Irish and Anglo-Saxons, Americans by birth or by adoption, Catholics and Protestants, there is not one of us who is not interested in a work which tells us from whom, and how, we have inherited our Christian faith. Even Germans will learn in the perusal of these volumes their religious origin; for it was from the British isles that the apostles of Germany went forth to their labors. The English language is the most universally spoken to-day; the sceptre of Britain rules an empire greater than that of Alexander or of any of the Caesars. The latest statistics tell us that there are one hundred and seventy-four millions of British subjects or vassals. The two Indies, vast Australia, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean belong mostly to the Anglo-Saxon race, and feel its influence. But what are all those great conquests compared to these once British colonies, now called North America? Who can foresee the height to which may reach this vigorous graft, cut from the old oak, invigorated by the virgin soil of the new world, and which already spreads its shade over immense latitudes, and which promises to be the largest and most powerful country ever seen? Is it not therefore useful and interesting to study the religious origin of this extraordinary race? Is there an American in heart, or by birth, who is not bound to know the history of those to whom this privileged race owes its having received in so large a measure the three fundamental bases of all grandeur and stability in nations: the spirit of liberty, the family spirit, and the spirit of religion?
The history of the conversion of England by the monks answers all these questions. It comprises the apostleship of the Irish, and of the Roman and Anglo-Saxon elements during the sixth and seventh centuries. The Irish or Celtic portion of the history centres in St. Columba, whose majestic form towers above his age, illustrated by his virtues and influenced by his genius. The Roman element is represented by the monk Augustine, the first apostle of the Anglo-Saxons. Lastly, this race itself enters on the missionary career, and sends out as its first apostle a great man and a great saint, the monk Wilfrid, whose moral beauty of character rivals that of St. Columba. Shortly after these, as it were following in their shadow, walks the admirable and gentle Venerable Bede, the first English historian, the learned encyclopedist, alike the honor and glory of his countrymen, and of the learned of all nations.
We cannot resist the pleasure of giving, though it be but very incomplete and pale, a sketch of the great monk of Clonard, the apostle of Caledonia, St. Columba. [Footnote 2] Sprung from the noble race of O'Niall, which ruled Ireland during six centuries, educated at Clonard, in one of those immense monasteries which recalled the memory of the monastic cities of the Thebaid, he was the chief founder, though hardly twenty-nine years old, of a multitude of religious houses. More than thirty-seven in Ireland claim him as their founder. He was a poet of great renown, and a musician skilled in singing that national poetry of Erin, which so intimately harmonizes with Catholic faith. He lived in fraternal union with the other poets of his country, with those famous bards, whom he was afterward to protect and save from their enemies. Besides being a great traveller, like the most of the Irish saints and monks whose memory has been preserved by history, he had another passion for manuscripts. This passion had results which decided his destiny. Having shut himself up at night in a church, where he discovered the psalter of the Abbot Finnian, Columba found means to make a clandestine copy of it. Finnian complained of it as a theft. The case was brought to the chief monarch of Ireland, who decided against Columba. The copyist protested; anathematized the king, and raised against him in revolt the north and west of Hibernia. Columba's party conquered, and the recovered psalter, called the Psalter of Battles, became the national relic of the clan O'Donnell. This psalter still exists, to the great joy of the erudite patriots of Ireland.
[Footnote 2: The Catholic Publication Society will soon publish The Life of St. Columba, as given in the third volume of The Monks of the West.]
Nevertheless, as Christian blood had flowed for a comparative trifle, and through the fault of a monk, a synod was convened and Columba was excommunicated. He succeeded in having the sentence cancelled; but he was commanded to gain to God, by his preaching, as many souls as he had destroyed Christians in the battle of Cooldrewny. To this injunction his confessor added the hardest of penances for a soul so passionately attached, as was that of Columba, to his country and his friends. The penitent was compelled to exile himself from Ireland for ever. Columba submitted. Twelve of his disciples refused to leave him, and embarking with them on one of those large osier, hide-covered boats which the Celtic peoples were accustomed to use in navigation, he landed on an island called Oronsay. He ascended a hill near the shore, and looking toward the south, perceived that he could still see the Irish coast. He reëmbarked immediately, and sailed in quest of a more distant isle, from which his native land should be no longer visible. He at last touched the small desert island of Iona, and chose for his abode this unknown rock, which he has made a partaker of his own immortality.
We should read in M. de Montalembert's work the eloquent description of the Hebrides, and of that sandy and sterile shore of Iona, rendered glorious by so many virtues. "'We were now treading,' wrote Dr. Johnson, the great moralist of the eighteenth century, 'that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored, and would be foolish if it were possible.'[Footnote 3] And he recited with enthusiasm those verses from Goldsmith's Traveller:
'Stern o'er each bosom reason holds her state,
With daring aims irregularly great.
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;
Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band.
By forms unfashioned, fresh from nature's hand.
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul.
True to imagined right, above control,
While even the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man.' [Footnote 4]
[Footnote 3: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. By Dr. Johnson,]
[Footnote 4: The Monks of the West, vol. iv. book xi. ch. 3.]
Grace had accomplished its work. Arrived at Iona, Columba, one of the most high-spirited and passionate of the Gaels of Hibernia, became a most humble penitent, a pattern of mortification to the monks, the most gentle of friends, and a most tender father. Having no other cell than a log cabin for seventy-six years, he slept in it on the bare ground, with a stone for his pillow. This hut was his oratory and library, into which, after working all day in the fields like the lowest of the brothers, he entered to meditate on the Holy Scripture and multiply copies of the sacred text. He is supposed to have transcribed with his own hand three hundred copies of the gospels. Devoted to his expiatory mission, he commenced by evangelizing the Dalriadian Scots, an Irish colony formed between the Picts of the north and the Britons of the south. This colony was on the western coast of Caledonia and in the neighboring islands, at the north of the mouth of the Clyde, in that tract of country afterward known by the name of Argyle. But these colonists were his countrymen. Soon he was called to lay hands on the head of their chief, thus inaugurating not only a new royalty, but also a new rite, which afterward became the most august solemnity in the life of Christian nations. This consecration of the Scot Aidan as King, by Columba, is the first authentic instance of the kind in the west. Later, crossing the Grampian hills, at the foot of which the victorious legions of Agricola stopped, and venturing in a frail skiff on Loch-Ness and the river which flows from it, he confronted those terrible Picts, the most depraved and ferocious of the barbarians, disputing, through an interpreter, with the Druids, thus attacked in their last retreat. He returned often to these savages, so that he finished, before his death, the conversion of the whole nation, dotting with churches and sanctuaries their forests, defiles, inaccessible mountains, their wild fens and their sparsely peopled isles. The vestiges of fifty-three of those churches are still traceable in modern Scotland, and even the most enlightened Protestant judges of the Scottish bench attribute the very ancient division of parishes in Scotland to the missionary monk of sacred Iona.
He never forgot, in the midst of his labors, his beloved Ireland. He had for her all the tender passion of the exile; a passion which let itself out in his songs, full of a charming melancholy. "Better to die in pure Ireland, than to live for ever here in Albania." [Footnote 5]