Cenannus is now Headfort in Meath, where Columba erected a monastery. Moen is now Moon, in Kildare.
The renderings of hymns given in the preceding paragraphs will convey some idea of the hymnology of the Gaelic Church. The singing of these Latin compositions awoke echoes for ages along the glens of Gaelic Scotland as well as in the forests of Germany; among the Swiss and Italian Alps, as well as along the sweet hills of Devon and Cornwall. They indicate a practical literary activity which served well its generation; and frequently helped to soothe the relentless spirit of revenge of the Pagan nations of the period.
The primitive Free Church of the Gaels of Britain was an important branch of this powerful missionary Church of the Celts. Its operations and results were largely obscured by successors on the same fields who departed from its methods of work; but recent efforts of impartial investigators, have helped to assign it its proper place in the ancient Christianization of Western Europe. It does not lie within the scope of this work to discuss the character of the organization of this Church of the Gaels. Indeed the question has been already so thoroughly investigated by competent pens that it would be perfectly superfluous to attempt it. To the literary student this period of church history is chiefly interesting on account of the fact that it is through the hands of these devoted workers of those ages that the first fruits of written literature have been handed down to us. These men being our earliest literary artists, we naturally turn with perennial interest to the Christian organizations which some had founded, and in which others were bred.
A small production, some three quarto pages in prose, gives us a picture of a holy brother who might be expected to cultivate the virtues of the Gospel in solitude rather than in the circle of the active community. It is called the “Rule of Calumcille;” and has been found in the Burgundian Library of Brussells. The Rule recommends residence close to a church; a fast place with one door; the company of one attendant only, whose duties must be light; and access to be granted only to those whose converse will be of God and His Testament. The time is to be spent in prayers for those taught and for those dying in the faith. The day is to be divided into three parts, one for prayers, for good works, and for reading respectfully. The work is to be divided into three parts; the first for his own benefit in doing what is needed for his own habitation; the second for the good of the brethren; and the third for that of the neighbours. The work of benefiting his neighbours to consist in giving precepts, writing manuscripts, sewing clothes, or any other profitable industry. The great end to be obtained is that there “be no idleness;” “ut Deus ait: non apparebis ante me vacuus.”
This sentiment of “no idleness” is highly creditable to the ancient Gaelic Christian communities; and if we combine with it another found in one of the lives of Columba,—
“He drank not ale; he loved not satiety:
He avoided flesh;”
we make a clean discovery which absolutely refutes the unneighbourly charges of more southern brethren in our own time which associate Celts, whisky, and idleness too closely and unfairly together. Our early Highland teachers inculcated industry and sobriety; the dangerous powers of whisky were unknown to them; and even the lighter inspirations of ale they eschewed until their own primitive virtues were undermined by contact with the beer-drinking Pagan Norse on the one hand, and in later times with the fiercer spirits which were imported from Teutonic fens on the other. Such are the strange reversals of popular opinions which accurate study of the facts of history unfolds. The alleged idleness of the Gael of the present day, does not appear thus to have any essential connection with the original sin of the race; the development of the quality appears to have taken place in contact with a more sluggish and a less lively people.
In his great work on “English Writers,” Professor Henry Morley writes:—“When darkness gathered over all the rest of western Europe, the churches and monasteries of the British island, first among the Celts and afterwards among the English, supplied, says the Danish scholar [Professor Sophus Bugge], in and after the seventh century, the only shelter and home to the higher studies. The British clergy travelled far in search of books, until in the time of Charlemagne it was from the Church in Britain that the clearest light shone through the western world.” The devotional spirit by which these men were animated, will be fairly illustrated by the renderings of their Latin Hymns contained in this chapter.
It is freely acknowledged that the ancient Free Church of the Scots, even in its golden age, held and practised peculiar tenets which in course of time developed undesirable and even unscriptural fruit. On the other hand, it must be allowed that it adhered for a long period to the main doctrines of evangelical Christianity. From the hymns which we have been considering, and from Patrick’s “Epistle of Coroticus,” and his “Confession,” in which we have something of the nature of a creed or a confession of faith, as well as from other sources, we gather a fair representation of the chief dogmas of its faith. It held and taught the chief doctrines of the Trinity, of the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and of His coming again at the last day to judge all men; and likewise of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to make us sons of God, and heirs of immortality. It held, moreover, the Holy Scriptures to be the Word of God, and used them freely and exclusively as the authority by which all statements of doctrine are to be proved and confirmed. At the same time the doctrine of human merit, purgatory, saint-worship, transubstantiation, papal infallibility, and other distinctive tenets of modern Romanism, find no recognition. While, as we are told by St. Bernard, its followers “rejected auricular confession as well as authoritative absolution, and confessed to God alone, believing God alone could forgive sins,” they would neither give to the Church of Rome the tenths, nor the first-fruits, which of course rendered them “schismatics and heretics” at Rome. Marriage was regarded as a civil rite, and was performed by the magistracy.