The Book-Hunter / A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author

by John Hill Burton

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.