Iona’s scenery was ever attractive, with its precipitous cliffs, its dazzling stretches of white shells and sand, its fertile fields, and its grassy hollows. Its natural charms drew visitors from afar and made those dwelling upon its acres content. Even before the name of Christ was uttered, it had been, as the Highlanders called it in their Gaelic tongue, the “Island of the Druids.” It was therefore famous, before it became the centre of Celtic Christianity, and the mother community, whose children were the depositories of the human spirit. From its numerous monastic houses, hundreds of alumni went out as missionaries to convert all northern Britain. In a word, the story of humanity in all the earth is told here. The strata of religions, the deposits of the human soul, are almost as discernible on Iona as are the layers of geology, or the floors of successive cities revealed by the spade, in Egypt or Palestine, in the terpen of Holland or the mounds of Babylon.
Even the humorous side of religion is here discernible to sharp eyes. Some of the carvings in the choir stalls and chisellings of the marble aloft show the joker in stone. The demons are represented as having their fun—and this is equally true in the art of Buddhism in Japan and of mediævalism in Iona. The tower of the church of St. Mary, on this island, has one bit of sculpture representing an angel weighing souls in a pair of scales, one of which is kept down by a demon’s paw. It reminded us of Dr. Franklin’s Yankee characterization of the Dutchman’s trade with the Indians.
Iona was at times so sacred a place, with its scores of monasteries and nunneries, with its small forest of crosses, and with architecture that enthralled by its beauty, that it was for centuries a spot to which pilgrims came from all lands, and in its holy soil kings and nobles longed to be buried; yet it was not free from the robber pagan and the bloody spoiler. The North Sea rovers, from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, descended in the eighth century to plunder, to burn, and to kill. For two hundred years Iona lay desolate, until Queen Margaret restored the desecrated monastery, building the chapel over the site of St. Columba’s grave. Later came the Benedictine monks, who expelled or absorbed the Celtic community. Intermittently the island was the seat of the bishopric of the Western Isles, but at the Reformation the monastic buildings were dismantled by order of the legal authorities. When Dr. Johnson visited Iona in 1773, only two persons on the island could speak English. None could read or write.
Of Iona’s political fortunes the story is brief, the most interesting point to an American being that, when oppression and the severe conditions made life here undesirable or scarcely possible, the people emigrated. From the hardy race, inhabiting this and other of the Western Isles, the United States received a noble contingent, to enrich its grand composite of humanity.
We spent some time in the cemetery called “the Burial Place of Kings,” which is reputed to contain the dust of forty-eight Scottish, four Irish, and eight Danish and Norwegian monarchs, besides many monumental stones. The number of crosses set up on Iona was nearly equal to that of the days of the year. These were standing, up to Reformation times, when most of them were thrown into the sea by order of the Synod of Argyl. Yet a few still remain. The finest are the Maclean’s cross and St. Martin’s cross, both being almost perfect in form, despite centuries of weathering. Both are richly carved with runic inscriptions, emblematic devices, and fanciful scroll-work.
THE KINGS’ GRAVES, IONA
It was certainly a brain stimulant and a heart-warmer to ramble among these ruins. Imagination re-created the scenes in those ancient days when the light of the gospel was brought by a saintly man filled with the spirit of Jesus. We realized, in measure at least, how great was his work and how far-reaching was his influence in winning men to Christ, before Latin and Germanic disputes for mastery had divided the Christian Church. Columba’s coming quickly changed the landscape of pagan Scotland. First in the cities and then in almost every village, the cross, symbol of the sacrificial death of Him who came to give life more abundantly, arose, first in wood and then in enduring stone. The savage people, whose passions and appetites had so closely allied them to the brutes, were transformed and uplifted.
In time the children of the first hearers of the gospel message were converted, not only outwardly to the acceptance of creeds,—which in their scholastic form they could not at first understand,—not only to symbols, which are ever but the shadows of eternal truths, but were inwardly transformed in the renewing of their minds. Gradually they became so changed in heart and life that we, after having seen Christianity in very many of its varied ethnic forms, and met its exemplars in lands not a few, cannot but feel that in the home, the school, and the church, there is no land on earth in which Christianity is more genuine than in Scotland. Between Columba’s homilies and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” long centuries were to pass slowly away. Nothing in literature, or art, or history, or statistics, furnishes so true a picture of the leavening of a whole nation, or illustrates more finely the truth that among believers, even the common people may be “kings and priests unto God,” than this poem of Burns. It is a revelation of “Old Scotia’s grandeur.”