This saint had his weaknesses, those of his creed and time. He would allow no woman on Iona, nor even a cow, for “where there is a cow, there is a woman; and where is a woman—” we know what monks thought of Eve’s daughters. An adjacent islet was given up to a nest of nuns who had fluttered towards this cold halo. So great waxed the fame of Columba’s sanctity that pilgrims sought his retreat from all parts of Western Christendom; and a sore pilgrimage that must have been that ended at the point of Mull, where a miraculously strengthened hail would bring over a boat from the island. Still the saint’s memory looms through a cloud of miracle and fable, behind which we catch the human proportions and qualities of a strong good man, who had such power of winning hearts.
IONA CATHEDRAL
It is possible that his part in the conversion of Scotland has been exaggerated. In his lifetime St. Kentigern was at work among the Cumbrian Britons, and the two evangelists are said to have met at Glasgow. About the time of his death landed in Kent those Roman missionaries who were long on such dissenting terms with the native church that the Anglian saint Guthlac, after spending a night of terror, beleaguered as he believed by Welsh Christians, gave thanks in the morning to find how the assailants of his hermitage had been no worse than devils. The Culdees, whom Presbyterians have claimed as spiritual forefathers free from Popish error, are taken for disciples of St. Columba, though some Roman writers go about to invest them with Augustinian orthodoxy. Into heathen Northumbria also went his missionaries, to encounter those of Rome over a great part of England; and on the east coast the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne grew to be another Iona.
While Scotland went on being dotted with the Culdee chapels and monasteries, Iona became a Christian Mecca, as well as a centre of education and missions. The bodies of princes and chiefs were brought here to be buried in sacred ground, as Persians to-day undertake long perilous pilgrimages to lay the bones of their dead beside those of Hussein or of Imam Reeza, whose tombs, as Iona was, are still sanctuaries of refuge from human justice or revenge. Sixty kings of Scotland, Ireland, and Norway have been counted as buried in this little isle, some of them perhaps since before Columba’s time. Duncan and Macbeth are fabled to lie here side by side; yet when we come to more authentic kings, this royal sepulchre seems no longer in reverence, for even Alexander II., who died conveniently on the island of Kerrera, was carried for burial all the way to Melrose.
There can be no more impressive sight than the burial-ground with its sculptured stones and worn crosses that mark now the undistinguished dust of men who at least “did not expect to be so soon forgotten.” By the twelfth century Cluniac monks had taken the place of the original garrison, more than once broken up by raids of Norse pirates. The oldest building is St. Oran’s Chapel, believed to have been erected by the pious Margaret, Malcolm Canmore’s English queen, who built also the chapel in Edinburgh Castle. The Nunnery appears to be later work, and the Cathedral to date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. These memorials, hastily visited by drenched and sea-sick tourists, make but fragments of the ecclesiastical state that once flourished on Iona. Its monuments came to be rudely treated at the Reformation, when all but two of 360 crosses are understood to have been thrown into the sea by an iconoclastic Presbytery, unless some of them had been transported to the mainland, as perhaps was that fine one preserved at Campbeltown. The memorial chapels seen by Dean Munro at the end of that century have since disappeared. The high altar of white marble still stood at the time of Pennant’s visit. About 1830 vanished obscurely the last of the black stones on which Highlanders of old swore their most binding oaths, perhaps the oldest of all Iona’s relics, once as sacred as the corner-stone of the Kaâba. So late as the English reign of James I., at the prompting of that pacific king, two clans met here to make a solemn covenant of peace after centuries of bloodshed. Now the Cathedral, given up by the late Duke of Argyll to the Church of Scotland, is being restored; and the choir has been already turned into a place of Presbyterian worship for its small congregation. The marble quarries of the island, one hears, are again to be exploited for the adornment of other churches.
INTERIOR, IONA CATHEDRAL
Nine miles to the north of Iona lies Staffa, whose columned caves can hardly have escaped serving as pagan fanes—