrine of man’s inability to work out his own salvation. Augustine, who was then in the zenith of his influence, was not slow to enter the lists against the preacher of these novelties. In presence of such ,in antagonist, the defeat of Pelagius was assured from the first. He failed to plant Pelagianism in Africa, and retired crest- fallen from the field, where he expected he would be hailed as a deliverer, and over which he hoped to walk in triumph. The churches of Africa, even under the “Doctor of grace” might have no very clear or definite view of the great doctrine of justification by faith as what church had till Luther appeared; yet they were not prepared at the bidding of Coelestius, to accept a theology which made the history of the Fall little better than a fable, and the doctrine of original sin an ensnaring and enfeebling delusion.

Pelagius had better success in the East. There Pelagianism was already in the air. This unhappy state of things was mainly owing to the teaching of Origen whose views were somewhat akin to those of Pelagius. The bishop of Jerusalem welcomed the heresiarch, and in that very city where the great Sacrifice had been offered did a doctrine find favor which made its offering to be in reality without purpose. In a synod held soon after at Diospolis, the ancient Lydda, the tenets of Pelagius were pronounced orthodox. This judgment, however, was reversed by Pope Innocent. Condemned by Innocent, Pelagius was next acquitted by his successor Zosimus. But again Zosimus, at the expostulation of Augustine, retracted his own judgment, and finally condemned Pelagius as a heresiarch. So little theological discernment had the synods and bishops of those days. The Pelagian champion was bandied from council to pope, and from one pope to another; he was branded with heresy this hour; he was absolved and pronounced orthodox the next, and finally the brand was reimposed by the same hands which had taken it off. Ecclesiastics who show so little confidence in their own judgment have verily small claim to demand the absolute submission of ours. Meanwhile the heresy which was being approved and condemned by turns at Rome, was spreading in the countries north of the Alps. It had infected the churches of France, and in that country synods were convoked to examine and pass sentence upon it.

Traveling still farther northward Pelagianism reached at last the land which had given birth to its alleged authors. It was tainting the theology and rending the unity of the British and Scottish churches (A. D. 420), and this it is that now brings Palladius upon the scene. The miter of the See of Rome- for as yet the tiara had not been achieved- now sat on the brow of Celestine. This pope and his advisers could not but see that the opinions of Pelagius, whether true or false, menaced the unity and stability of the Roman See, and they resolved to discountenance the new tenets.

Accordingly Pope Celestine dispatched Palladius to check the ravages which Pelagianism was making in the churches of the British Isles, and having recovered them to orthodoxy, he empowered him to place himself at their head, at least at the head of one of them, as its “first bishop.” Thus we read in the Chronicle of Prosper of Aquitane, under the year A. D. 431: “Palladius is ordained by Pope Celestine, and sent as the first bishop to the Scots believing in Christ. The man and his mission bulk so little in after years that we might take Prosper’s words as the record of a myth, were it not that his statement is repeated and confirmed by both Bede and Baronius.

This matter throws a clear light upon the ecclesiastical state of our nation in the centuries that preceded the coming,” of Palladius, and, therefore, we shall study a little fullness in our historic treatment of it. All the historians of the time agree that Palladius was sent as their first bishop to the Scots.

Bede, as we have said, testifies to the fact, and Cardinal Baronius does so not less explicitly. The words of the latter are, “All men agree that this nation [the Scots] had Palladius their first bishop from Pope Celestine.” f205 The same authority again says, “From this you will know how to refute those who allege that Sedulius, the Christian poet, whom Pope Gelasius so much extols, had for his master Hildebert, the Archbishop of the Scots, for seeing even Sedulius himself lived in the time of Theodosius the emperor, how could he have had for his teacher Hildebert archbishop of the Scots, seeing there was no archbishop yet ordained in Scotland, and Palladius is without debate affirmed to have been the first bishop of that nation.” f206 The same thing is asserted in a fragment of the “Life of St. Kentigern.” “The venerable Palladius,” says the writer, “the first bishop of the Scoti, who was sent, in the year of the incarnation, 430, by Pope Celestine, as the first bishop to the Scots, who believed.” To the same purpose the Magdeburg Centuriators, who, speaking of the fifth century, say, “Nor were the Scots without a church at this time, seeing Palladius was sent as their first bishop from Celestine.” With this agree all the ancient writers of our church, had teachers of the faith and dispensers of the own country. “Before the coming of Palladius,” says Fordun, “the Scots, following the custom of the primitive sacraments who were only Presbyters or monks.” And John Major says, “The Scots were instructed in the faith by priests and monks without bishops.” The current of testimony to this fact runs on unbroken to our own day, but to trace it farther were to heap up a superfluous abundance of proof. It does not in the least alter the meaning, or weaken the force of these statements on whichever side of the Irish Sea we shall place the Scots. Till Palladius appeared amongst them a diocesan bishop was unknown to them; and as he was the first, so he was the last bishop to the Scots for a long while; for, as we shall see in the sequel, many centuries passed away before a second appeared.

We come no to the vexed question, To what country was Palladius missioned? We have no hesitation in replying that the Scotland to which Palladius was sent was the Scotland of the fifth century, the century in which Prosper of Aquitane wrote. The Scotland of the fifth century was Ireland. The Scotland of our duty was known in that age is Albania. For, as Archbishop Usher remarks, “there cannot be produced from the whole of the first eleven centuries a single writer who has called Albania by the name of Scotia. “ And “whoever,” says Dr. Todd, “reads the works of Bede and Adamnan will not need to be informed that even in their times, Scotia meant no country but Ireland, and Scoti no people but the inhabitants of Ireland.” It must be born in mind, however, that Ireland was not their original seat, but their temporary halting- place on their road their final home. We have already shown that the Scots had a common origin with the other races which descended from the regions of the north, with life new and fresh, and ideas unfettered by the past, to begin the modern times on broader foundations than the Greeks and Romans which preceded them.

We take it as a matter about which there can hardly be any doubt that Palladius was sent to Ireland. There were at that time no Scots in Scotland.

Pioneer bands of Scots had before this crossed the channel and planted themselves in the mountains of Argyleshire. They were welcomed by the Picts for the sake of the aid they brought them in the forays and raids in which they indulged. Pict and Scot fought beneath the same banner against their enemies the Romans, or joined their arms not unfrequently in a common onslaught on their neighbors the British, on the other side of the Roman wall. But, as we have already said, the Romans, a little before this time, had succeeded in sowing dissension betwixt the Scots and the Picts, and the result was that the Scots had found it convenient to quit Scotland, had been driven out of it by force. The mission of Palladius took place in the interval betwixt their expulsion and return, and this makes it undoubted that the Scots, to whom Celestine, in A. D. 431, sent Palladius as their “first bishop,” were those in Ireland, the Scotia of that day. Prosper says, in almost so many words, that Ireland was the scene of Palladius mission, when he writes in another place, “Having ordained a bishop to the Scots, while he (Celestine) studied to preserve Roman Britain Catholic, he made the barbarian island christian.” The words of Prosper may indeed be held to apply to the northern and barbarian part of Scotland in contradistinction to its southern and Roman portion, but it is much more probable that he has Ireland in his eye.

On the showing of Prosper then, the Scots in Ireland were already believers in Christ. We do not see what should hinder Ireland receiving the gospel as early as England and. Scotland. It is nearer to Spain, where Christianity was planted in the apostles’ days, than Scotland is. The navigation across from Cape Finisterre, the ancient Promontorium Celticum, to the south of Ireland is direct and short. The coasts and harbors of Ireland, Tacitus informs us, were better known in his day to the foreign merchant than those of Britain. Traders from Carthage and North Africa and even from the more distant Levant frequently visited them. If the merchant could find his way to that shore why not also the herald of the Gospel? That Ireland should remain unchristianized till the fifth century is incredible, we might say impossible. From Ireland came Coelestius, bringing with him from thence a pure faith to have it corrupted at Rome. From that same country came yet a greater theologian and scholar, Sedulius, that is Shiel. Sedulius, who was a contemporary of Coelestius, was amongst the most accomplished divines of his day: he was an elegant Latin poet, and a zealous opponent of Pelagianism. “Sedulius the presbyter,” says Trithemius, “was a Scot.” He speaks of himself as “Sedulius Scotigena,” that is, a born Scot. Having left the Scotia of that day, Ireland to wit, he traveled over France and other countries, and ultimately settled in Italy, where his rich erudition and his beautiful genius gained him many admirers.

His hymns, Dr. Lanigan informs us, were often used in the church services, and among his prose writings is a commentary on all the epistles of Paul, entitled “Collectaneum of Sedulius, a Scot of Ireland, “ a work not unworthy of taking its place in any Protestant theological library of our own day. A church that could send forth a man so richly endowed with the gifts of genius and learning must have held no mean place among her sisters of the fifth century.

But the Scots of Ireland had opened their ears to the syren song of Pelagianism, and were being lured into a path which promises much at its beginning, but is bitterness in the cold, that of one’s saving one’s self.

Celestine seeing the danger to which they were exposed, sent Palladius from Rome to lead them back into the old ways. So has it been assumed, though no ancient writer says that Palladius came to combat Pelagianism.

The pontiff had another end in view, though less openly avowed, that of breaking the Scots to the curb of a Roman bridle and preventing them escaping from under his crozier in days to come. The Scots probably divined the real purpose underlying Celestine’s affected concern, and hence the cold reception they appear to have given his missionary. From the time that Palladius sets out on his journey, we obtain only dim and shadowy glimpses of him. No bishop or church salutes him by the way. We pursue the dubious steps of this “first bishop” of the Scots through the fragmentary notices of successive chroniclers, only to that he is enveloped in the haze of legend, and we are conscious of a touch of pity for one who had come so far, and encountered such a diversity of fortune, in quest of a miter, at least a diocese, which after all he failed to find. The earliest Irish traditions indicate Wicklow as the place where Palladius landed. From this point he turned his steps inland. But again we lose all track of him. He makes no converts that we can discover. He finds no flock over which to exercise his episcopal authority, or flock willing to receive him as their shepherd. The authorities that follow tell us in plain words that the mission of Palladius was a failure, and that the same year that saw him arrive in Ireland saw him take his departure from it. Those of the inhabitants of that country who were already Christians declined his authority, being jealous probably of his having come to impose a foreign yoke upon them, axed a yoke which above all others they detested, and with good reason. From Rome the Scots had received nothing but wars and persecutions. They dreaded her missionaries not less than her soldiers. It had cost them much suffering to resist the imposition of her political yoke, and they were in no humor to bow their necks to her ecclesiastical tyranny. Rome they had come to regard as the symbol of intrigue, of force, and of boundless ambition. Her bishops, they knew, were following in the footsteps of her emperors, and were seeking to grasp the universal government of the church and to become the one bishop of the ecclesiastical world as Caesar had been the one king of the political. Such were the feelings with which the Scots of that day were inspired towards Rome. It is probable that Palladius had not been an hour in their company till he discovered how the matter stood, and saw, that in no character could he approach the Scots which would be less welcome or more ungracious than that of missionary or bishop of the Pope. Like the raven from the ark, he goes forth from the foot of the pontifical chair, but he returns not, and the explanation of the matter lies in the point we have stated- Scotch mistrust of Romish envoys.

As regards those of the inhabitants of Ireland who were still Pagan- that is, the descendants of the race that were found occupying the country when the Scots arrived in it, “God hindered him “- that is Palladius- says the first Life of St. Patrick, “for neither did those fierce and savage men receive his doctrine readily, neither did he himself wish to spend time in a land not his own, but returning hence to him that sent him, having begun his passage the first tide, little of his journey being accomplished, he died in the territory of the Britons.” f215 The Scots declined to receive him, and Pagan Ireland he did not evangelize. Palladius was not the man to do this. He lacked the faith and courage requisite for such a work. Pope Celestine could elevate him to the dignity of the miter, he could not crown him with the higher glory of converting Ireland. The old Druidic priesthood of that island was still powerful- more powerful than in either England or Scotland. The Romans were great iconoclasts when Druidic oaks or altars were concerned; and hence a vast demolition of stone circles and sacred groves in Britain and Caledonia; but the Romans had never been in Ireland; and as a consequence, nor axe nor hammer had been lifted up upon the consecrated trees, and the sacrificial dolmens of that land, unless it might be that of some iconoclastic Scot, and so the priesthood of Ireland retained much of its ancient influence and power. This made the task of Christianizing pagan Ireland a formidable one indeed. When Palladius shook off the dust from his feet against the Scots who had rejected him as their bishop, as manifestly they did, he might have turned to the pagan Irish, but his heart failed him, when he thought how hazardous the enterprise would prove.

The Anakim of Irish paganism were “fierce and savage,” says an old chronicler Muirchu, “and ready to wash out in blood any affront that might be offered to their Druidic divinities,” and so Palladius leaving “those few sheep in the wilderness,” he had been appointed to feed, turned and fled from a land which, doubtless, it repented him he ever had entered. “He crossed the sea,” says the authority quoted above, “and ended his days in the territories of the Britons.” In the second and fifth Life of St. Patrick, a similar account is given of tire mission of Palladius, with this exception, that “the territories of the Britons” is changed into “the territories of the Picts.” The precise spot in the territories of tire Picts where the illfated deputy of Pope Celestine died is fixed by another ancient biographer.

The Scholia on Fiacc’s Hymn, given by Colgan in his collection of the Lives of St. Patrick, speaking of Palladius, says, “he was not well received by the people, but was forced to go round the coast of Ireland towards the north, until, driven by a great tempest, he reached the extreme part of Moidhaidh towards the south, where he founded the Church of Fordun, and Pledi is his name there.” In harmony with these statements is a still later biography, of date probably about A. D. 900. This writer makes the death of Palladius take place at Fordun in Scotland, and adds a few particulars not found in the other accounts. He says, that Celestine, when he missioned him to Ireland, committed to him the relics of “the blessed Peter and Paul,” that he disembarked at Leinster, that he was withstood by a chief named Garrchon, that, nevertheless, he founded three churches, depositing in them the bones of the apostles, and certain books which the pope had given him, and that, “after a short time, Palladius died on the plain of Girgin, in a place which is called Forddun.” Girgin or Maghgherginn was the Irish name for the Mearns. One of his biographers, not unwilling, perhaps, to put honor on one who had borne so many humiliations, states that Palladius “received the crown of martyrdom” at Fordun. Even this compensation was denied him in all probability, for the southern Picts of that age were Christian. The mission of Palladius is a tangled though interesting story. It is to the Scots in Ireland that he is sent, and yet it is among the Picts of the Mearns only that we find any monuments of him. If Palladius set sail from Ireland to go to Rome, his first port of disembarkation would be Wales, or the north of France.

Instead, we find hint arriving on the eastern coast of Scotland. This was to go a long way out of his road if he wished to return to the eternal city.

There must have been some reason for this. Palladius would naturally be in no hurry to appear before his master. He had nothing to tell Pope Celestine, save that his mission had failed: that the Scots whom he hoped to bring to his apostolic feet had repulsed him as their bishop, and that the pagan Irish still clung to their idols. Palladius might think it well to let another carry these unwelcome tidings to Rome. Meanwhile, as some of his biographers hint, expelled by Garrchon, he set out on a cruise northward in the hope of finding in some other part of Ireland a tribe who might bid him welcome, and whose conversion to the Christian faith might extend the glory of the Papal See, and redeem his own mission from total failure. Nor is there any improbability in the statement that while so engaged, he was caught in one of the Atlantic storms, and carried through the Pentland Firth, and along the coast of Scotland southward, and, finally, landed on the shore of Kincardineshire. Whatever the causes that operated, and these it is now impossible to discover, there can be no doubt that Palladius, after a year’s wanderings, pursued now by fierce Irish chieftans, and now by the tempests of the sky, took up his abode at Fordun in the Mearns; and there, near the spot where, according to one theory, Galgacus made that noble stand which checked the northward advance of the Romans, did the first bishop sent form Rome to the Scots, also terminate his career, and spend his last years, most probably, in peace. The village of Fordun is situated on a spur of the Grampians, looking sweetly down on the well cultivated plains of the Mearns, doubtless less fertile then than now. This is the spot which gave rest to the “traveled feet” of Palladius. All the ancient chroniclers say so with one voice. And if the singular unanimity of their testimony needed farther corroboration we have it in the chain of evidence, partly monumental, and partly traditionary, that comes down from Palladius’ day to our own. In the churchyard of Fordun is a little house of most ancient aspect. Its thick wall, low roof, and small window, through which the sun struggles with no great success to dispel the darkness of the interior, make it liker cave than sanctuary. This edifice, which one can well believe was reared in the days of Palladius, enjoys the traditionary reputation of being his chapel. Here, it is said, the image of the “saint” was kept, which crowds of pilgrims from the most distant parts of Scotland, in after years, came to worship. So does Camerarius affirm on the authority of Polydore Virgil. And so, too, does Baronius. He tells us that “they highly honored the relics of Palladius which are buried in the Mearns, a province of Scotland.” In the corner of the manse garden is a well that goes by the name of Paldy’s well. And the market held yearly at Fordun is styled Paldy’s fair, or, in the vulgar speech of the district, “Paddy Fair.” This last is the strongest proof of all that a church and festival in honor of Palladius once existed here. The festivals of the Roman church were always followed by a fair, and sometimes they were festival and fair in one. At the Reformation they were abolished in their religious character of a festival, but retained in their secular form of a fair, and so here the festival is dropped, but the fair is continued. f221 One other circumstance in the story of Palladius must we notice. It is surely touching to reflect that in the spot to which the “first bishop to the Scots” came to breath his last, one of the earliest and noblest of our reformers first saw the light. Lying sweetly in the valley beneath Fordun, about a mile off, is Pittarrow. Fordun and Pittarrow! The first gave a grave to Palladius; the second a cradle to George Wishart.

CHAPTER - PATRICK- BIRTH, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTHCARRIED OFF BY PIRATES.

THE scene that next opens takes us to a land which a narrow sea parts from the country to which, at this day, the name of Scotland is exclusively applied. But though with drawn for a time from the soil of Scotland, it does not follow that we are withdrawn from the history of Scotland. On the contrary, it is only now that we feel that we are fairly launched on the great stream of our nation’s annals, and may follow without pause its everenlarging volume. The events on which we now enter, though episodical, are the pregnant germs of the great future that is to succeed. They determine that Scotland shall be a puissance in the world; not a puissance in arms like Rome, but a moral puissance, to go before the nations, and open to them the paths of knowledge and liberty.

This new and greater commencement in our country’s career had its birth in the soul of one man. Let us mark its beginning, so obscure as to be scarce perceptible. We behold one of Scotland’s soils, borne away to captivity in Ireland, and there, amid the miseries and wretchedness, bodily and mental, attendant on the lot of a slave, brought to the true knowledge of God, and prepared as an instrument for spreading the light of the Gospel in the land to which he was carried captive. From Ireland that light is to be carried back to Scotland where it is to shine in a splendor that shall far surpass the feeble illumination of all previous evangelizations. The time was drawing near when the dim and expiring light of Candida Casa was to be superseded by the brighter lamp of Iona. Between the setting of the one and the rising of the other, comes in the episode of Succat. This youth, whose story rises from romance to the dignity and grandeur of history, forms the connecting link between the two Scotlands, the Scotland on the hither side of the Irish Channel, and the Scotland on this, its eastern shore.

In his life and labors the history of the two countries runs on for some time in the same channel- in the same person.

In entering on the story of Succat, whom our readers will more familiarly recognize under his later and better known appellative of St. Patrick, we feel that we tread on ground more stable .and reliable than that which we had to traverse when relating the earlier evangelization of Whithorn. St.

Patrick, it is true, has not wholly escaped the fate which has usually befallen early and distinguished missionaries at the hands of their monkish chroniclers. Unable to perceive or to appreciate his true grandeur as a humble preacher of the Gospel, some of his biographers have striven to invest him with the fictitious glory of a miracle- worker.

No monk of the Middle Ages could have imagined such a life as Patrick’s.

These scribes deemed it beneath their heroes to perform, or their pens to record, whatever did not rise to the rank of prodigy. Humility, self- denial, deeds of unaffected piety and benevolence, discredited rather than authenticated one’s claim to saintship. Boastful professions and acts of fantastic and sanctimonious virtue were readier passports to monkish renown than lives which had no glory save that of sterling and unostentatious goodness.

We can trace the gradual gathering of the miraculous halo around Patrick on the pages of his successive chroniclers. His miracles are made to begin before he himself had seen the light. His story grows in marvel and prodigy as it proceeds. Each successive narrator must needs bring a fresh miracle to exalt the greatness of his hero and the wonder of his readers. Probus in the tenth century outdoes in this respect all who had gone before him, and Jocelin, in the twelfth, outrun Probus as far as Probus had outrun his predecessors. Last of all comes O’Sullivan in the seventeenth century, and he carries off the palm from every previous writer of the “Life of St.

Patrick.” The man who comes after O’Sullivan may well despair, for surely nothing more foolish or more monstrous was ever imagined by monk than what this writer has related of Patrick. So rises this stupendous structure which lacks but one thing- foundation.

But happily it is easier in the present instance than in most cases of a similar kind, to separate what is false, and to be put aside, from what is true, and, therefore, to be retained. Before the monks had any opportunity of disfiguring the great evangelist by encircling him with a cloud of legends, Patrick himself had told the story of his life, and with such marked individuality, with such truth to Christian experience, and with such perfect accordance to the age and the circumstances, that we are irresistibly led to the conclusion that the life before us is a real life, and must have been lived, it could not have been invented. The confessions here poured forth could come from no heart but a heart burdened with a sense of guilt; and the sorrows here disclosed with so simple yet so touching a pathos, authenticate themselves as real not ideal. They are the experiences of the soul, not the creations of the imagination.

Succat- the first name of the man who has taken his permanent place in history as Patrick or St. Patrick- was born on the banks of the Clyde. So much is certain, but the exact spot it is now impossible to determine. The present towns of Hamilton and Dumbarton compete for the honor of his birthplace; near one of the two must he have first seen the light. He himself says in his “Confessins,” “My father was of the village of ‘Bonaven Taberniae’, near to which he had a villa, where I was made captive.” In the dialect of the Celtic known as the ancient British, Bonaven signifies “the mouth of the Aven,” and the added “Taberniae,” or place of Tabernacles, indicates, doubtless, the district in which the village of Bonaven was situated. This favors the claims of Hamilton, and leads us to seek in Avondale, on the banks of the torrent that gives its name to the dale, and near the point where it falls into the Clyde, the birth- place of the future apostle. And what strengthens the probability that here may be the spot where Patrick was born, is the fact, that some greatly defaced remains show that the Romans had a station here; and as the legionaries had but recently quitted Britain, the erections they had vacated may be presumed to have been comparatively entire and fresh in Patrick’s time. This would decide the point, if the evidence stood alone, and did not conflict with other and varying testimony.

Fiacc, one of the curliest and most reliable of his biographers, tells us that Patrick “was born at Nemthur,” and that his first name, among his own tribes, was Succat. Nemthur signifies in Irish the lofty rock, and the reference undoubtedly is to All- Cluid, or Rock of the Clyde, the rock that so grandly guards the entrance of that river, now known as the Rock of Dumbarton, which then formed the capital of the British Kingdom of Strathclyde. Here too are the yet unobliterated vestiges of a Roman encampment, and one of much greater importance than any on the southern shore, for here did the Roman wall which extended betwixt the Firths of Forth and Clyde terminate. This must have led to the creation of a town, with suburban villas, and Roman municipal privileges, such as we know were enjoyed by the community in which the ancestors of Patrick lived.

Tradition, moreover, has put its finger on the spot, by planting here “KilPatrick,” that is Patrick’s Church. Here then, on the northern shore, where the Roman had left his mark in the buildings, in the cultivations, in the manners, and in the language of the people, are we inclined to place the birth of one who has left a yet deeper mark on Scotland, and one infinitely more beneficent, than any left by Roman.

There is yet greater uncertainty as regards the year in which Patrick was born. We can hope only to approximate the time of his birth: and we think we are not far from the truth when we place it towards the end of the fourth century. It was au evil age. Apostolic times were fading from the memory, and apostolic examples vanishing from the sight of men. An incipient night was darkening the skies of countries which had been the first to brighten beneath the rays of Christianity. There was need that the simple gospel should anew exhibit itself to the world in the life and labors of some man of apostolic character, if the decline setting in was to be arrested. Tokens are not wanting that it is to be so. For now as the shades gather in the south, the light of a new day is seen to suffuse the skies of the north.

Patrick was descended of a family which, for two generations at least, had publicly professed the gospel. His father, Calpurnius, was a deacon, and his grandfather, Potitus, a presbyter in the Christian Church. He was well born, as the phrase is, seeing his father held the rank of “decurio;” that is, was a member of the council of magistracy in a Roman provincial town. These facts we have under Patrick’s own hand. In his autobiography, to which we have referred above, written but a little while before his death, and known as “Patrick’s Confessions,” he says, “I, Patrick, a sinner, had for my father, Calpurnius, a deacon, and for my grandfather, Potitus, a presbyter.” We should like to know what sort of woman his mother was, seeing mothers not unfrequently live over again in their sons. Patrick nowhere mentions his mother, save under the general term of “parents.” But judging from the robust and unselfish qualities of the son, we are inclined to infer that tradition speaks truth when it describes “Conchessa,” the mother of the future apostle, as a woman of talent, who began early to instruct her son in divine things, and to instill into his heart the fear of that God whom his father and grandfather had served.

Here, then, on the banks of the Clyde, within sight, if not under the very shadow of the rock of Dumbarton, was placed the cradle of that child, which, in after life, was to win, though not by arms, so many glorious triumphs. The region is one of varied loveliness and sublimity. It is conspicuous, in these respects, in a land justly famed for its many fine combinations of beauty and grandeur. As the young Succat grew in years, his mind would open to the charms of the region in which he lived. His young eye would mark with growing interest the varying aspects of nature, now gay, now solemn; and his ardent soul would daily draw deeper and richer enjoyment from the scenes amid which his home was placed. He saw the ebbing and flowing of the river on whose banks he played, and doubtless mused at times on those mighty unseen forces that now compelled its waves to advance, and now to retreat. He saw the whitewinged ships going and coming on its bosom: he saw the fisherman launching his net into its stream, and again drawing it ashore laden with the finny treasures of the deep. He beheld the silver morning coming up in the east, and the day departing behind the vermilion- tinted tops of the mountains in the west. He saw the seasons revolve. Spring, with her soft breath, wooing the primroses and the butter- cups from their abodes in the earth to bedeck mountain and vale; autumn spotting the woods with gold; and winter bringing up her black clouds, in marshaled battalions, from the western sea. These ever- changing aspects of nature would awaken their fitting responses in the soul of the youth. His heart would expand this hour with joy as the hills and shores around him lay clad in light; and now again, as mountain and vale were wrapt in gloom, or troubled at the thunder’s voice, there would pass over his soul, as over the sky, darkness and terror.

Thus he would begin to feel how awful was that which lived and thought within him! How vast the range of its capacity for happiness or for suffering: and how solemn a matter it is to live.

So passed the boyhood of the future apostle of Ireland. As he advanced in years, his nature expanded and grew richer in generous impulses and emotions. All those exquisite sensibilities which fill the bosom in tire fresh dawn of manhood were now stirring within him. Every day opened to him a new source of enjoyment, because everyday widened the range of his capacity to enjoy. A sudden thrill of pleasure would, at times, shoot through his being from objects he had been wont to pass without once suspecting the many springs of happiness that lay hidden in them.

Relationships were growing sweeter, friendships more tender. In a word, all nature and life seemed to teem with satisfactions and pleasures, endless in number, and infinitely varied in character. He has only to open his heart and enjoy. But this was a happiness which was born of earth, and like all that springs of the earth, it returns to the earth again. Young Succat’s sensibilities were quickened, but his conscience slept.

The youth had not opened his heart to the instructions of home. The loving counsels of a mother, and the weightier admonitions of a father, had fallen upon a mind preoccupied with the delights of sense, and the joys of friendship: his cup seemed full. He knew not that the soul which is the man cannot. feed on such pleasures as these, nor live by them. It must drink of living waters, or suffer inappeasable thirst. His relations to God- that matter of everlasting moment- had awakened in him no thought, and, occasioned him no concern. The age, we have said, was a degenerate one.

The lamp of Candida Casa burned low and dim. The teachers that emanated from it possessed but little authority; their reproofs were but little heeded. The truth which is tire light was dying out from the knowledge of men; and the feeble Christianity that remained in the kingdom and church of Strathclyde, in which, Succat’s grandfather had ministered, was becoming infected with Pagan ideas and Druidic rites. A few more decades, it seemed, and the Christian sanctuaries of Caledonia would give place to the groves of the Druid, or the returning altars of the Roman.

The handful of missionaries sent forth from the school of Ninian, could but ill cope with the growing apostasy. They were but poorly equipped for the warfare in which they were engaged. There needed one man of commanding eloquence and burning zeal to redeem the age from its formalism and impiety. But no such man arose: and so the stream of corruption continued to roll on; and among those who were engulfed in its flood, and drifted down in its current, was the grandson of the Presbyter Potitus. Succat, with all his fine sympathies, and all his enjoyment of nature and life, lived without God, and he would so have lived to the end of his days, had not He who had “chosen him from the womb, and ordained him a prophet to the nations,” had mercy upon him. Sudden as the lightning, and from a cloud as black as that from which the lightning darts its fires, came the mercy that rescued him when ready to perish. One day a little fleet of strange ships suddenly made their appearance in the Clyde. They held on their course up the lovely frith till past the rock of Dumbarton. Whence, and on what errand bound, were these strange ill- omened vessels? They were piratical craft from across the Irish ocean, and they were here on the shores of the Clyde on one of those marauding expeditions which were then but too common, and which the narrow sea and the open navigable firth made it so easy to carry out. Succat, with others, was at play on the banks of the stream, and they remained watching the new arrivals, not suspecting the danger that lurked under their apparently innocent and peaceful movements. Quietly the robber crew drew their barks close in to the land. In a few minutes the bandits, rushing through the water, leaped on shore. The inhabitants of Bonavon had no time to rally in their own defense. Before they were well aware of the presence of the piratical band in their river, the invaders had surrounded them, and some hundreds of the inhabitants of the district were made captive.

Presbyters who admonished us for our salvation.” What a crushing blow to the youth! When it fell on Succat he had reached that season of life when every day and almost every hour brings with it a new joy. And if the present was full of enjoyment, the years to come were big with the promise of a still richer happiness. Standing at the portals of manhood and casting his glance forward, Succat could see the future advancing towards him dressed in golden light, and bringing with it unnumbered honors and joys.

For such must life be, passed amid conditions like his- a region so picturesque, companions so pleasant, a station securing respect, and dispositions so well fitted to win and to reciprocate love. But while he gazed on the radiant vision it was gone. In its room had come instant and dismal blackness. A whirlwind had caught him up, and cruelly severing all the tender tics that bound him to home and friends, and giving him time for not even one brief parting adieu, it bore him away and cast him violently on a foreign shore, amid a barbarous and heathen people.

Bending to their oars the sea- robbers swept swiftly down the Clyde. The meadows and feathery knolls that so finely border the river at that part of its banks where Succat’s youth had been passed, are soon lost to his sight.

Dumbarton rock, with its cleft top, is left behind. The grander masses of Cowal, not yet the dwelling of the Irish Scots, and the alpine peaks of Arran, are passed in succession, and sink out of view. The galleys with their wretched freight are now on the open sea, making straight for the opposite shore, where we see them arriving. The lot of the exile is bitter at the best, but to have slavery added to exile is to have the cup of bitterness overflow. This cup Succat was doomed to drink to the very dregs in the new country to which we see him carried. And without stop or pause did his misery begin. The pirates who had borne him across the sea, had no sooner landed him on the Irish shore, than forthwith they proceeded to untie his cords, and expose him for inspection to the crowd which had hastened to the beach on the arrival of the galleys, not failing, doubtless, to call attention to his wellshaped form, and sinewy limbs, and other points which alone are held to be of value in such markets as that in which Succat was now put up for sale. The son of Calpurnius was a goodly person, and soon found a purchaser. His captors sold him to a chieftain in those parts, at what price we do not know.

We can imagine Succat eagerly scanning the face of the man whose slave he had now become, if haply he might read there some promise of alleviation in his hard fate. But we can well believe that in the rough voice and stern unpitying eye of this heathen chieftain, he failed to discern any grounds of hope that his lot would be less dismal than his worst fears had painted it. His apprehensions were realized to the full when he learned his fixture employment: truly a vile and degrading one, for the son of Calpurnius. Henceforth he is to occupy himself in tending his master’s herds of cattle and droves of swine in the mountains of Antrim.

CHAPTER - PATRICK’S CAPTIVITY IN IRELAND- HIS CONSCIENCE AWAKENS- PROLONGED ANGUISH.

HISTORY is no mere register of events. It is the reverent study of the working of a Hand that is profoundly hidden, and yet, at times, most manifestly revealed. To the man of understanding there is no earthly actor so real and palpable as is that veiled agent, who stands behind the curtain, and whose steps we hear in the fall of empires and the revolutions of the world. We have come in our narrative to one of those sudden shiftings of the scenes that betoken the presence and the hand of this great Ruler. A stronger evangelization than any that can ever proceed from Candida Casa, is about to be summoned into existence to keep alive the elements of truth and the seeds of liberty during those ages of darkness and bondage that are yet pass over Europe. We have already seen the first act of the new drama.

It opens in a very commonplace way indeed, and is altogether out of keeping, we should say, with the grandeur of the consequences which are to spring out of it. A band of Irish piratcs make their dcsccnt on the Scottish shore, and sweep off into captivity a wretched crowd of men and women. Amongst the miserable captives, kidnapped, and carried across the sea, is a youth who is destined to originate a movement which will change the face of northern Europe.

Neither the pirate crew, nor the agonized crowd that filled their galleys, knew who was in the same bottom with themselves, or how momentous their expedition was to prove. Meanwhile, Patrick is lost in the mass of sufferers around him. No one observes or pities the anguish so vividly depicted on the face of the youth. No one seeks to assuage the bitterness of his grief by addressing to him a few words of sympathy or whispering grounds of hope. Unhelped and unpitied he bears his great burden alone.

Of his many companions in woe, each was too much absorbed in the sense of his own miserable lot to have a thought to bestow on the misery of those who were his partners in this calamity. Through dim eyes, and with a heart ready to break, Succat sees the Irish shore rise before him, and as the ship that carries him touches the land, he rouses himself from his stupor to see what change of fortune this new evolution in the tragedy, which still seems like a terrible dream, will bring him.

The timing of this event was not the least remarkable circumstance about it. Had this calamity befallen Succat at an earlier, or at a later, period of his life, and not just when it did, it would have been resultless. As a chastisement for the sins and follies of his past career it might have profited, but it would not have availed as a discipline for the lifework before him. This was the main thing in the purpose of Him from whom this affliction came. Patrick’s life- trial befell him at that stage of his existence, which of all others is the most critical in the career of a human being. He was now sixteen years of age. It is at this age that the passions rouse themselves with sudden, and sometimes overmastering force. It is at this time of life accordingly that the character of the man in most cases becomes definitely fixed for good or for evil. He stands at the parting of the ways, and the road then chosen is that which in all ordinary cases he will pursue to the end.

This, which is the law that rules human life and character in so many instances, is operative with special and almost uniform force in the case of those who have been born in a pious home, and reared, as Patrick was, amid the instructions and observances of religion. If they overpass the age at which Patrick had now arrived without experiencing that engrafting of the soul with a divine principle, which the Bible calls “being born again,” they have missed the “new life,” and very probably missed it for ever. At all events the likelihood of their ever attaining it grows less and less from that time forward. Habit, day by day, shuts the heart up yet more closely; the sleep of the conscience grows ever the deeper, and the man goes on his way content with such light and pleasure as the world can give him, and never sees the radiance of a new dawn, nor ever tastes the joys of a higher existence.

On this fateful brink stood Patrick when this whirlwind, with force so boisterous, yet so merciful, caught him up, and carried him away from the midst of enjoyments, where he would have fallen asleep to awake no more, and placed him where he could find neither rest nor happiness, because around him was only naked desolation. Not a moment too soon, if we rightly interpret Patrick’s own statement, was the grasp of this strong hand laid upon him. He tells us, in his “Confessions,” that at this period of his life he fell into a grave fault. What that fault was, neither he himself, nor any of his biographers, have informed us, or even dropped a hint from which we might infer its nature or form. A rather grave offense, we are inclined to think, it must have been, seeing it was remembered, and brought up against him long years after when he was about to cater into the sacred office. His foot had well- nigh slipped, and it would have slipped outright, and he would have fallen to rise no more, had not this strong hand been put forth at this critical moment to hold him up. He would have cast off the form of religion, which was all as yet that he possessed, and would have drifted with the current, and gone the same downward road which was being trodden by so many of his fellow- countrymen of the kingdom of Strathclyde. His ardor of soul, and his resoluteness of purpose would have made him a ringleader in the apostate band; and to show how completely he had emancipated himself from the traditions of his youth, and the faiths of his ancestors, he would have taken his scat in the chair of the scorner, and mocked at that which he had been taught in his early home to hold in reverence. It is the way of all who forsake “the guide of their youth.”

We must follow Patrick across the sea, and see him sent to a new schoolseeing the first had been a failure- and put under a new instructor, one who knows how to open the ear, and not the ear only but the heart also. Patrick was not to be like the teachers of the age, and so was not reared in the same school with them. He must be stern, bold, original, but the sickly and sentimental influences of Ninian’s school would never have made him such.

Rougher forces and hotter fires must melt and mold him. Kidnapped, forced down into the hold with a crowd of captives, tossed on the waters of the channel, and when landed on the Irish shore, sold to a heathen chieftain, and sent into the wilds of Antrim: such beginning had Patrick’s new training. In this solitude his mother’s voice will speak again, and Patrick will listen now. His heart will open at last, but first it must be broken. The iron will pierce his soul. It is Adversity’s school in which he sits, where the discipline is stern, but the lessons are of infinite price, and are urged with a persuasive force which makes it impossible not to understand them, and once understood and mastered, impossible ever to forget them. From this school have come forth many of the world’s wisest instructors, and greatest benefactors. Let us mark the youth as we behold him at the feet, not of doctor or pope, but at the feet of a far greater Instructress.

On the mountain’s side, day after day all the year through, tending his master’s herds of cattle and swine, sits Patrick the son of Calpurnius the Scottish deacon. Was ever metamorphosis so complete or so sudden?

Yesterday the cherished son of a Roman magistrate, today a slave and a swine herd. Pinched with hunger, covered with rags, soaked with the summer’s rain, bitten by the winter’s frost, or blinded by its drifts, he is the very picture which the parable had drawn so long before of that prodigal who was sent into the fields to keep swine, and would fain have filled his belly with the husks on which the animals he tended fed. No one would have recognized in the youth that sat there with famished cheek and mournful eye, the tenderly- nurtured and well- favored son of Calpurnius, or would have remembered in his hollow and sepulchral voice the cheerful tones that had so often rung out on the banks of the Clyde, and awakened the echoes of that stately rock that graces its shores. Only through this death, and through a death yet more profound, a death within of all past feelings, hopes, and joys, could Patrick pass into a new life. When he awoke from the stupefaction into which the blow, doubtless, had thrown him, he opened his eyes upon blank misery. But he opened them on something besides. He opened them on his former self! on his former life!

How different did that life now appear from what it had seemed, under the hues in which it had clothed itself in his eyes but a few years, a few days before! The colorings in which a self- righteous pride had dressed it, and the less warm but equally delusive lights thrown over it latterly by an incipient skepticism, or a dreary formalism, were now completely dispelled, and it stood out before him as it really was, an unlovable, a ghastly, a guilty thing. Sitting here, the Irish Channel between him and his home, his past severed from his present by this great dividing stroke, he could calmly look at his life as if it were no part of himself, as if it had a subsistence of its own, and he could pronounce a dispassionate verdict upon it. It was a life to be wept over. But when again it refused to sever itself from himself, when it cleaved to him with all its blackness, and he felt that it was and ever would be his, it evoked more than tears; it awakened within him horror. A father’s prayers and a mother’s counsels, despised and scorned, all rose up before him in the deep silence in which he sat, amid the desolate hills, tending his flock under the gathering blasts. He shuddered as the remembrance came back upon him. He had bowed the knee at the family devotions but he had not prayed; he had but mocked that Omniscient One he professed to worship. These hypocrisies gave him no concern at the time, he was hardly sensible of them, but they lay heavy upon his conscience now. He thought of them, and a darker cloud came between him and the heavens than that which was coming up from the western sea to let its rain or hail on the hills amid which he fed his swine. Still darker remembrances came crowding upon him, and he trembled and shook yet more violently. When preachers came from Candida Casa to warn him and his companions of their evil way, and entreat them to turn from it and live, had he not flouted and jeered, or given tacit encouragement to those that did so? Though the grandson of a Christian presbyter, he had helped to swell that chorus of derision and defiance with which these preachers of repentance, and dolorous prophets of evil were sent back to those from whom they came? The retrospect of his hardihood filled him with amazement and horror. Thus, as one’s image looks forth from the mirror on one’s self, so did Patrick’s life look forth from the past upon Patrick in all its vileness and blackness and horror.

But deeper still was his eye made to pierce. It turned inward, and questioned his spirit what manner of life it had led in its thoughts and purposes. He was shown a chamber where lodged greater abominations than any that had deformed him outwardly. His heart, which he believed to be so good, he saw to be full of envy, hatred, malice, revenge, pride, lust, hypocrisy, idolatry, and all the things that defile a man. How was this fountain of evil to be cured, for if not cured, it would send forth even blacker streams in time to come than any that had flowed from it in the past. Where was the salt which, cast into its bitter waters, would sweeten them? This hidden iniquity, this ulcer in the soul, pained and appalled him even more than all the transgressions which had deformed him outwardly and given scandal to others.

Such was the odious picture that rose before the captive youth as he sat ruminating amid the mountains of Antrim; his past life, rather than his vile charge or his heathen master, before him. Such had been and till his life was cleansed at its source, such would be the son of Calpurnius the Christian deacon. He stood aghast at this veritable image of himself. He felt that he was viler than the vilest of those animals that he tended. “Oh, my sin! my sill!” we hear him cry! What shall I do? Whither shall I flee? It is no imaginary scene that we are describing. “In that strange land,” says he, speaking of this period of conviction and agony, “the Lord imparted to me the feeling of my belief and hardness of heart, so that I should call my sins to remembrance though late, and turn with all my heart to God.” And again he says, “Before the Lord humbled me, I was even as a stone lying in the depth of the mire, and He who is able came and lifted me up, and not only lifted me up but set me on the top of the wall;” that is, made him a corner stone in the spiritual building, for we cannot fail to perceive here an allusion to the beautiful emblem of Scripture which presents the church as a living temple built up living stones.

While this sore struggle was going on, the outward discomforts of his lot, we may well believe, gave Patrick but little concern. The violence of the stoma that raged made him heedless of the blasts that beat upon him as he watched his herds in the woods and amongst the mountains. The black cloud would gather and burst, and pass away, and the stricken youth, absorbed in the thought of his distant home and his past life, and sick in soul, would hardly be conscious of the pelting rain, or the driving snow, or the bitter furious gusts that were shaking the oaks and fir- trees around him. The hail and lightning of the clouds were drowned in the voice of those mightier thunders which came rolling out of a higher sky, and seemed to his car to emphasize the award of that Book which says, “the wages of sin is death.”

The youth had been overtaken by a series of calamities. which singly were overwhelming, and taken together, were worse than death. He had been torn from his home and his native land, he had been robbed of his liberty, he had been sold to a heathen lord, and now he had no prospect before him save that of passing the years of his wretched life in a vile employment. The blow was the more crushing, that all these miseries had fallen upon him in the same moment, and had come without warning. And yet they were to Patrick but as the trifles of a day compared with those darker sorrows which gathered round his soul. These last were the ripened fruits of the evil seed his own hand had sowed. In enduring them he had not even this small consolation that he was suffering by the unrighteous will and cruel power of another. Nor would they pass with the fleeting years of the present life, for death, which is the termination of all other evils, would only deliver him up to an endless misery. This terrible thought was ever present to him as he sat alone amid the desolate hills; it was his companion in the silence of the night, and in the nearly equally profound silence of the day. It was here that his miseries culminated. he was entirely in his master’s power, who might for the slightest offense, unrestrained by any feeling of humanity, and without question from any one, doom him to die. But wherein was this master to be feared, compared with that Greater Master, who could kill body and soul? He had lost his liberty, but what was the loss of liberty to one who was in imminent jeopardy of losing himself and that for ever?

Sleep forsook him, he tells us. He would lie awake for nights on end. From his lowly couch he watched the stars as they passed, each in its appointed place, and at its appointed time, across the sky. He feared as he looked up at them. Their ever- burning fires and silent majestic march suggested that endless duration of which their vast cycles are but as a hand- breadth. And when he thought of that Eye which was looking down upon him from above these orbs, with a light to which theirs was but as darkness, where, he asked, “shall I find hiding from it? When these orbs shall have paled their fires in an eternal night, this Eye will still be looking down upon me.”

Where was there night or darkness in all the universe deep enough in which to bury himself, and be unseen for ever?

He now broke out into moanings. When his grief ceased to be dumb, its paroxysm somewhat abated. These moanings were the first feeble inarticulate cries for pardon. Then followed words of supplication. He stood up, like the publican in the temple, and striking upon his breast, cried, “God be merciful to Patrick, the sinner.” It was now seen that the lessons of his early home had not been in vain. The seed then sown in his mind appeared to have perished: yet no; though late, that seed began to spring up and bear fruit. Without the knowledge imparted by these lessons, Patrick would never have seen his sin, and without the sight of his sin his conscience would have continued to sleep, or if peradventure awakened, not knowing the way of pardon, he would have been driven to despair. he had heard, on the Sabbath evenings in his Scottish home, that the “King of Heaven is a merciful King.” And now, in that far land, and far away from that father from whose lips the once- forgotten but now remembered words had fallen, a sea of trouble all round him, nor help nor pity on earth, he turned his gaze upwards, and said, “I will arise, and go to my Father.”

He rose, he tells us, before the dawn to pray.

How long Patrick continued under this distress of soul before finding peace, we do not know. It is probable that his conflict lasted with more or less severity for some years. It is not the wont of that Physician who had undertaken his case to dismiss His patients till He has perfected their cure, and made them altogether and completely whole. And there were special reasons in Patrick’s case why this severe but most merciful discipline should be prolonged. Patrick’s sore had to be probed to the very bottom, and he had to know the malignity of the malady under which he labored, and the strength with which it holds captive its unhappy victims, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of those many others, to whom he was in after years to act the part of physician. He was to be a Healer of nations.

But how could he acquire the insight and tenderness necessary for the right discharge of his grand function- the reverse of the warrior’s, who goes forth to destroy- and know how deep these wounds go into the soul, and how they rankle there, and be able in his treatment of them to combine perfect sympathy with perfect fidelity” merciful and faithful” like the great Physician- if he had not himself first been wounded, and made to bleedaye, bleed unto death, well nigh- before being sent forth to be a healer of others?

CHAPTER - PATRICK FINDS PEACE- UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR FUTURE WORKESCAPES FROM IRELAND, Now, at last, a hand was put forth to heal this sorely wounded man. As he lay on the mountains of Antrim, stricken down by an unseen but mighty power, with no friend by his side to pour oil into his wounds and bind up his sores, there passed by One who turned and looked with compassion upon him, and stretching out His hand lifted him out of the “mire,” to use his own phrase, in which he lay. “HE WHO ALONE IS ABLE” are the few simple but emphatic words in which Patrick records this mighty transaction, “He who alone is able came, and in His mercy lifted me up.”

This deliverer, Patrick saw, had Himself been wounded, and so deeply wounded that He still retained the marks of His sufferings. Hence His sympathy, which would not let Him pass by and leave Patrick to die of his hurt. drawing near to him, and showing him the wounds in His own hands and feet, and the scar deep graven in His side, He said to Patrick, “Fear not: I bore your sins on the bitter tree. All is forgiven you. Be of good cheer.”

These words were not altogether new to the son of Calpurnius. He had heard them, or their equivalents, in his early home. they had been woven into his father’s prayers, and they had received yet more formal statement in his mother’s counsels and instructions. But he had failed to grasp their momentous import. The salvation which they announced was to him a matter of no immediate concern. What mattered it to Patrick whether this salvation were an out- and- out gift, or whether it were wages to be worked for and earned like other wages? What good would this’ birthright do him? So thought he then, but it was otherwise now. He saw that without this salvation he was lost, body and soul, for ever. When, therefore, these truths, so commonplace and meaningless before, were heard again, he felt as if the finger of a man’s hand had come forth and written them before him in characters of light, and written them specially for him. The veil dropped. He saw that the words were “eternal life,” not an abstract dogma announced for the world’s assent, but an actual gift held out for his own acceptance. He knew now what the wounds in the hands and feet of that compassionate One who had passed by him signified. He saw that they had been borne for him; and so he cast himself into His arms.

A wonderful joy sprang up in his soul. In that moment the bolt of his dungeon was drawn back, and Patrick walked forth into liberty- into a new life.

The future apostle of Ireland, and through Ireland of Northern Europe, now clearly saw that it was not his own tears, though copious and bitter, nor his cries, though frequent and loud, which had opened the door of that dark prison in which he had so long sat. It was God’s sovereign blessed hand which had flung back that ponderous portal, and brought him forth.

There he would have been sitting still had not that gracious One passed by him, and shown him His wounds. He had been traveling on the great broad road which the bulk of Christendom was to pursue in the ages that were to come, that even of self- inflicted penance and self- righteous performances.

But journey as he might he came no nearer the light; around him was still the darkness, within him was still the horror. He had not caught even a glimmer of the dawn. But when the sight of the Wounded One was vouchsafed to him it was as when the sun rises on the earth. He saw himself already at the gates of that Peace which he had begun to despair of ever finding. Thus was Patrick made to know the better and the worse road, that standing, as he did, at that eventful epoch, when Christendom was parting into two companies, and going to the right and to the left, he might lift up his voice and warn all, that of these two paths, the beginnings he close together, but their endings are wide apart, even as death and destruction are from life. From tending his master’s swine, on the bleak hillside, amid the stormy blasts, Patrick was taken to teach this great lesson at this formative epoch to the men of Christendom, having himself first been taught it. But not just yet was he to enter on his work.

As aforetime, weighed down by the great sorrow that lay upon him, he felt not the pangs of hunger, nor regarded the rude buffering of the tempest, so now, the new- born joy, that filled his soul, made him equally insensible to the physical discomforts and sufferings to which he was still subjected. he was still the slave, if not of his first master, of some other chieftain into whose hands he had passed; for he speaks of having served four masters; and the vile drudgery of the swine- herd continued to occupy him from day to day; but, no longer sad at heart, the hills which aforetime had re- echoed his complainings now became vocal with his joy. It was his wont to rise while it was yet dark, that he might renew his song of praise. It mattered not though the earth was clad in snow and the heavens were black with storm, he “prevented the dawning,” not now to utter the cry of anguish, but to sing “songs of deliverance.” He tells us in his “Confession” that he rose, long before daylight, and in all weathers, in snowy, in frost, in rain, that he might have time for prayer; and he suffered no inconvenience therefrom, “for,” says he, “the spirit of God was warm in me.”

Patrick had now received his first great preparation for his future work. His conversion was arranged, as we have seen, in all its circumstances, so as to teach him a great lesson; and in the light of that lesson he continued to walk all his life after. It brought out in clear, bold relief, the freeness and sovereignty of God’s grace. No priest was near to co- operate with his mystic rites in effecting his conversion, no friend was present to assist him with his prayers. Patrick was alone in the midst of the pagan darkness; yet there We behold him undergoing that great change which Rome professes to work by her sacraments, and which, she tells us, cannot be effected without them. How manifest was it in this case that the “new creature” Was formed solely by the Spirit working by the instrumentality of the truth- the truth heard when young, and recalled to the memory- to the entire exclusion of all the appliances of ecclesiasticism. What a rebuke to that Sacramentalism which was in that age rising in the church, and which continued to develop till at last it supplanted within the Roman pale the Gospel. And what a lesson did his conversion read to him, that “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.” When Patrick presented himself at his Heavenly Father’s door, it was in no robe woven on his own loom, it was in no garment borrowed or bought from priest; he came in his rags- the rags Of his corrupt nature and sinful life, and begged for admittance. Was he told that in this beggarly attire he could not be admitted? was he bidden go back to the Church, and when she had purified him by her rites and penances, return and be received? No; the moment he presented himself, his Father ran and fell upon the neck of the wretched and ragged man, and embraced him and kissed him. Thus did Patrick exemplify, first of all, in his own person, the sovereignty of grace, and the power of the truth, before being sent forth to preach the Gospel to others. It was here that he learned his theology. He had no Bible by him, but its truths, taught him when young, revived in his memory, and he read them all over again by the new light which had dawned in his soul. They were more palpable and clear than when he had read them on the actual page, for now they were written not with pen and ink, they were graven by the Spirit on the tablets Of his heart. A theology so pure he could not have learned in any school of Christendom at that day. Patrick drew his theology from the original and unpolluted fountains: the Word of God, and the Spirit; the same at which the apostles had drunk on the day of Pentecost. It was the theology of the early church, which in God’s providence is ever renewed when a Divine revival is to visit the world.

Patrick was now replenished with the gift of Divine knowledge, but he was not immediately let go from bondage, and sent forth to begin his great mission. He needed to have his experience deepened, and his knowledge enlarged. If meditation and solitude be the nurse of genius, and if they feed the springs of bold conception and daring effort, not less do they nourish that sublimer genius which prompts to the loftier enterprises of the Christian, and sustain at the proper pitch the faculties necessary for their successful accomplishment. The young convert, led by the ardor of his zeal, is sometimes tempted to rush into the field of public labor, his powers still immature. Patrick was preserved from this error, and it was essential he should, for the work before him was to be done not at a heat, but by the patient and persistent forth- putting of fully ripened powers. He lacked, as yet, many subordinate qualifications essential to success in his future mission. He must learn the dialect of the people to whom he was afterwards to proclaim the Gospel. He must study their dispositions and know how access was to be obtained to their hearts. He must observe their social habits, their political arrangements, and above all, he must ponder their deep spiritual misery, and mark the cords with which idolatry had bound them, that at a future day he might undo that heavy yoke, and lead them forth into the same liberty into which a divine and gracious hand had conducted himself. Therefore was he still retained in this land, a slave to his master- though the sting had now been taken out of that slavery, and though occupied in ignoble tasks, learning all the while noble lessons.

Six years had passed away, and now Patrick had fulfilled his appointed term of captivity. Dreams of escape from Ireland began to visit him by night. In his sleep he heard the voice saying to him, “Youth, thou fastest well, soon thou shalt go to thy native home- lo! thy ship is ready.” Was it wonderful that the exile should see in his sleep his fatherland, and imagine himself there again, or on the way thither? Without seeing miracle or vision in this, as many of his biographers have done, we see none the less the mysterious touches which the Divine Hand sometimes gives to the human spirit when “deep sleep falleth on man.” Patrick knew that his captivity was wholly of Divine ordering; he knew also that it had gained its end; and this bego in him an ardent hope that now its close was not distant, and by night this hope returned clothed in the vivid drapery of an accomplished reality.

The dream gave him spirit and courage to flee.

How far the youth had to travel, or at what point of the coast he arrived, it is impossible to determine amid the dubious and conflicting accounts of his biographers. The “Book of Armagh” makes Patrick journey two hundred miles; the “Scholiast on Fiacc” reduces the distance to sixty, others say a hundred. Lanigan makes him arrive at Bantry Bay. On reaching the shore he saw, as it had seemed in his dream, a ship lying close in land. The sight awoke within him a yet more intense desire to be free. Lifting up his voice, he besought the captain to take him on board. A refusal, much to his chagrin, was the reply sent back. An emaciated figure, clad in the garb of a swine- herd, the plight doubtless in which Patrick presented himself, was not an attractive Object, nor one fitted to make the ship’s- crew wish to have any nearer acquaintance with him. The ship was on the point of departing without him. He sent up a prayer to heaven- the cry of a heart that panted for deliverance and fully confided in God. It was the act of an instant. The voice was again heard speaking to him from the ship, and telling him that the captain was willing to take him on board.

The sail spread and the anchor lifted, we behold the vessel, with Patrick on board, ploughing her way through the waters of the Irish Channel, her prow turned in the direction of the British shore. The youth was fleeing from slavery, with all its humiliating and brutalizing adjuncts, but with a heart full of thankfulness that the day had ever dawned upon him- the darkest he had ever seen, as he then deemed it; the happiest of all his life, he now saw it to be, when the robber- band, darting from their galleys, and enclosing the quiet village of Bonaven, made him their prey, and carried him captive to that land whose mountains, in his flight from it, were now sinking behind him. By losing his liberty he had found it, but he had found a better liberty than the liberty he lost. Nor- though the crime reflected disgrace not only on its perpetrators, but also on the country to which they belonged- had Ireland cause to reflect, save with profoundest gratitude, as the sequel will show, on an occurrence which had brought this youth to its shore, and retained him so many years a bondsman.

CHAPTER - PATRICK AGAIN AT HOME- THOUGHTS OF IRELANDDREAMS- RESOLVES TO DEVOTE HIMSELF TO ITS CONVERSION.

PATRICK, the apostle of Ireland, is not the first, nor is he by any means the last, whose career illustrates that great law, according to which the highest eminence in the church - by which we mean not the eminence of official rank, but the higher eminence of spiritual gifts and holy service- is attainable only through great and often prolonged struggles of soul. It is amid these throes and agonies that great souls are born. And then to inward distress and conflict there are added at times, as in the case before us, bitter outward humiliations and sufferings. The most cursory survey of the past justifies our remark. Whether we turn to the names that shine as stars in the firmament of Holy Writ, or to those that illumine the page of ecclesiastical history, we trace in all of them the operation of a law which was established in ancient times, and is as changeless and imperative as that other of which it was said that it “altereth not.”

And it must needs be so. The brilliant prizes which wait on ambition; the sweets of power, the grandeur which surrounds rank and wealth, the luster which superior knowledge sheds on its possessor,- all these are potent enough to nerve the man whose aim- a high one, we admit- it is to maintain his country’s rights, or enlarge the boundaries of science. But it is far otherwise with those whose aim is the eternal good of their fellow- men.

The very passions and ambitions which need to be fostered in the former class of workers, must be purged out in the latter. It is in the furnace- a furnace heated seven- fold- that this purgation is effected. It is in its fires that the dross of selfishness is consumed; the nobler but still earthly passion of ambition conquered; the love of human applause, which so enfeebles and vitiates, extinguished, and the soul becomes able to yield an entire devotion to truth, and to exercise an absolute dependence on God. The man now stands clothed in a moral strength which is proof alike against the seductions of error and the terrors of power.

Moses by one rash act threw back the deliverance of his people, and drove himself into exile. Many a bitter hour did the thought cause him in the solitudes of Midian. But we behold the hot impulsive spirit which he brought with him from Egypt, and which had been fostered doubtless by the flatteries of the court, toning down day by day amid these silent wastes, till of all the sons of men, Moses is now the meekest, and he who had fallen before the provocation of a moment was able to bear the burden of a whole nation for forty years. It was in a prison among felons, whose fetters he wore, that Joseph acquired that knowledge of human nature and matured those great faculties which afterwards displayed in the government of Egypt. Luther entered the convent at Erfurt as proud a Pharisee as ever walked the earth, full of the project of being his own savior, but he buried the pharisee in his cell, and returned to the world “a sinner saved by grace.”

What the Augustinian convent was to Luther, the mountains of Antrim were to Patrick. There, in his struggles for his own eternal life, he learned the secret of Ireland’s darkness and bondage, and matured the faculties by which he effected its emancipation, making it morning in that land when the shadows were falling thick and fast on so many of the countries of Europe.

Two months elapsed before the exile reached his home on the banks of the Clyde. This was a long time for so short a distance. But the two countries lay much farther apart in that age than in ours, if we measure the distance by the difficulties of the road rather than by the number of its miles. Three days, or at most, a week, would be spent on the sea voyage, leaving seven weeks for the journey from the point of disembarkation, of which we are ignorant, to his father’s dwelling at Bonaven. But the country to be passed through was unsettled, and liable to sudden raids; and the exile’s journey, we know, was full of hazards and escapes, of which, however, we have only transient and scarcely intelligible glimpses. He would seem on his way to have fallen into the power of a hostile tribe, and to have suffered some detention at their hands, for he speaks of a second captivity undergone by him after his escape from his first in Ireland. But it does not concern the object of ore’ history to arrange or reconcile these obscurely recorded incidents. Let it suffice that Patrick was again with his parents. “After a few years,” says he, referring probably to his six years of absence in Ireland, “I was again with my parents in the Brittaniae,” the customary term for the Roman provinces in Britain. Once more Succat stands at his father’s door.

Emaciated, way- worn, attired in the garb of a swineherd, shall his father know him under this disguise? The shock of the first surprise over, Calpurnius recognizes in the figure before him- the flush of excitement contending on his cheek with the pallor of suffering and endurance- his long- lost son, of whom no tidings, probably, had ever reached him since the day the pirate fleet bore away and was lost to view beyond the Argyleshire hills. He throws himself upon the neck of his son, as unexpectedly restored as he had been suddenly snatched away. While he gives him the kiss of welcome, he little dreams how much more precious is the son whom he now receives back than was the son who went forth from him! He could not see, he could not even guess the rich experiences and the lofty aspirations that lay hid beneath the tattered raiment that covered the form he was now pressing to his bosom. The son he now so gladly welcomes had just returned from a school, though Calpurnius had yet to be told this, where, if the regimen is sharp, it is beyond measure salutary, and if the lessons are hard they repay an hundredfold the pain it costs to learn them.

We behold Patrick once more in the home of his youth. Around that home all was unchanged. There, as aforetime, were the vales flecked with flocks; there were the hazel and the birch crowning the rocky crests and knolls; there was the noble river washing as of yore the feet of the grand rock that towers up on its shore; there were the far- off mountains opening wide their stony portals to give exit to the expanding flow of the Clyde into the Irish Sea; lovely as ever were the gray tints of the morning and the vermilion dyes of the sun- set. But Patrick gazed on all these with other eyes than those which had drank in their beauties in his boyhood and youth.

His old companions came round him in the hope of hearing the tale of his adventures, and helping him to forget in their gay society the hardships of his exile. They found him strangely changed though they knew not why. He could not join their laugh nor re- echo their scoffs. Their delights were no longer his delights. Black melancholy, they said, has set her mark upon him. The light of his once exuberant spirit has gone out. Let us leave him to his moody humors. Yes! Patrick had come to himself. Awakened, he felt how solemn it is to live; how awful to laugh or mock all through the short years, and go down into the grave loaded with the guilt of vast undischarged responsibilities. In truth, those who said that he had escaped from Ireland only in body, were in the right; his heart was in that country still. “The traveler,” it has been said, “changes his sky, but not himself.”

The remark does not hold good in the case of the exile whose history we are tracing. Patrick, when he crossed the Channel, the cords round his limbs, changed his sky, but he changed also himself. Ireland was the land of his birth, of his second and better birth; and he now thought of it, therefore, and felt towards it as towards his native land. The ties that bound him to it were holier and stronger than those that linked him to the home of his fathers. While he wandered by the banks of his native Clyde, he ever and anon turned his gaze wistfully in the direction of the western hills. The image of the poor country beyond them rose before him night and day. The cold, the hunger, the night- watchings he had there undergone, were now sweet and blessed memories. The bitterness had gone out of them. Amid the comforts of his home in his father’s house he looked back with regret to the nights he had spent watching his flock on the mountains of Antrim, his spirit within him singing songs of gladness while the storm was raging without. But though Patrick had as good as forgotten the miseries he had endured in that land, he had not forgotten the misery he had seen there. The thought of its sons groping on through life in darkness and going down into an eternal night, was ever present with him and ever uppermost. Could he wash his hands and hold himself wholly guiltless of their blood? He owed himself to Ireland surely the least he could do towards payment of the debt was to give himself to it! Why had he left it? Had he not acted the part of the ancient prophet, who, when commanded to go and preach repentance to Nineveh rose up and fled, leaving the million- peopled capital of Assyria to its fate? These were the thoughts that stirred within him and gave him no rest.

What by day were abstract considerations of duty appealing to his conscience, took to themselves by night embodiment and shape, and appeared before him as suppliants who had come to plead the cause of that wretched country from which he had fled. It seemed to Patrick as if a man of Ireland stood on the other side of the Channel, and gazing beseechingly across, like the man of Macedonia who beckoned to Paul, cried to Patrick and said, “Come over and help us.” “In the dead of the night,” says he, “I saw a man coming to me as if from Hiberio, whose name was Victoricus, bearing innumerable letters. He gave me one of them to read. It was entitled, ‘The Voice of the Irish.’ As I read I thought I heard at that same moment the voice of those that dwell at the wood of Foclaid, near the western ocean; and thus they cried, as with one mouth, ‘We beseech thee, holy youth, come and walk still among us. ‘I felt my heart greatly stirred in me, and could read no more, and so I awoke.” f228 “Again on another night, I know not, God knoweth whether it was within me, or near me, I heard distinctly words which could not understand, except that at the end of what was said, there was uttered: ‘He who gave his life for thee, is he who speaketh in thee?’ And so I awoke rejoicing.”

On another occasion he tells us, that it seemed to him as if one were praying within him. But he makes clear in what sense he interpreted his dream by telling us that when he awoke he recollected the apostle’s words, “The Spirit helpeth the infirmity of our prayer. For we know not what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us, with groanings that cannot be uttered, which cannot be expressed in words.”

And again, “The Lord our advocate intercedeth for us.” f229 Patrick was removed by only a few centuries from an age in which God had spoken to men in dreams, and visions of the night. Was the Most High again having recourse to this ancient method of communicating His will?

There was divine interposition, but no miracle, in the occurrences we have related; nor does Patrick himself see miracle in them. They were the echo in his now awakened conscience of the great command given on the Mount of Olives, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” This Patrick regarded as his special warrant to essay the great work of evangelizing Ireland. His commission had come to him, not from the Seven Hills, but direct from the Mount of Olives. Christ Himself it was who sent him forth; and that commission received in due course its seal and signature in a converted Ireland.

Days and months passed on, and Patrick was still with his parents in the Britanniae. Had the cry of Ireland waxed faint, and died away? or had Patrick become deaf to an appeal which had stirred him so powerfully at the first? The cry from across the Channel grew louder day by day, and Patrick was more eager than ever to respond to it; but there were many and great hindrances in the way, which he feared to break through. Who was Patrick, the exile, the swine- herd, that he should essay to bring a nation out of darkness, from which he himself was but newly escaped? he must lay his account, in theprosecution of such an enterprise, with encountering the sophistry of learned Druid and the hostility of powerful chieftain. The one would fight for his altar, and the other for his slave, and he would draw down the wrath of both upon his poor head. Last, and perhaps greatest, he would inevitably rouse the suspicion and perhaps the violence of the masses, who would not take kindly that he should disturb and unsettle their long- cherished superstitions and beliefs. These were the formidable obstacles that arrayed themselves against his enterprise ever as he thought of it. What pretensions had he to the learning or eloquence without which it were folly to think of achieving so great a work?

As he hesitated and delayed, the cry of Ireland sounded again in the ear of his conscience. That cry agreeably to the ideas of the age and the warm temperament of the youth, embodied itself in the dramatic form of voices and dreams by night. There seemed again to stand before him suppliants from across the Irish Sea, who pleaded with him in behalf of those who lay plunged in a misery from which he himself had been delivered. With the return of day these suppliants who had stood all night long by his couch took their departure, only to let conscience speak. He had no rest. If he wandered by the Clyde he saw its waters flowing away to join the Irish sea.

If he watched the setting sun it was going down over Ireland, and its last gleam was gilding the wood of Focloid. If the storm- cloud came up from the south- west, it was laden with the sighs of that land over which it blew in its passage from the great Western ocean. At last his resolution was unalterably taken. He would arise and go in the character of a missionary to that land to which he had been carried as a slave. Unlettered, as regards the learning of the schools, unanointed, save by “an unction from the Holy One,” uncommissioned, save by the last words spoken on Olivet, and floated across the five centuries to his own day, he would cross the Channel, and borrowing the strength of Him who had dispelled the night around his own soul, he would attack the darkness, and throw down the idols of Ireland.

He broke his purpose to his parents. Surprised and grieved, they strongly opposed it. Had he not suffered enough already in that barbarous country?

Was he ambitions of being a second time the slave of its chieftains, and the keeper of its swine? Even some of the clergy of the Church of Ninian discountenanced his design. Their own dying zeal was far below the pitch that could prompt them to such an enterprise; and they derided the idea that it should be undertaken by a youth who had never passed a single day within the walls of Candida Casa, or of any missionary institute of the age, and who had no qualifications for the task, that they could see. Nay, the old fault was brought up against him; but all was in vain. Neither the tears of parents, nor the sneers of prudent- minded ecclesiastics, could shake his resolution. A greater than father or presbyter commanded him to go, and His voice he would obey. “Oh, whence to me this wisdom!” we find him writing in after days, “who once knew not so much as to count the number of the days, and had no relish for God? Whence to me this, so great and saving a grace, that I should thus know God, or love God? that I should cast off country and parents, refusing their many offers and weeping and tears, and, withal, offend my seniors (elders) contrary to my wish? . . . Yet not I, but the grace of God which was in me, which resisted all impediments to the end that I should come to the Irish tribes to preach the gospel.” If he had been able to offer himself in the service of this heathen country, he takes no merit to himself. It was not strength of will that had achieved this victory. The old Patrick would have remained at home with parents and friends. The new Patrick must go forth and begin what he calls his “laborious episcopate.” “Not I,” says he, with a greater apostle, “but the grace of God that was in me.”

His biographers make Patrick prepare himself for entering on his field of labor by making the tour of the then famous monasteries or missionschools of the continent of Europe. They send him first of all to Tours in Gaul, which then reflected the luster of the genius and labors of Martin, a near relation, as some have affirmed, though on no certain evidence, of his mother, Conchessa. From the school of Tours they make him proceed to that of Lerins, where Vincent was then rising into repute. Last of all, they place him at the feet of the celebrated Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre. In this training thirty years pass away, and when Patrick has become learned in all the wisdom which these seats of knowledge had to impart, his biographers send him to Ireland. f231 This progress through the schools on the part of our missionary, we believe to be wholly imaginary; in short, a fable. Patrick himself says not one word from which we could infer that he passed through so lengthened a course of study. When reproached with being unlearned, as he sometimes was, what more natural than that he should have pointed to the famous schools he had frequented, and the great teachers at whose feet he had sat. Instead of doing so, he always frankly confesses that the accusation was true, and that he was unlearned. Moreover, it is very improbable that one who knew, as Patrick did, Ireland’s misery, and whose heart yearned, as his yearned, for that country’s deliverance, would have spent thirty years in going from school to school, where he could learn little that would be of use in his future work, and might forget much of essential service which he had been already taught by more infallible guides.

Patrick set out for Ireland clad in no armor of the schools. The scholastic age, with its great doctor, was yet a long way off. Aristotle had not yet come into vogue in the Christian Church. The clergy of those days bowed to Plato rather than to the Stagerite. The doctrines of Paul, in their estimation, lacked the “salt” of philosophy. By combining the wisdom of the Greek with the gospel of the Jew, they would produce a system more likely, in their belief, to find general acceptance with the nations.

Augustine, who saw in this the subversion of Christianity, strove to stem the torrent of corruption, and lead back Western Christendom to the original sources of divine knowledge; and could we persuade ourselves that his writings had traveled as far to the north as the banks of the Clyde, we would say that the future apostle of Ireland was a disciple of the bishop of Hippo, and had learned from him the two cardinal doctrines which are the kernel of all theology, the beginning and the end of religion as a system, even the utter helplessness of man, and the absolute freeness of the grace of God. But Patrick was not taught by man. He had learned his theology on the mountains of Antrim. The two great doctrines of his teaching had been revealed to him, as the law was revealed to the Israelites, amid the darkness and thunders of an awakened conscience. There was a revelation of them within himself. When the terrors of God, like great waters, were rolling round his soul, and he was preparing to make his bed in hell, a Hand from above drew him out of the depths and set him upon a rock, and this sudden and gracious deliverance made him see how helpless he himself was, and how free and sovereign the grace that had rescued him.

It is in the furnace that the true priest receives his anointing: it is in the furnace that the soldier of the cross is harnessed for the battle. It was in a furnace heated seven- fold that the apostle of Ireland had the sign of his apostleship stamped upon him. His sufferings were a more glorious badge of office than crosier and miter. “I was amended of the Lord,” he says, “who thus fitted me to be today what I was once far from being, namely, that I should busy myself with, and labor for the salvation of others at a time when I thought not of my own.” f232 CHAPTER - PATRICK- GREATNESS OF HIS MISSION- ITS OPPORTUNENESSYEAR OF PATRICK’S ARRIVAL- HE PRECEDES PALLADIUSPALLADIUS SENT FROM ROME TO COUNTERACT HIM ATTENDED by a few companions, humble men like himself, Patrick crossed the sea, and arrived in Ireland. He was now thirty years of age. The prime of his days and the commencement of his life- work had come together.

The work on which we now behold him entering, and in which he was to be unceasingly occupied during the sixty years that were yet to be given him, is one that takes its place among the great movements of the world.

Till we come to the morning of the sixteenth century we meet with no work of equal magnitude, whether we have regard to the revolution it produced in Patrick’s own day, or to the wide issues into which it opened out, and the vast area over which its beneficent influence extended in the following centuries. It was, in fact, a second departure of primitive Christianity; it was a sudden uprising, in virtue of its own inextinguishable force, of the pure simple Gospel, on new soil, after it had been apparently overlaid and buried under a load of pagan ideas, philosophic theories, and Jewish ceremonialism in the countries where it first arose.

The voyage of Patrick, to begin his mission, was the one bright spot in the Europe of that hour. The wherry that bore him across the Irish Sea may with truth be said to have carried the Church and her fortunes. The world that had been was passing away. The lights of knowledge were disappearing from the sky. Ancient monarchies were falling by the stroke of barbarian arms. The Church was resounding with’ the din of controversy, and the thunder of anathema. Religion had no beauty in the eyes of its professors, save what was shed upon it by the pomp of ceremony, or the blaze of worldly dignities. Christianity appeared to have failed in her mission of enduing the nations with a new and purer life. She had stepped down from her lofty sphere where she shone as a spiritual power, and was moving in the low orbit of earthly systems. It was at this time of gathering darkness that this man, in simplicity of character, and grandeur of aim, so unlike the men of his age, went forth to kindle the lamp of Divine truth in this isle of ocean, whence it might diffuse its light over northern Europe.

Patrick arrived in Ireland about the year A. D. 405. In fixing this date as the commencement of his labors, we differ widely from the current of previous histories. All the mediaeval writers of his life, save the very earliest, and even his modern biographers, date his arrival in Ireland thirty years later, making it fall about A. D. 439. This date is at variance with the other dates and occurrences of his life- in short, a manifest mistake, and yet it is surprising how long it has escaped discovery, and not only so, but has passed without even challenge. The monkish biographers of Patrick had Palladius upon their hands, and being careful of his honor, and not less of that of his master, they have adjusted the mission of Patrick so as to harmonize with the exigencies arising out of the mission of Palladius. They have placed Patrick’s mission in the year subsequent to that of Palladius, though at the cost of throwing the life and labors of both men, and the occurrences of the time, into utter confusion. We think we are able to show, on the contrary, that Patrick was the first to arrive in Ireland; that he preceded Palladius as a worker in that country, by not less than twentyseven years, and that it was to the converts of Patrick that Palladius was sent as their first bishop. This is the fair, one may say, the unavoidable conclusion to which we are constrained to come after comparing the statements of history, and weighing the evidence on the whole case. But this is a conclusion which inevitably suggests an inference touching the view held by the Scots on the claims of the pontiff, and the obedience due to him, which is not at all agreeable to the assertors of the papal dignity, either in our own or in mediaeval times; and so the two missions have been jumbled and mixed up together in a way that tends to prevent that inference being seen. Let us see how the case stands. It throws light on the condition of the Christian Scots at the opening of the fifth century, and their relations to the Italian bishop.

The starting- point of our argument is a fact which is well authenticated in history, and which must be held to the the whole question. In the year 431, says Prosper, writing in the same century, “Palladius was sent by Pope Celestine to the Scots, believing in Christ as their first bishop.” We know of no succeeding writer who has called in question the statement of Prosper; but let us reflect how much that statement concedes, and how far it goes to make good our whole contention. It is admitted, then, that in A.D. 431 the Scots, that is, the Scots in Ireland -for Ireland was then the Scots, that is, the Scots in Ireland 1 -for Ireland was then the seat of the nation- were “believers in Christ.” The words of Prosper cannot mean only that there were individual converts among the Scots; they obviously imply that a large body of that nation had been converted to Christianity.

The fact of their christianization had been carried. to the metropolis of the Christian world, it had received the grave attention of the pontiff. Celestine had judged the Scots ripe for having a bishop set over them, and accordingly, consecrating Palladius, he dispatched him to exercise that office amongst them. The words of Prosper can bear no other construction.

They show us the Scots formed into a Church, enjoying, doubtless, the ministry of pastors, but lacking that which, according to Roman ideas, was essential to the completeness of their organization- a bishop, namely. And accordingly Celestine resolves to supply this want, by sending Palladius to crown their ecclesiastical polity, and to receive in return, doubtless, for this mark of pontifical affection, the submission of the Scots to the papal see.

But the mediaeval chroniclers go on to relate what it is impossible to reconcile with the state of affairs among the Scots as their previous statements had put it. They first show us the Scots believing in Christ, and Palladius arriving amongst them as their bishop. And then they go on to say that the Scots in Ireland were still unconverted, and that it was Patrick by whom this great revolution in their affairs was brought about.

Accounting for the repulse and flight of Palladius, they say, “God had given the conversion of Ireland to St. Patrick.” The words are, “Palladius was ordained and sent to convert this island, lying under wintry cold, but God hindered him, for no man can receive anything from earth unless it be given him from heaven. Of equal antiquity and authority is the following:-” Then Patricius is sent by the angel of God named Victor, and by Pope Celestine, in whom all Hibernia believed, and who baptized almost the whole of it.” f235 So, then, according to the mediaeval chroniclers, we have the Scots believing in Christ in A. D. 431 when Palladius arrived among them, and we have them yet to be converted in A. D. 432 when Patrick visited them.

Either Pope Celestine was grossly imposed upon when he was made to believe that the Scots had become Christian and needed a bishop, or the mediaeval biographers of St. Patrick have blundered as regards the year of his arrival in Ireland, and made him follow Palladius when they ought to have made him precede him. Both statements cannot be correct, for that would make the Scots to be at once Christian and pagan. In history as in logic it is the more certain that determines the less certain. The more certain in this case is the mission of Palladius in 431, and the condition of the Scots as already believers in Christ. The less certain is the conjectural visit of Patrick in 432. The latter, thereforethat is, the year of Patrick’s arrival in Ireland,- must be determined in harmony with the admitted historic fact as regards the time and object of Palladius’ mission, and that imperatively demands that we give precedence to Patrick as the first missionary to the Scots in Ireland, and the man by whom they were brought to the knowledge of the gospel. To place him after Palladius would only land us in contradiction and confusion.

Other facts and considerations confirm our view of this matter. Patrick’s life, written by himself, is the oldest piece of patristic literature extant, the authorship of which was within the British churches. As a sober and trustworthy authority, it outweighs all the mediaeval chronicles put together. The picture it presents of Ireland at the time of Patrick’s arrival is that of a Pagan country. Not a word does he say of any previous laborer in this field. He is seen building up the church among the Scots from its very foundations. Other witnesses to the same fact follow. Marcus, an Irish bishop who flourished in the beginning of the ninth century, informs us that Patrick came to Ireland in A. D. 405; and Nennius, who lived about the same time, repeats the statement. The “Leadhar Breac,” or Speckled Book, which is the most important repertory of ecclesiastical and theological writings which the Irish Church possesses, being written early in the twelfth century, and some parts of it in the eighth century, or even earlier, gives us to understand that it was known at Rome that Patrick was laboring in Ireland when Palladius was sent thither, for it informs us that “Palladius was sent by Pope Celestine with a gospel for Patrick to preach to the Irish.” And in one of the oldest lives of Patrick extant it is admitted that he was in Ireland many years before Palladius arrived in that country. f239 There are three dates in the career of Patrick which have of late been ascertained with tolerable certainty. These are relating to the Irish Church, now preserved, or which, perhaps, the Irish ever possessed. his birth, his death, and the length of time he labored as an evangelist in Ireland; and while these dates agree with one another, and so afford a strong corroboration of the accuracy of all three, they cannot be reconciled with the theory that Patrick’s ministry in Ireland was posterior to the mission of Palladius. According to the best authorities, Patrick was born about A. D. 373; and Lanigan has adduced good evidence to prove that he died in A. D. 465. The “Book of Armagh” furnishes corroborative evidence of the same fact. It says, “From the passion of Christ to the death of Patrick there were 436 years. The crucifixion took place about A. D. 30; and adding these thirty years to the 436 that intervened betwixt the crucifixion and the death of Patrick, we arrive at A. D. 466 as the year of his demise.

Traditions of the highest authority attest that he spent sixty years in preaching the gospel to the Scoto- Irish. And as between A. D. 405, when, we have said, Patrick arrived in Ireland, and A. D. 465 when he died, there are exactly sixty years, we are presented with a strong confirmation that this is the true scheme of his life, and that when Palladius arrived “with a gospel from Pope Celestine for Patrick to preach to the Irish,” he found the British missionary in the midst of his evangelical labors among the Scots, and learned, much to his chagrin, doubtless, that the numerous converts of Patrick preferred to keep by the shepherd who had been the first to lead them into the pastures of the gospel to following the voice of a stranger.

If anything were wanting to complete the proof that Palladius came not before, but after, Patrick, intruding into a field which he had not cultivated, and attempting to exercise authority over ,a flock who knew him not, and owed him no subjection, it is the transparent weakness of the excuses by which it has been attempted to cover Palladius’ speedy and inglorious flight from Ireland, and the very improbable and, indeed, incredible account which the mediaeval chroniclers have given of the appointment by Pope Celestine of Patrick as his successor. If one who had filled the influential position of archdeacon of Rome, as Palladius had done, had so signally failed in his mission to the Scots, and been so summarily and unceremoniously repudiated by them, it is not likely that Celestine would so soon renew the attempt, or that his choice would fall on one of whose name, so far as our information goes, he had never heard- at all events, one of whom he could have known almost nothing. Nor is this the only, or, indeed, main difficulty connected with this supposed appointment by Celestine. Patrick, we are told, was nominated as Palladius’ successor, when the pope had learned that the latter was dead. The pope never did or could learn that his missionary to the Scots was dead, for before it was possible for the tidings .to have traveled to Rome, the pope himself was in his grave. Celestine died in July the 27th, A. D. 432. At that time Palladius was alive at Fordun, or, if he had succumbed to the fever that carried him off, he was but newly dead; and months must have elapsed before the tidings of his decease arrived in Rome, to find the pope also in his tomb. It hardly needs the plain and positive denial Patrick himself has given, that he never received pontifical consecration, to convince us that his appointment by Pope Celestine as missionary or bishop to Ireland is a fable.

The more nearly we approach this matter, and the closer we look into the allegations of the chroniclers and of those who follow them, the more clearly does the truth appear. The excuses with which they cover the speedy retreat of Palladius only reveal the naked fact; they are a confession that the Christian Scots refused to receive him as their bishop. The story of Nathy, the terrible Irish chieftain, who so frightened Palladius that he fled for his life before he had been many days in the country, is a weak and ridiculous invention. Instead of a powerful monarch, as some have painted him, Nathy was a petty chieftain, who stretched his scepter over a territory equal in size to an English county or a Scotch parish; and if Palladius could not brave the wrath of so insignificant a potentate, verily his courage was small, and his zeal for the cause which Celestine had entrusted to him, lukewarm. We cannot believe that the missionary of Celestine was the craven this story would represent him to have been, or that he would so easily betray the interests of the Papal chair, or refuse to run a little risk for the sake of advancing its pretensions. The true reason for his precipitate flight was, beyond doubt, the opposition of the Scots to his mission. They wanted no bishop from Rome. Patrick had now for seven- andtwenty years been laboring among them; he had been their instructor in the gospel; they willingly submitted to his gracious rule; they rejoiced to call him their bishop, although there never had been set miter on his brow; and they had no desire to exchange the government of his pastoral staff for the iron crook of this emissary from the banks of the Tiber. If the “gospel” which Palladius had brought from Celestine to preach to them was the same gospel which Patrick had taught them, what could they do but express their regret that he should have come so long a journey to give them that which they already possessed .2 If it was another gospel, even though it had come down to them from Rome, which was now aspiring to be called the mother and mistress of all churches, they declined to receive it. In short, the Scots gave Palladius plainly to understand that he had meddled in a matter with which he had no concern, and that they judged his interference an attempt to steal their hearts from him who had “begotten them in Christ,” and to whom all their loyalty was due, and of inflicting upon them the farther wrong of robbing them of the liberty in which they lived under the pastor of their choice, and bringing them into thraldom to a foreign lord. But the plain unvarnished record of the fact was not to be expected from the medieval chroniclers. They were worshippers of the pontifical grandeur, and hence the contradictions and fables by which they have sought to conceal the affront offered to the pontiff in the person of his deputy. Nor is the fact to be looked for from those writers of our own day who are so anxious to persuade us that the Scots were always in communion with Rome, and always subject to the authority of its bishop. History shows us the very opposite. The first acts of the Scots on their conversion to the Christian faith are seen to be these- they repel the advances of the bishop of Rome, they put forth a claim of independence, and they refuse to bow at the foot of the papal chair.

CHAPTER - PATRICK CROSSES THE SEA- BEGINS HIS MINISTRYMANNER OF HIS PREACHING- EFFECT ON THE IRISH.

NOTHING could be more unpretending, or farther removed from display, than the manner in which Patrick entered on his mission. We see him go forth, not, indeed, alone, but with only a small following of obscure and humble disciples. He has communicated his design to a few select members of the British church of Strath- Clyde: they have approved his purpose, and caught a portion of his spirit, and now offer themselves as the associates of his future labors. On a certain day they proceed together to the sea- shore, and pass over to the other side. On that voyage hang events of incalculable consequence. If the tempest shall burst and mishap befall the tiny ship now laboring amid the tides of the Irish Channel, history must alter its course, and the destiny of nations will be changed.

Tirechan, the eighth- century commentator on the “Life of Patrick,” deeming so mean an escort altogether unbefitting so great an occasion, has provided Patrick with a sumptuous retinue of “holy bishops, presbyters, deacons, exorcists, ostiari, and lictors.” It is hard to see the need he had of such an attendance, or the help these various functionaries could give him in his labors among the savage clans of pagan Ireland. But in truth the coracle that carried Patrick across the Channel bore no such freight. This army of spiritual men is the pure creation of the chronicler’s pen.

The little party crossed the sea in safety, and arrived at Innes Patrick, a small island off the coast of Dublin. Their stay here was short, the place being then most probably uninhabited. They next sailed along the coast northward, halting at various points on their voyage to recruit their stock of provisions. In some instances the inhabitants absolutely refused to supply their necessities, and sent them away fasting, and Patrick, his biographers say, punished their niggardliness by pronouncing the curse of barrenness on the rivers and fields of these inhospitable people. These “bolts of malediction,” as his biographers term them, we may well believe, are as purely imaginary as the crowd of “holy bishops” that formed his train. Such fictions serve only to show how in these writers understood the man whose character they had undertaken to portray. Patrick bore neither weapon in his hand nor malediction on his lip: he had come to preach peace, and to scatter blessings, and, after the example of a Greater, he took no account whether they were friends or enemies on whom these blessings lighted.

Continuing their course, Patrick and his fellow- voyagers reached the coast of Ulster, and finally disembarked at the mouth of the Slain, a small river now called Slany. The spot lies between the town- lands of Ringbane and Ballintogher, about two miles from Sabhal or Saul. Here it was that Patrick began his great career. In the little band which we see stepping on shore at DownPatrick to begin work among the Scots in Ireland, we behold the beginning of that great movement among the Celtic nations by which Christianity, during the course of the three following centuries, was spread from the banks of the Po to the frozen shores of Iceland.

Patrick’s first sermon was preached in a barn. The use of this humble edifice was granted him by the chief of the district, whom, the legend says, was the same man with his former master, Milchu. When we see Patrick rising up before a crowd of pagan Scots in this barn we are reminded of the crazy wooden shed in which Luther, ten centuries afterwards, opened his publ