The Early Northern Saints.
arried on by the power of association, we are thus brought to the door of an exceedingly interesting department of book-club literature,—the restoration of the true text of the early lives of the saints—a species of literature now recognised and separated from others by the title of Hagiology. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint successively according to his day in the calendar. Ignorance is more excusable on the question what constitutes saintship, and, supposing you to have found your saint, on the criterion by which the day of his festival should be adjusted in the calendar. Technically, to make a saint, there should be an act of pontifical jurisdiction, all the more solemn than any secular judicial act as the interests affected are more momentous; but only a small number of the saints stand on record in the proceedings of the Vatican. In fact, the great body of them were in the enjoyment of their honours hundreds of years before the certifying process was adopted, and to investigate all their credentials was far too weighty a task to be attempted. It is taken for granted that they have been canonised, and if it be difficult to prove that they have gone through this ceremony, they hold their ground through the still greater difficulty of proving that they have not. Some of those whose sanctity is established by this kind of acclamation are so illustrious, that it would be ludicrous to suppose even the Vatican capable of adding to their eminence—more so, to imagine any process by which they could be unsanctified; such are St Patrick, St George, and St Kentigern. But there is a vast crowd of village or parochial saints firmly established within their own narrow circles, but as unknown at the court of Rome as any obscure curate working in some distant valley, or among the poor of some great city. In such a crowd there will naturally be questionable personages. St Valentine, St Fiacre, St Boniface, St Lupus, St Maccesso, St Bobbio, St Fursy, and St Jingo, have names not endowed with a very sanctimonious sound, but they are well-established respectable saints. Even Alban Butler, however, has hard work in giving credit to St Longinus, St Quirinus, St Mercurius, St Hermes, St Virgil, St Plutarch, and St Bacchus. It is the occurrence of such names that makes Moreri speak of the Bollandist selection as rather loose, since it contains "vies des saintes bonnes, médiocres, mauvaises, vrayes, douteuses, et fausses."
The saint's festival-day is generally the anniversary of his death, or "deposition," as it is technically termed; but this is by no means an absolute rule. Few compilers deserve more sympathy than those who try to adjust saints' days by rule and chronology, since not only does one saint differ from another in the way in which his feast is established, but for the same saint there are different days in different countries, and even in different ecclesiastical districts—the diocese of Paris having, for instance, some special saints' days of its own, which differ from the practice throughout the rest of Catholic Christendom. Some saints, too, have been shifted about from day to day by authority. Queen Margaret of Scotland, the wife of Malcolm, whose real source of influence was that she represented the old Saxon line of England, had two great days,—that of her deposition on July the 8th, and that of her translation on July the 19th; but, by a papal ordinance immediately after the Revolution, her festival was established upon the 10th of June. This was rather a remarkable day in Britain, being that on which the poor infant son of the last of the Jameses, afterwards known in Parliamentary language as the Pretender, was born. The adjustment of Queen Margaret's day to that event was a stroke of policy for the purpose of rendering the poor child respectable, and removing all doubts about warming-pans and other disagreeables; but it is not known that the measure exercised the slightest influence on the British Parliament.
Bollandus, who was the first seriously to lay his hand to the great work called after him, was a Belgian Jesuit. He had got through January and February in five folio volumes, when he died in 1658. Under the auspices of his successor, Daniel Papebroch, March appeared in 1668 and April in 1675, each in three volumes. So the great work crept on day by day and year by year, absorbing the whole lives of many devoted labourers, conspicuous among whom are the unmelodious names of Peter Bosch, John Stilting, Constantine Suyskhen, Urban Sticken, Cornelius Bye, James Bue, and Ignacius Hubens. In 1762, a hundred and four years after January, September was completed. It filled eight volumes, for the work accumulated like a snow-ball as it rolled, each month being larger than its predecessor. Here the ordinary copies stop in forty-seven volumes, for the evil days of the Jesuits were coming on, and the new literary oligarchy, where Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D'Alembert held sway, had not been propitious to hagiology. A part of October was accomplished under the auspices of Maria Theresa, the Empress Queen, but for some reason or other it came within the category of rare books, and was not to be easily obtained until it was lately reprinted.
Whatever effect such a phenomenon may have on some denominations of the religious world, it can afford nothing but pure satisfaction to all historical investigators to know that this great work has been resumed in this middle of the nineteenth century. I have before me the ninth volume for October, embracing the twentieth and twenty-first days of that month, and containing about as much matter as the five volumes of Macaulay's History. On the 21st of October there is, to be sure, a very heavy job to be got through in St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, whose bones may be seen in musty presses in the Church of the Ursulines in Cologne; but still as it moves forward, it is evident that the mighty work continues to enlarge its proportions. The winter is coming on too, a period crowded with the memorials of departed saints, as being unpropitious to men of highly ascetic habits, so that those who have undertaken the completion of the Bollandist enterprise have their work before them.
There is a marvellous uniformity in all the arrangements of this array of volumes which have thus appeared at intervals throughout two centuries. They dealt with matter too sublimely separated from the temporal doings of men to be affected by political events, yet could they not entirely escape some slight touches from the convulsions that had recast the whole order and conditions of society. When October was begun, Belgium, where the work is published, was attached to the Austrian Empire, and the French Revolution had not yet come. The Jesuits, though not favourites among monarchs, profess a decorous loyalty, and the earlier volumes of the month have portraits of the Empress Queen, and others of the Imperial family, in the most elaborate court costume of the days before the Revolution; while the later volumes, still loyal, are illustrated by the family circle of the Protestant King of constitutional Belgium, whose good-natured face and plain broad-cloth coat are those doubtless of the right man, though one cannot help imagining that he feels himself somehow in the wrong place.
The crowds of saints who come sometimes swarming in on a single day to these teeming volumes, give one an almost oppressive notion of the quantity of goodness that must have, after all, existed in this wicked world. The labours of the Bollandists, not only in searching through all available literature, but in a special correspondence established with their Jesuit brethren throughout the world, are absolutely astounding. Their conscientious minuteness is wonderful; and many a one who thinks he is master of the ecclesiastical lore of his own parish, which he has made his specialty, has been petrified to find what he thought his discoveries all laid down with careful precision as matters of ordinary knowledge in some corner of these mighty volumes. The Bollandists obtained their information from the spot, and it is on the spot that this kind of literature must be worked out. A thoroughly accomplished antiquary, working within a limited district, will thus bring forth more full and satisfactory results, so far as they go, than even the Bollandists have achieved, and hence the great value of the services of the book clubs to hagiology.
The writer of the letters bearing the signature "Veritas," in all the newspapers, would, of course, specially object to the resuscitation of this class of literature, "because it is full of fabulous accounts of miracles and other supernatural events which can only minister to credulity and superstition." But even in the extent and character of this very element there is a great significance. The size of a current falsehood is the measure of the size of the human belief that has swallowed it, and is a component part of the history of man.
The best critical writers on ancient history have agreed not to throw away the cosmogony and the hierology of Greece. It is part of Grecian history that the creed of the people was filled with a love of embodied fancies, so graceful and luxuriant. No less are the revel rout of Valhalla part of the virtual history of the Scandinavian tribes. But the lives of our saints, independently altogether of the momentous change in human affairs and prospects which they ushered in, have a substantial hold on history, of which neither the classical nor the northern hierology can boast. Poseidon and Aphrodite, Odin and Freya, vanish into the indefinite and undiscoverable at the approach of historical criticism. But separately altogether from their miracles, Cuthbert and Ninian, Columba and Kentigern, had actual existences. We know when they lived and when they died. The closer that historical criticism dogs their steps, the clearer it sees them, and the more it knows about their actual lives and ways. Even if they were not the missionaries who introduced Christianity among us,—as men who, in the old days before Britain became populous and affluent in the fruits of advanced civilisation, trod the soil that we tread, it would be interesting to know about them—about the habitations they lodged in, the garments they wore, the food they ate, the language they spoke, their method of social intercourse among each other, and the sort of government under which they lived.
That by investigation and critical inquiry we can know more of these things than our ancestors of centuries past could know, is still a notion comparatively new which has not been popularly realised. The classic literature in which our early training lies has nothing in it to show us the power of historical inquiry, and much to make us slight it. The Romans, instead of improving on the Greeks, fell in this respect behind them. Father Herodotus, credulous as he was, was a better antiquary than any who wrote in Latin before the revival of letters. Occupied entirely with the glory of their conquests, and blind to the future which their selfish tyranny was preparing for them, the Romans were equally thoughtless of the past, unless it were exaggerated and falsified into a narrative to aggrandise their own glory. Their authors abdicated the duty of leaving to the world the true narrative of the early struggles and achievements out of which the Republic and the Empire arose. It is easy to be sceptical at any time. We can cut away Romulus and Remus from accepted history now, hundreds of years after the Empire has ceased to govern or exist. But the golden opportunity for sifting the genuine out of the fabulous has long passed away. It is seldom possible to construct the infant histories of departed nationalities. The difference between the facilities which a nation has for finding out its own early history, and those which strangers have for constructing it when the nationality has allowed its deathbed to pass over without the performance of that patriotic task, is nearly as great as a man's own facilities for writing the history of his youth, and those of the biographer who makes inquiries about him after he is buried.
We are becoming wiser than the Romans in this as in other matters, and are constructing the infant histories of the various European nations out of the materials which each possesses. The biographies of those saints or missionaries who first diffused the light of the Gospel among the various communities of the Christian north, form a very large element in these materials; and no wonder, when we remember that the Church possessed all the literature, such as it was, of the age. In applying, however, to the British Empire, this new source of historical information, there arose the difficulty that it was chiefly supplied from Ireland. If all hagiology were under a general suspicion of the fabulous, Irish history was known to be a luxuriant preserve of fables, and these causes of dubiety being multiplied by each other in the mind, it seemed almost impossible to obtain a hearing for the new voice. In fact, during a long period the three nations were engaged in a competition which should carry its history through the longest track of fictitious glory, and this was a kind of work in which Ireland beat her neighbours entirely. Hence, when all were pressing pretty close upon the Deluge, Ireland took the leap at once and cleared that gulf. As a fairish record of these successful efforts, I would recommend to the reader's notice a very well-conditioned and truly learned-looking folio volume, called "The General History of Ireland, collected by the learned Jeffrey Keating, D.D., faithfully translated from the original Irish Language, with many curious Amendments taken from the Psalters of Tara and Cashel, with other authentic Records, by Dermod O'Connor, Antiquary to the Kingdom of Ireland." Opposite to the title-page is a full-length portrait of Brian Boroomh, whose fame has been increased of late years by the achievements of his descendant in the cabbage-garden. The monarch is in full burnished plate armour, with scarf and surcoat—all three centuries at least later in fashion than the era attributed to him. But that is a trifle. It would involve much hard and useless work to make war on the anachronisms of historical portraits, and we are not to judge of historical works by their engraved decorations. Here, however, the picture is sober truth itself to what the inquiring reader finds in the typography. After the descriptive geographical introduction common in old histories, the real commencement comes upon us in this form:—
"Of the first invasion of Ireland before the Flood!" "Various," the author tells us, "are the opinions concerning the first mortal that set a foot upon this island. We are told by some that three of the daughters of Cain arrived here, several hundred years before the Deluge. The white book, which in the Irish is called Leabhar Dhroma Sneachta, informs us that the oldest of these daughters was called Banba, and gave a name to the whole kingdom. After these, we are told that three men and fifty women arrived in the island; one of them was called Ladhra, from whom was derived the name of Ardladhan. These people lived forty years in the country, and at last they all died of a certain distemper in a week's time. From their death, it is said that the island was uninhabited for the space of an hundred years, till the world was drowned. We are told that the first who set foot upon the island were three fishermen that were driven thither by a storm from the coast of Spain. They were pleased with the discovery they had made, and resolved to settle in the country; but they agreed first to go back for their wives, and in their return were unfortunately drowned by the waters of the Deluge at a place called Tuath Inbhir. The names of these three fishermen were Capa, Laighne, and Luasat. Others, again, are of opinion that Ceasar, the daughter of Bith, was the first that came into the island before the Deluge.... When Noah was building the ark to preserve himself and his family from the Deluge, Bith, the father of Ceasar, sent to desire an apartment for him and his daughter, to save them from the approaching danger. Noah, having no authority from Heaven to receive them into the ark, denied his request. Upon this repulse, Bith Fiontan, the husband of Ceasar, and Ladhra her brother, consulted among themselves what measures they should take in this extremity."
The result was, that, like the Laird of Macnab, they "built a boat o' their ain," but on a much larger scale, being a fair match with the ark itself. But justice should be done to every one. The learned Dr Keating does not give us all this as veritable history; on the contrary, being of a sceptical turn of mind, he has courage enough to stem the national prejudice, and throw doubt on the narrative. He even rises up into something like eloquent scorn when he discusses the manner in which some antediluvian annals were said to be preserved. Thus:—
"As for such of them who say that Fiontan was drowned in the Flood, and afterwards came to life, and lived to publish the antediluvian history of the island—what can they propose by such chimerical relations, but to amuse the ignorant with strange and romantic tales, to corrupt and perplex the original annals, and to raise a jealousy that no manner of credit is to be given to the true and authentic chronicles of that kingdom?"
I shall quote no more until after the doctor, having exhausted his sceptical ingenuity about the antediluvian stories, finds himself again on firm ground, prepared to afford his readers, without any critical misgivings, "an account of the first inhabitants of Ireland after the Flood." He now tells us with simple and dignified brevity that "the kingdom of Ireland lay waste and uninhabited for the space of three hundred years after the Deluge, till Partholanus, son of Seara, son of Sru, son of Easru, son of Framant, son of Fathochda, son of Magog, son of Japhet, son of Noah, arrived there with his people." From such a patriarchal nomenclature the reader of Keating is suddenly introduced to a story of domestic scandal, in which a "footman" and a "favourite greyhound" make their frequent appearance. Then follow many great epochs—the arrival of the Firbolgs, the dynasty of the Tuatha de Danans, with revolutions and battles countless, before we come to the commencement of a settled dynasty of kings, of whom more than ninety reigned before the Christian era. It is, after all, more sad than ridiculous to remember that within the present generation many historians believed not only what Keating thus tells as truth, but also what he ventured to doubt; and if the English antiquaries, according to their wont, called for records,—did these not exist abundantly, if they could be got at, in those authentic genealogies, which were from time to time adjusted and collated with so much skill and scrupulous accuracy by the official antiquaries who met in the Hall of Tara? The reader unacquainted with such an out-of-the-way and rather weedy corner of literature, may think this vague exaggeration; and I shall finish it by quoting the latest printed, so far as I know, of the numerous solemn and methodical statements about the manner in which the records of these very distant matters were authenticated.
"When the said princes got the kingdom into their hands, they assigned large territories to their antiquaries and their posterity to preserve their pedigree, exploits, actions, &c.; and so very strict they were on this point, that they established a triennial convention at Tara, where the chief kings of Ireland dwelt, where all the antiquaries of the nation met every third year to have their chronicles and antiquities examined before the king of Ireland, the four provincial kings, the king's antiquary-royal, &c.; the least forgery in the antiquary was punished with death, and loss of estate to his posterity for ever—so very exact they were in preserving their venerable monuments, and leaving them to posterity truly and candidly; so that even at this day (though our nation lost estate and all almost) there is not an ancient name of Ireland, of the blood-royal thereof descended, but we can bring, from father to father, from the present man in being to Adam—and I, Thaddy O'Roddy, who wrote this, have written all the families of the Milesian race from this present age to Adam."[80]
To all this preposterous, and now scarcely credible extravagance of fiction, there attaches a melancholy political moral. Poor Ireland, trodden by a dominant party whose hand was strengthened by her potent neighbour, sought relief from the gloom of the present, by looking far back into the fabulous glories of the past—and it seemed the last drop in her cup of bitterness when this pleasant vista was also to be closed by the hard utilitarian hand of the unsympathising Saxon.
After "this sort of thing" it was naturally difficult to get sensible men to listen to proposals for opening valuable new sources of early history in Ireland. In fact, down to the time when Moore wrote his History in 1835, no one could venture to look another in the face when speaking of the early Irish annals, and the consequence was that that accomplished author wilfully shut his eyes to the rich supply of historical materials in which he might have worked to brilliant effect.
Yet, upon the general face of history, it must on examination have been fairly seen that Ireland is the natural place where a great proportion of whatever is to be known about the primitive Church in the British Islands was to be found. Indeed, in the history of Christianity, not the least wonderful chapter contains the episode of the repose in the West, where a portion of the Church, having settled down, grew up in calm obscurity, protected by distance from the desolating contest which was breaking up the empire of the world, and raged more or less wherever the Roman sway had penetrated. Of the southern Britons it could no longer be said, as in the days of Augustus, that they were cut off from all the world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the facilities which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening his political position, and plotting for a fragment of the disintegrating empire. An admiral of the Roman fleet had at one time established his power in Britain, where he set up as Cæsar, and sought to create a new imperial centre. Thus the southern part of Britain was a province of the true Roman empire awaiting the coming of the wild hordes who were gathering for the general overthrow, and was not the place where either the Christian Church or Italian civilisation could find permanent refuge. The destined destroyer was indeed close at hand. Though the Romans had their walls, their roads, their forts, and even a few villas in Scotland, yet one going northward at that time through the territories of the Gadeni and the Otadeni, would observe the Romanised character of the country gradually decreasing, until he found himself among those rough independent northern tribes, who, under the name of Picts and Scots, drove the Romanised Britons into the sea, and did for the insular portion of the empire what the hordes who were called Goths, Franks, and Alemanni, were doing in the Roman provinces of the Continent.
Behind the scene of this destructive contest, Christianity, having been planted, flourished in peaceful poverty. It grew here and there over Ireland, and in a small portion of the remote part of Scotland; and the distance from the scene of warfare necessary for its safety is shown by the fate of St Ninian's little church in the Mull of Galloway. It was too near the field of strife to live. The isolation in which the western Christians thus arose, was productive of ecclesiastical conditions very remarkable in themselves, but perfectly natural as the effects of their peculiar causes. The admirable organisation for carrying out the civil government of the Roman empire, was a ready-made hierarchy for carrying out the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. It was far from the object of those who seized on the power of the Cæsars to abolish that power. On the contrary, they desired to work it on their own account, and thus the machinery of the empire lived, exercising more or less vitality and power, down to the first French Revolution.
No part of its civil organisation, however, retained the comprehensive vitality which the learning and subtlety of the priesthood enabled them to preserve, or rather restore, to its spiritual branch. Hence, wherever the conquerors of Rome held sway, there the priests of Rome obtained a sway also. But the one little fragment of the primitive Church, which had been so curiously cut off during the great contest, was beyond the sway of the conquerors of Rome, as it had been beyond the sway of the Emperors themselves. Hence, while the Church, as united to Rome, grew up in one great uniform hierarchy, the small, isolated Church in the West grew up with different usages and characteristics; and when afterwards those who followed them were charged with schism, they asserted that they had their canons and usages directly from the apostles, from whom they had obtained the Gospel and the regulations of the Church pure and undefiled. Thus arose the renowned contest between the early Scottish Church and the rest of Christendom about the proper period of observing Easter, and about the form of the tonsure. Hence, too, arose the debates about the peculiar discipline of the communities called Culdees, who, having to frame their own system of church government for themselves, humble, poor, and isolated as they were, constructed it after a different fashion from the potent hierarchy of Rome. The history of these corporations possesses extreme interest, even to those who follow it without a predetermined design to identify every feature of their arrangements with a modern English diocese, or with a modern Scottish presbytery; and not the least interesting portion of this history is its conclusion, in the final absorption, not without a struggle, of these isolated communities within the expanding hierarchy of the Popes.
In a few humble architectural remains, these primitive bodies have left vestiges of their peculiar character to the present day. Neither deriving the form of their buildings nor their other observances from Rome, they failed to enter with the rest of the Church on that course of construction which led towards Gothic architecture. The earliest Christian churches on the Continent were constructed on the plan of the Roman basilica, or court of justice, and wherever the Church of Rome spread, this method of construction went with her. The oldest style of church-building—that which used to be called Saxon, and is now sometimes termed Norman, and sometimes Romanesque—degenerated directly from the architecture of Rome. There are ecclesiastical buildings in France and Italy, of which it might fairly be debated, from their style, whether they were built by the latest of the classical, or the earliest of the Gothic architects. The little Church in the West had not the benefit of such models. Places of worship, and cells, or oratories, were built of timber, turf, or osiers. The biographer of Columba describes his followers as collecting wattles for the construction of their first edifice. But they had also a few humble dwellings of stone, which, naturally enough, had no more resemblance to the proud fanes of the Romish hierarchy, than the primitive edifices of Mexico and New Zealand had to those of modern Europe. They were first found in Ireland; more lately, they have been traced in the Western Isles. They are small rude domes of rough stone; and if it may seem strange that the form adapted to the grandest of all architectural achievements should be accomplished by those rude masons who could not make a Roman arch, it must be remembered, that while the arch cannot be constructed without artificial support or scaffolding, a dome on a small scale may, and is indeed the form to which rude artists, with rude stones, and no other materials, would naturally be driven. It is that in which boys build their snow-houses. I shall not easily forget how, once, accompanying a piscatorial friend on the Loch of Curran, near Ballyskelligs, in Kerry, I stepped on a small island to visit a Norman ruin there, and saw, besides the ruin and a stone cross, one of these small rough domes, testifying, by its venerable simplicity, that it had stood there centuries before the Norman church beside it. But the peculiar characteristics of the architecture of the West did not stop short with these simple types. It advanced, carrying in its advance its own significant character, until it became mingled with the architecture propagated from Rome, as the Christian community which worshipped within the buildings became absorbed in the hierarchy. The Oratory of Galerus, in Kerry, is a piece of solid, well-conditioned masonry, built after a plan of no mean symmetry and proportion, yet with scarcely a feature in common with the early Christian churches of the rest of Europe. Like the ruder specimens, it struggles for as much solidity and spaciousness as it can obtain in stonework without the help of the arch, and it makes a good deal out of the old Egyptian plan of gradually narrowing the courses of stones inwards, until they come so near that large slabs of stone can be thrown across the opening. Some buildings of the same sort have been lately revealed in the island of Lewis: one is named Teampul Rona, and another, which is dedicated to St Flannan, Teampul Beannachadh.[81] The specialty of both these, as well as of the Irish buildings, is that they are edifices beyond all question raised for Christian worship, that they have been built with pains and skill, and yet that they have no vestige of that earlier type of Christian architecture which Europe in general obtained from Rome.
In offering a few stray remarks on the lives of the saints, or, more properly speaking, the missionaries, whose labours lay in the British Isles, it would be pedantic to cite the precise document, printed generally for one or other of the book clubs, which supplies the authority for each sentence. I must, however, mention one authority which stands supreme among its brethren—the edition of Adamnan's Life of St Columba, edited by Dr Reeves, under the joint patronage of the Irish Archæological and the Bannatyne Clubs. The original work has long been accepted as throwing a light on the Christianising of the North, second only to that shed by the invaluable morsels in Bede. With wonderful industry and learning, the editor has incorporated the small book of Adamnan in a mass of new matter, every word of which is equally instructive and interesting to the student.
There is no doubt that the saints of Irish origin supply by far the more important portion of our hagiology. They are countless. Taking merely a topographical estimate of them—looking, that is, to the names of places which have been dedicated to them, or otherwise bear their names—we find them crowding Ireland, and swarming over the Highlands of Scotland and the north of England into London itself, where St Bride's Well has given a gloomy perpetuity to the name of the first and greatest of Irish female saints. Some people would be content to attribute the frequentness of saintship among the Irish and the Highlanders to the opportunities enjoyed by them in consequence of the early Church having found a refuge in Ireland. Others would attribute the phenomenon to the extreme susceptibility of the Celtic race to religious enthusiasm, and would illustrate their views by referring to the present Celtic population in Ireland under the dominion of the priests, and their brethren of the West of Scotland equally under the dominion of the doctrinal antipodes of the priests; while the parallel might be illustrated by a reference to those Highland Franciscans called "The Men," whose belcher neckcloths represent the cord, and their Kilmarnock bonnets the cowl.
At the commencement of Christianity the difference between the religious Celt and the religious Saxon was naturally far more conspicuous than it is now. Bede's description of the thoughtful calmness with which Ethelbert studied the preaching of Augustin, with all the consequences which the adoption of the new creed must bring upon his kingdom, is still eminently characteristic of the Saxon nature. In the life of St Wilbrord a scene is described which is not easily alluded to with due reverence. The saint had prevailed on a Frisian Prince to acknowledge Christianity, and be baptised. Standing by the font, with one foot in the water, a misgiving seized on him, and he inquired touching his ancestors, whether the greater number of them were in the regions of the blessed, or in those of the spirits doomed to everlasting perdition. On being abruptly told by the honest saint that they were all, without exception, in the latter region, he withdrew his foot—he would not desert his race—he would go to the place where he would find his dead ancestors.
The conversion of the Picts by Columba seems to have proceeded deliberately. We find him, in the narrative of his life, exercising much influence on Brud their king, and occasionally enjoying a visit to the royal lodge on the pleasant banks of Lochness. There he is seen commending his friend and fellow-labourer St Cormac to the good offices of the Regulus of the Orkney Islands, who is also at the court of Brud, to whom he owes something akin to allegiance; for Columba looks to Brud as well as to the Orcadian guest for the proper attention being paid to Cormac. Still, honoured and respected as he is in the court of the Pictish monarch, Columba is not that omnipotent person which he finds himself to be in Dalriada and in Ireland. There still sits an unpleasant personage at the king's gate. A Magus, as he is called—a priest of the old heathen religion—is in fact well received at court, where, although doomed to be superseded by the Christian missionary, he yet seems to have been retained by the king, as a sort of protest that he had not put himself entirely under the control of the priests of the new doctrine.
It was indeed among their own people, the Celts of Ireland and of the Irish colony in the west of Scotland, that the reign of these saints was absolute. But if we count this ecclesiastical influence a feature of the Celtic nation, either the Welsh must not be counted as Celts, or they must be looked on as exceptions from this spiritual dominion. They were the people among whom, of all the tribes who inhabited Britain between the days of Julius Cæsar and those of William of Normandy, it might have been primarily expected that we would find the most vital Christianity and the greatest missionary force. They professed to have carried with them into their mountains the traditions and the nationality of that very important portion of the Christianised Roman Empire which was called Britannia. When the heart of the Empire became paralysed, this branch, doubtless after a long harassing contest with the Picts and the Irish of the north, was broken, and partly subjected, partly driven away by the Saxons. That they should have failed, through all their revolutions and calamities, to preserve any remnants of Roman social habits, is not perhaps wonderful. But that they should have failed to preserve enough of Christian influence to second and support the missions sent to the Saxons, so soon after these had superseded the British power, looks like an exception to the usual rule of Christian progress. The Welsh antiquaries, through meritorious efforts, strive in vain to establish the existence of Welsh ecclesiarchs during the time when the countless saints of Ireland were swarming over Scotland and penetrating into England. They point to a stone said to commemorate a victory gained over the Picts and the Saxons by the Britons, not through their courage or their skill in fight, but by the Halleluiahs raised by two saints who were present in their host. These saints, however, Garmon and Lupus, were, as Bede tells us, Frenchmen, missionaries from the Gallican Church to correct the errors of the Britons. The venerable Bede scolds these Britons roundly for not having kept up the faith planted among them, and for not having been prepared to help Augustin and his followers in the very hard task of converting the Saxons. It is a pity that we do not know something more of Roman Christianity, and indeed of Roman civilisation generally in Britain, before the Saxon days. There appears to have been among the Romanised British Christians little zeal and a good deal of controversy and dissent, and we hear a great deal more of the influence of the Pelagian heresy among them than of the influence of Christianity itself.
The scantiness of our acquaintance with Roman Christianity in Britain is the more to be regretted, because it would have been very interesting to compare its manifestations with those of the Church which found refuge in the West during the dark days of Rome—the days when the temporal empire was crushed, and the spiritual empire had not arisen. As we might expect from the ecclesiastical conditions already noticed, the persons who first exercise ecclesiastical authority in the two islands did not derive their strength from any foreign hierarchy, and had no connection with Rome. Any reference, indeed, to the influence of a Roman pontiff, either actual or prospective, in the life of any of our early saints, will prepare the critic for finding that the life has been written centuries after the era of the saint, or has been tampered with. In Adamnan's Life of Columba, Rome is mentioned once or twice as a very great city, but there is no allusion throughout that remarkable biography to any spiritual central authority exercised by the bishop there over the presbyters in Scotland and Ireland. This is, of course, nothing more than the statement of what the reader of a book has not found in it. Any other reader may find allusions to the supremacy of the popedom over these early Christian communities, if he can. But I think he is likely to find none; and any one who desires to study the real history of the rise and progress of the spiritual dominion of Rome would, with more profit, take up the books and records referring to events three or four hundred years after the age of Columba.
Self-sustained as they were, these isolated communities had a very strong vitality. The picture exhibited in the hagiographies is truly the reign of the saints. Their power was of an immediate, abrupt, and purely despotic kind, which would have been neutralised or weakened by anything like a central control. Prompt and blind obedience to the commands of the saint-superior was the rule of Hy or Iona, and of all the other religious communities of the West. Perhaps there were even here feuds, disputes, and mutinies of which no record has been preserved. The hagiographer can only commemorate those which were suppressed by some terrible manifestation of Divine power, for the person whose life he commemorates is only conventionally and nominally to be spoken of as a mortal; he is in reality superhuman, wielding, whenever he pleases, the thunderbolts of the Deity, annihilating dissent and disobedience to himself, as if it were blasphemy in the Deity's own presence, and crushing by an immediate miracle any effort to oppose his will, were it even about the proper hour of setting off on a journey, or the dinner to be ordered for the day.
The rank which those primitive clergy of Ireland and the Highlands occupy is almost invariably that of the saint, a rank as far separated from that which can be conferred by any human hierarchy as heaven is from earth. They were, as we have seen, independent of Rome from the beginning, and this great host of saints had lived and left their biographies to the world long before the system of judicial canonisation. How a boundary is professed to be drawn between the genuine and the false among these saints of the North, cannot be easily understood. No one seems to object to any of them as spurious. Many of them are so very obscure that only faint and fragmentary traces of them can be found, yet it seems never to be questioned that they occupied the transcendent spiritual rank usually attributed to them. Of others nothing is known but the bare name, yet it is never doubted that the owner was entitled to his attribute of saint.
The brethren at Iona seem sometimes to have lived well, for we hear of the killing of heifers and oxen. A pragmatical fellow declines to participate in the meal permitted on the occasion of a relaxation of discipline—the saint tells him that since he refuses good meat at a time when he is permitted to have it, it is to be his doom to be one of a band of robbers who will be glad to appease their hunger on putrid horse-flesh. The ruling spirit, however, of this first Christian mission, as we find it recorded, is undoubtedly asceticism. The mortification of the flesh is the temporal source of spiritual power. Some incidents occur which put this spirit in a shape bordering on the ludicrous. A saint is at a loss to know how his power is waning. There is some mysterious countervailing influence acting against him, which manifests itself in the continued success of an irreverent king or chief, whom he thought he had taken the proper spiritual methods to humble. He at last discovers the mystery; the king had been fasting against him—entering the field of asceticism with him, in short, and not without success.
The biography of an Asiatic despot, so far as other persons are concerned, is merely the history of his commands and their obedience. It is only incidentally, therefore, that one is likely to acquire any information from it about the people over whom he rules. In like manner, the life of an Irish saint is the history of commanding and obeying; yet a few glimpses of social life may be caught through occasional chinks. The relation which the spiritual held towards the temporal powers is sufficiently developed to give ground for considerable inquiry and criticism. The more eminent of the saints had great influence in state affairs, ruling in some measure the monarchs themselves. Some monarch is occasionally mentioned as the friend of Columba, much as a bishop might allude to this or that lay lord as among his personal friends. We find him settling the succession of Aidan, the king of the Dalriadic Scots, through an influence to which any opposition was utterly hopeless. Send your sons to me, he says to Aidan, and God will show me who is to be your successor. The sign falls on Eochoid Buidh, and the saint tells the king that all his other sons will come to a premature end, and they drop off accordingly, chiefly in battle. This power of fixing the evil eye, of prophesying death, is found in perpetual use among the early saints. It is their ultimate appeal in strife and contest, and their instrument of vengeance when thwarted or affronted; and a terrible instrument it must have been. Who could gainsay those believed to hold in their hands the issues of life and death?
In our conception of the kings with whom these saints were familiar, it may be well not to be misled by words. We shall realise them better at the present day by looking to Madagascar or the Marquesas Islands than among the states of Europe. The palace was a shanty of log or wattle, protected, perhaps, by a rampart of earth or uncemented stones, and the king had a stone chair with a few mystic decorations scratched on it, which served for his throne on state occasions. The prospect of acquiring a gold torque or a silver drinking-cup would have a material influence over his imperial policy. Were we to believe the fabulous historians, Ireland was for centuries a compact kingdom under one imperial sovereign, who presided over subsidiary rulers in the provinces. But although sometimes one provincial king was powerful enough to keep the others in subjection, old Celtic Ireland never was a kingdom, properly speaking, for it never had a nationality. Some people maintain, not without reason, that the facility with which a nationality resolves itself into existence depends much, not only on race, but on geological conditions. The Celtic Irish seem to have always been too busy with local feuds and rivalries to achieve any broad nationality. And the nature of their country—a vast plain intersected by morasses and rivers, and here and there edged with mountain ranges—is unfavourable to the growth of a nationality, since it presents no general centre of defence against a foreign enemy, like that great central range of mountains in Scotland, which Columba's biographers call the Dorsum Britanniæ—the Backbone of Britain. Ireland, indeed, seems to have had no conception of a nationality until such a thing was suggested by the Normans and the Saxons, after they had been long enough there to feel patriotic. And so it has generally happened that any alarming outbreaks against the imperial government have been led by people of Norman or Saxon descent.
Still there is no doubt, difficult as it may be to realise the idea, that at the times with which we are dealing, Ireland enjoyed a kind of civilisation, which enabled its princes and its priests to look down on Pictland, and even on Saxon England, as barbarian. The Roman dominion had not penetrated among them, but the very remoteness which kept the island beyond the boundaries of the Empire, also kept it beyond the range of the destroyers of the Empire, and made it in reality the repository of the vestiges of imperial civilisation in the north. Perhaps the difference between the two grades of civilisation might be about the same as we could have found ten years ago between Tahiti and New Zealand.
An extensive and minute genealogical ramification, when it is authentic, is a condition of a pretty far advanced state of civilisation. Abandoning the old fabulous genealogies which went back among the Biblical patriarchs, the rigid antiquaries of Ireland find their way through authentic sources to genealogical connections of a truly marvellous extent. Such illustrious men as the saints can, of course, be easily traced, as all were proud to establish connection with them; while Columba himself and several others were men of royal descent. But of the casual persons mentioned in the Life of Columba, Dr Reeves hunts out the genealogy—fully as successfully, one would say, as that of any person of the country-gentleman class in Britain, living at the beginning of this century, could be established. There are, indeed, many characteristics in the hagiologic literature bearing an analogy to modern social habits so close as to be almost ludicrous; and it is not easy to deal with these conditions of a very distant age, brought to us as they are through the vehicle of a language which is neither classical nor vernacular, but conventional—the corrupt Latin in which the biographers of the saints found it convenient to write. It would appear that when he was in Ireland, St Columba kept his carriage, and the loss of the lynch-pin on one occasion is connected with a notable miracle. Dr Reeves, as appropriate to this, remarks that "the memoirs of St Patrick in the Book of Armagh make frequent mention of his chariot, and even name his driver." It is difficult to suppose such a vehicle ever becoming available in Iona; but there Columba seems to have been provided with abundance of vessels, and he could send for a friend, in the way in which MacGillicallum's "carriage," in the form of a boat, was sent for Johnson and Boswell.
There are many other things in these books which have a sound more familiar to us than any sense which they really convey. Here the saint blesses the store of a "homo plebeius cum uxore et filiis"—a poor man with a wife and family—a term expressively known in this day among all who have to deal with the condition of their fellow-men, from the chancellor of the exchequer to the relieving-officer. In the same chapter we are told "de quodam viro divite tenacissimo"—of a very hard-fisted rich fellow—a term thoroughly significant in civilised times. He is doomed, by the way, to become bankrupt, and fall into such poverty that his offspring will be found dead in a ditch—a fate also intelligible in the nineteenth century. In another place we have among the saint's suitors "plebeius pauperrimus, qui in ea habitabat regione quæ Stagni litoribus Aporici est contermina." The "Stagnum Aporicum" is Lochaber; so here we have a pauper from the neighbourhood of Lochaber—a designation which I take to be familiarly known at "the Board of Supervision for the Relief of the Poor in Scotland." We are told, too, of the saint being at a plebeian feast, and of a plebeius in the island of Raghery quarrelling with his wife.
The thoughtful student will find a more distinguished analogy with the habits of later civilisation in the literature of these early churchmen. The subject of the introduction of letters into Ireland, and the very early literature of that country, is too large to be handled here. It is certain that in Columba's era, the middle of the sixth century, books were written and used in Ireland. The respect paid to a book in that age was something beyond that of the most ardent book-hunter. Many of the most exciting of the saintly miracles have for their end the preservation of a book in fire or in water. The custody of the Book of Armagh, containing St Patrick's canons, was a great hereditary office; and the princely munificence which provided the book with a suitable case or shrine in the tenth century is recorded in Irish history. Besides their costly shrines already referred to, these books often had for an outer covering a bag or satchel, in which the sacred deposit was carried from place to place. The heart must be dead to all natural sensations that does not sympathise with Dr Reeves in the following triumphant announcement:—
"Of leather cases the cover of the Book of Armagh is the most interesting example now remaining. It came, together with its inestimable enclosure, into the writer's possession at the end of 1853, and is now lying before him. It is formed of a single piece of strong leather, 36 inches long and 12 broad, folded in such a way as to form a six-sided case 12 inches long, 12-3/4 broad, and 2-3/4 thick, having a flap which doubles over in front, and is furnished with a rude lock and eight staples, admitted through perforations in the flap, for short iron rods to enter and meet at the lock. The whole outer surface, which has become perfectly black from age, is covered with figures and interlacings of the Irish pattern in relief, which appear to have been produced by subjecting the leather, in a damp state, before it was folded, to pressure upon a block of the whole size, having a depressed pattern, and allowing it to remain until the impression became indelible."
A pleasing peculiarity in the personal habits of these recluses is their frequent communion with birds and the gentler kind of beasts. Their legendary histories speak of these animals as apt mediums of vaticination and miraculous intervention; but we must be content, in the present age, to suppose that their frequent appearance, their familiar intercourse with the saints, and the quaint and amiable incidents in which they figure, are in reality characteristic memorials of the kindly feelings and the innocent pursuits natural to men of gentle disposition and retired life. Thus Columba one day gives directions to a brother to be on the watch at a certain point in the island of Iona, for there, by nine o'clock on that day, a certain stranger stork will alight and drop down, utterly fatigued with her journey across the ocean. That stork the brother is enjoined to take up gently, and convey to the nearest house, and feed and tend for three days, after which she will take wing and fly away to the sweet spot of her native Ireland, whence she had wandered. And this the brother is to do because the bird is a guest from their own beloved native land. The brother departs, and returns at the proper time. Columba asks no questions—he knows what has taken place, and commends the obedient piety of the brother who had sheltered and tended the wanderer.
Another saint, Ailbhe, had a different kind of intercourse with certain cranes. They went about in a large body, destroying the corn in the neighbourhood, and would not be dispersed. The saint went and delivered on oration to them on the unreasonableness of their conduct, and forthwith, penitent and somewhat ashamed, they soared into the air and went their way. "St Cuthbert's ducks" acquired a long celebrity. When that reverenced ascetic went to take up his residence in the wave-bounded solitude of the Farne Islands, he found the solan-geese there imbued with the wild habits common to their storm-nurtured race, and totally unconscious of the civilisation and refinement of their kinsmen who graze on commons, and hiss at children and dogs. St Cuthbert tamed them through his miraculous powers, and made them as obedient and docile a flock as abbot ever ruled. The geese went before him in regular platoons, following the word of command, and doing what he ordered—whether it might be the most ordinary act of the feathered biped, or some mighty miracle. Under his successors their conduct seems to have been less regular, though certainly not less peculiar; for we are told that they built their nests on the altar, and around the altar, and in all the houses of the island; farther, that, during the celebration of mass, they familiarly pecked the officiating priest and his assistants with their bills. It is curious enough that the miraculous education of these birds makes its appearance in a Scottish legal or official document at the close of the fifteenth century. It is an instrument recording an attestation to the enormous value of the down of these renowned birds; and seems, indeed, to be an advertisement or puff by merchants dealing in the ware, though its ponderous Latinity is in curious contrast with the neat examples of that kind of literature to which we are accustomed in these days.[82]
One of the prettiest of the stories about birds is divided between St Serf, the founder of a monastery in Loch Leven, and St Kentigern, the patron of Glasgow, where he is better known as St Mungo. Kentigern was one among a parcel of neophyte boys whom the worthy old Serf, or Servanus, was perfecting in the knowledge of the truth. Their teacher had a feathered pet—"quædam avicula quæ vulgo ob ruborem corpusculi rubisca nuncupatur"—a robin-redbreast, in fact, an animal whose good fortune it is never to be mentioned without some kindly reference to his universal popularity, and the decoration which renders him so easily recognised wherever he appears. St Serf's robin was a wonderful bird; he not only took food from his master's hand and pecked about him according to the fashion of tame and familiar birds, but took a lively interest in his devotions and studies by flapping his wings and crowing in his own little way, so as to be a sort of chorus to the acts of the saint. The old man enjoyed this extremely; and his biographer, with more geniality than hagiographers usually show, sympathises with this innocent recreation, applying the example of the bow that was not always bent, in a manner suggestive of suspicions that he was not entirely unacquainted with profane letters. One day, when the saint had retired to his devotions, the boys amused themselves with his little pet; and a struggle arising among them for its possession, the head was torn from the body—altogether a natural incident. Thereupon, says the narrator, fear was turned to grief, and the avenging birch—"plagas virgarum quæ puerorum gravissima tormenta esse solent"—arose terribly in their sight. It was at this moment that an unpopular pupil, named Kentigern—a new boy, apparently—a stranger who had not taken in good-fellowship to the rest of the school, but was addicted to solitary meditation, entered the guilty conclave. Their course was taken—they threw the fragments of the bird into his hands, and bolted. St Serf enters, and the crew are awaiting in guilty exultation the bursting of his wrath. The consecrated youth, however, fitting the severed parts to each other, signs the cross, raises his pure hands to heaven, and breathes an appropriate prayer—when lo! robin lifts his little head, expands his wings, and hops away to meet his master. In the eucharistic office of St Kentigern's day, this event, along with the restoration to life of a meritorious cook, and other miracles, inspired a canticle which, for long subsequent ages, was exultingly sung by the choristers in the saint's own cathedral of Glasgow, thus:—
"Garrit ales pernecatus.
Cocus est resuscitatus.
Salit vervex trucidatus
Amputato capite."
A bird proper, on the shield argent of the city of Glasgow, has been identified with the resuscitated pet of the patron saint. The tree on which it is there perched is a commemoration of another of the saint's miracles. In a time of frost and snow his enemies had extinguished his fire; but immediately drawing on the miraculous resources ever at the command of his class on such emergencies, he breathed fire into a frozen branch from the forest; and it was centuries afterwards attested that the green branches of that forest made excellent firewood.
Another element in the blazon of the Venice of the west is a fish, laid across the stem of the tree, "in base," as the heralds say, but not, as generally depicted, conformable either to their science or that of the ichthyologist. This fish holds in its mouth something like a dish—in reality a ring—and thus commemorates a miraculous feat of the same saint, which has found its way into the romances of the juvenile portion of the reading public, where it is a standard nuisance. Queen Cadyow, whose conduct was of such a character that it is wonderful how any respectable saint could have prevailed on himself to serve her, gives her bridal ring to a paramour. Her husband lures the rival away to the bank of the Clyde, to sleep after the fatigues of the chase, and there, furtively removing the ring, pitches it into the river. The reader knows the result by instinct. St Kentigern, appealed to, directs the first salmon that can be caught in the Clyde to be opened, and there, of course, is the ring in the stomach. This miracle is as common in the "Acta Sanctorum" as in the juvenile romances. It served St Nathalan in such a manner as to preclude the supposition that the saint had invoked it on the occasion. He locked himself into iron chains, and threw their key into the river Dee, in order that he might be unable to open the fetterlock before he had made a pilgrimage to the tombs of St Peter and St Paul; but the water did its duty, and restored the key in the stomach of a fish.
We have naturally many fishing anecdotes connected with the northern saints. Columba is described as out a-fishing one day with a parcel of his disciples, who are characterised as "strenui piscatores," a term which would be highly applicable to many a Waltonian of the present day. The saint, desirous of affording them a pleasant surprise, directs them to cast their net where a wonderful fish was prepared for them; and they drag out an "esox" (whatever that may mean) of wonderful size.
Some of the inhabitants of the deep familiar to these saints were animals of a formidable kind. Columba and a band of his disciples are going to cross the river Ness, when they meet those who bear on their shoulders the body of one who, endeavouring to swim across the same river, had been bitten to death by a monster of the deep. The saint, in the face of this gloomy procession, requires that one of his disciples shall swim across the Ness, and bring over a boat which is on the other side. A disciple named Mocumin, whom the saint had miraculously cured of a bleeding of the nose, confident in the protecting power of his master, pulls off all his clothes save his tunica (whatever that may be—coat, kilt, or leathern shirt), and takes to the water. The monster, who is reposing deep down in the stillness of the profoundest pool, hears the stir of the water above, and is seen to rise with a splash on the surface, and make with distended jaws for the swimmer. The saint, of course, orders the beast back just at the moment when all seemed over, and is instantly obeyed. The characteristics of the monster could not be more closely identical with those of the crocodile or alligator, had the incident been narrated in Egypt or America.
Adventures with such monsters in our northern waters supply many of the triumphs attributed to the saints. St Colman of Drumore actually extracted a young girl alive from the stomach of an "aquetalis bestia." She had been swallowed while standing on the edge of a lake, "camisiam suam lavantem"—washing her chemise, poor simple soul. St Molua saw a monster, of the size of a large boat, in pursuit of two boys swimming unconscious of danger in a lake in the county of Monaghan. He showed good worldly sense and presence of mind on the occasion; for, instead of alarming them with an announcement of their perilous condition, he called out to them to try a race and see which would reach the bank first. The beast, balked of his prey, took in good part an admonition by the saint, and returned no more to frighten boys.
From fishes and aquatic monsters the law of association naturally leads us to the waters themselves. There are throughout the United Kingdom multitudes of wells, still bearing the names of the saints to whom they were dedicated. The legends of miracles performed by their waters, through the intercession of their special saints, are countless. It is, perhaps, because cures effected by the use of waters may be accounted for otherwise than by supernatural intervention, that modern writers of the old faith speak with less reserve of the miracles at fountains than of the others they have to record, and even bring them down to modern times. Many of them may be found recorded in his usual slipshod manner in the amiable pages of Butler—as, for instance, in the life of St Winfrid (November 3), where we are told how "Roger Whetstone, a Quaker, near Bromsgrove, by bathing at Holywell, was cured of an inveterate lameness and palsy by which he was converted to the Catholic faith." Some of the old saints' wells, remote from cities and advanced opinions, are still haunted by people who believe them to be endowed with supernatural healing virtues. It is in Romish Ireland, of course, that this belief has its most legitimate seat; but even in the most orthodoxly-Presbyterian districts of Scotland, a lingering dubious trust in the healing virtues of sanctified fountains has given much perplexity to the clergy.
Some of these fountains are in caverns, and if in any one of these the well falls into a rude-hewn basin like a font, we may be sure that a hermit frequented the cave, and that it was the place of worship of early converts. Such a cave was the hiding-place, after the '45, of the worthy single-minded Lord Pitsligo, no bad prototype of the Baron of Bradwardine. It is entered by a small orifice like a fox's hole, in the face of the rugged cliffs which front the German Ocean near Trouphead. Gradually it rises to a noble arched cavern, at the end of which is the font cut into the stone, where it would catch the outpourings of a small spring. When I saw it long years ago, it was filled with clear living water, which, save when it had been the frugal drink of the poor Jacobite refugee, had probably been scarcely disturbed since the early day when heathen men and women went thither to throw off their idolatry and enter the pale of Christendom. The unnoticeable smallness of many of these consecrated wells makes their very reminiscence and still semi-sacred character all the more remarkable. The stranger in Ireland or the Highlands of Scotland hears rumours of a distinguished well miles on miles off. He thinks he will find an ancient edifice over it, or some other conspicuous adjunct. Nothing of the kind—he has been lured all that distance over rock and bog to see a tiny spring bubbling out of the rock, such as he may see hundreds of in a tolerable walk any day. Yet, if he search in old topographical authorities, he will find that the little well has ever been an important feature of the district—that, century after century, it has been unforgotten; and, with diligence, he may perhaps trace it to some incident in the life of the saint, dead more than 1200 years ago, whose name it bears. Highlanders still make pilgrimages to drink the waters of such fountains, which they judiciously mix with the other aqua to which they are attached. They sometimes mimic the spirit of the old pilgrimage, by leaving behind them an offering at the fountain. I have seen such offerings by the brink of remote Highland springs, as well as in Ireland. The market value of them would not afford an alarming estimate of the intensity of the superstition still lingering in this form in the land. The logic of the depositors probably suggests, that the spiritual guardians of the fountain, though amenable to flattery and propitiation by gift, are not really well informed about the market value of worldly chattels, and are easily put off with rubbish.
A historical inquiry into the worship or consecration of wells and other waters would be interesting. In countries near the tropics, where sandy deserts prevail, a well must ever have been a thing of momentous importance; and we find among the tribes of Israel the digging down a well spoken of as the climax of reckless, heartless, and awful destructiveness. To find, however, how in watery Ireland and Scotland a mere dribblet of the element so generally abounding should have been an object of veneration for centuries, we must look to something beyond physical wants and their supply.
The principal cause of the sanctification of springs must, of course, be explained by the first of Christian ordinances. The spring close by the dwelling or cell of the saint—the spring on account of which he probably selected the centre of his mission—had not only washed the forefathers of the district from the stain of primeval heathenism, but had applied the visible sign by which all, from generation to generation, had been admitted into the bosom of the Church. This might seem to afford a cause sufficient in itself for the effect, yet it appears to have been aided by other causes more recondite and mysterious. Notwithstanding all the trash talked about Druids and other persons of this kind, we know extremely little of the heathenism of the British Isles. The little that we do know is learned from the meagre notices which the biographers of the saints have furnished of that which the saints superseded. It is not their function to commemorate the abominations of heathenism; they would rather bury it in eternal oblivion—premat nox alta—but they cannot entirely tell the triumphs of their spiritual heroes without some reference, however faint, to the conquered enemies.
The earliest recorded conflicts between the new and the old creed are connected with fountains. In one page of the Life of Columba we find the saint, on a child being brought to him for baptism, in a desert place where no water was, striking the rock like Moses, and drawing forth a rill, which remained in perennial existence—a fountain surrounded by a special sanctity. In the next page he deals with a well in the hands of the Magi. They had put a demon of theirs into it to such effect, that any unfortunate person washing himself in the well or drinking of its water, was forthwith stricken with paralysis, or leprosy, or blindness of an eye, or some other corporeal calamity. The malignant powers with which they had inspired this formidable well spread far around the fear of the Magi, and consequently their influence. But the Christian missionaries were to show a power of a different kind—a power of beneficence, excelling and destroying the power of malignity. The process adopted is fully described. The saint, after a suitable invocation, washed his hands and feet in the water, and then drank of it with his disciples. The Magi looked on with a malignant smile to see the accursed well produce its usual effect; but the saint and his followers came away uninjured: the demon was driven out of the well, and it became ever afterwards a holy fountain, curing many of their infirmities. Another miracle, bearing against the Magi, introduces us to one of their number by name, and gives a little of his domestic history. His name is Broichan, and he is tutor to Brud, king of the Picts, with whom he dwells on the banks of the Ness. It might have relieved the mind of the historical inquirer to be told that Brud built for himself the remarkable vitrified fort of Craig-Phadric, which rises high above the Ness, and to be informed of the manner in which its calcined rampart was constructed; but nothing is said on the subject, and Craig-Phadric stands on its own isolated merits, still to be guessed at, without one tangible word out of record or history to help any theory about its object or construction home to a conclusion. One is free, however, to imagine Brud, the heathen king of the Picts, living on the scarped top of the hill, in a lodging of wattled or wooden houses, surrounded by a rampart of stones fused by fire, as the only cement then known. Such we may suppose to have been the "domus regia," whence the saint walked out in a very bad humour to the river Ness, from the pebbles of which he selected one white stone, to be turned to an important use. Broichan, the Magus, had in his possession a female slave from Ireland. Columba, who seems to have held with him such intercourse as a missionary to the Chocktaws might have with a great medicine-man, desired that the Magus should manumit the woman, for what reason we are not distinctly told; but it is easy to suppose strong grounds for intervention when a Christian missionary finds a woman, of his own country and creed, the slave of a heathen priest. Columba's request was refused. Losing patience, he had resort to threats; and at length, driven to his ultimatum, he denounced death to Broichan if the slave were not released before his own return to Ireland. Columba told his disciples to expect two messengers to come from the king to tell of the sudden and critical illness of Broichan. The messengers rushed in immediately after to claim the saint's intervention. Broichan had been suddenly stricken by an angel sent for the purpose; and as if he had been taking his dram in a modern gin-palace, we are told that the drinking-glass, or glass drinking-vessel, "vitrea bibera," which he was conveying to his lips, was smashed in pieces, and he himself seized with deadly sickness. Columba sends the consecrated pebble, with a prescription that the water in which it is dipped is to be drunk. If, before he drinks, Broichan releases his slave, he is to recover; if not, he dies. The Magus complies, and is saved. The consecrated stone, which had the quality of floating in water like a nut, was afterwards, as we are told, preserved in the treasury of the king of the Picts. It has been lost to the world, along with the saint's white robe and his consecrated banner, both of which performed miracles after his death. But the sanitary influence attributed to the water in which consecrated stones have been dipped, is a superstition scarcely yet uprooted in Scotland.