THE opening of the fifth century brought with it changes of transcendent magnitude and importance in Europe. For ages the arms of the South had overflowed the countries of the North, but now the tide of conquest had turned, the North was bearing down on the South, and that haughty. Power which had subjected to her scepter so many tribes and realms, was about to suffer in her turn the miseries of foreign invasion, and taste the bitterness of a barbarian yoke. These changes were preparatory to the erection of a kingdom which was destined to flourish when the victories of Rome had crumbled into dust.

We must here pause in order specially to note the deadlock into which the affairs of the world had come at this great turning- point of its history. Its three leading nations are seen to be unable to advance beyond the point at which they had now arrived. Hence the necessity of bringing new races upon the stage if the human march was to go forward. This extraordinary position of matters must be taken into account and distinctly apprehended if we would intelligently follow the course of succeeding events; and especially if we would understand the place of the Scots in general history, and the part they were selected to fulfill in the cause of Christian civilization and constitutional liberty. It is here that we find the key of modern history.

Till this epoch the business of the world had been left in the hands of the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman. These were its three leading nations. The march of all three was towards the same goal, but they approached it on separate lines. The world’s work was too onerous to be undertaken by any one of them singly, and accordingly we see it partitioned among the three, in fit correspondence with the age in which each flourished, and the peculiar idiosyncrasy with which each had been endowed.

Each rendered a distinct, and, in truth, brilliant contribution to the world’s one work. The Jew came first; for his share of the mighty labor had respect to the foundations. He presented us, although in figure and symbol, with a system of spiritual truth, to which we have been able to make no material addition, and which we accept as by far the mightiest instrumentality for regenerating the race, and building up society. The Greeks followed, furnishing us, by means of their great thinkers, with the laws of thought, and molding for us, by their great orators, the most melodious of the tongues of earth. Last of all came the Roman. After the spiritual and the intellectual had been supplied by his two predecessors, the Roman added the political. He gathered the scattered races into one empire, and taught them to be obedient to one law. So far the work was done, but done only up to a certain point. At this point the workers found themselves arrested, and farther progress impossible to them; but though they left their great task incomplete, the world never can forget what it owes to those who sowed the first seeds of that rich inheritance of truth and knowledge and liberty which awaits it in the future.

These three workers- the Jew, the Greek, the Roman had brought the human family to the confine of a new age, but they were unable to conduct them across the boundary. At the portals of this new era they must demit their functions as the pioneers in the human march, and from the van, which they had occupied till now, they must fall into thereat, and leave to others a work which they were no longer able to carry forward. In truth the very fitness of these three nations to do the world’s work in the times that preceded the advent of Christianity, made them unfit for doing it in the times that followed that great revolution. All three had been engrossed with the forms of knowledge, rather than with knowledge itself. They had seen and handled only the images or pictures of truth. This in process of time produced an intellectual and moral incapacity to apprehend the verities which lay hid beneath the forms and symbols with which they were versant. The Jew would have given us a religion of the letter, but he never would have given us a religion of the spirit. The Greek would have given us a philosophy of syllogism, but never would he have given us a philosophy of fact. And the Roman would have given us a polity shaped by a power outside society, but not a polity springing from forces acting from within- a polity in accordance with the will of Caesar, but not in harmony with the rights and wishes of humanity. In a word, the Jew never would have evolved Christianity, nor the Greek the Baconian philosophy, nor the Roman constitutional government.

Under this incapacity did all three labor, hence the arrest of the world; nor was it possible for it to resume its march till fresh races had come forward to break through the trammels in which long custom had enchained the old nations. The Jew had lived two thousand years amid ceremonial ordinances and ritualistic observances. These had become to him a second nature: they were to him what the senses of seeing, hearing, and handling are to the soul; and should he be cut off from the means by which he held intercourse with the spiritual world, truth would be placed beyond his reach, and he would account himself condemned to dwell in a world of utter isolation. He would have resisted the change as he would have resisted the destruction of truth itself,- for to the Jew the change was equivalent to the destruction of truth. Had it depended on the Jew, the Temple would have been still standing, the sacrifices of bullocks and rams still burning on its altar, and the sublime doctrines of Christianity still shining dimly through the veils of ceremony and type.

His syllogistic philosophy had as completely enslaved the Greek as his ceremonial religion had lettered the Jew; and the former equally with the latter needed emancipation. The Greek was familiar with but the form of wisdom. His philosophy was a philosophy of ingenious speculations and syllogistic reasonings. It assumed as its basis not the ascertained facts of the natural and moral worlds, but the conceptions or dreams which had their birth in the minds of the great thinkers who stood at the head of their respective schools. Lyrics of melting sweetness, epics of thrilling and tragic grandeur, statues of dazzling beauty, philosophies theoretically perfect, only lacking foundation in nature, the loves, revels, and battles of gods and goddesses that did not exist, celebrated in an empyrean, which was as unreal and imaginary as the divinities with which the Greek imagination had peopled it: all this and much more the Greek could and did give us; but a science with enough of truth and substance in it to form a solid basis for the arts of life, such as those which the modern world has at its service, the Greek could not give us, because he turned away from the quarter where alone the materials for such a science are to be found. He refused to look at nature. Shirking the patient induction of facts, and the careful registration of laws, he set his imagination to work, and that enchantress found for him the materials on which his wondrous intellect worked, and out of which it wove these brilliant but baseless philosophies, which dazzled the world before the advent of Christianity.

And so was it as regards the Roman. He excelled all the nations that had been before him in the order and organization of his empire, but that very organization at last fettered his mind, stereotyped all his ideas in that special department of the world’s work which had been committed to him ; and henceforward the farther progress of the race under the Roman became impossible. His empire was but a vast political machine for carrying out the will of one man. His scheme of government took no cognizance of individual rights; it did not train the citizen in independence and selfgovernment; it made no provision for gathering up and combining the myriad wishes of the people into one supreme sentiment or will, and making that the governing power. The day of constitutional and representative government was yet afar off. The despotism of Rome was perhaps the most lenient, the most equitable, and the most moral despotism which has ever, either before or since, flourished upon the earth. It was a despotism, nevertheless, and the more its organization was perfected, the more complete and irresistible that despotism became, being but the vehicle for carrying into effect that one will which the empire made supreme, yet all rights, over all liberties, and over all consciences. The government of Rome, although unrivaled in point of organization among the governments of the ancient world, could, by the very necessity of its constitution, only work downwards,- it never would have elevated the masses into self-government; it never could have given liberty.

Thus all three nations, at the period we speak of, had come into a deadlock. The Jew could not get beyond Moses; the Greek could not advance beyond Plato; and the Roman could not rise above Caesar. The Jew, while the spell of ritualism was upon him, would never have worked his way to the doctrine of Justification by faith. The Greek, bound in the fetters of syllogism, and not daring to stray beyond the narrow confine of his own ratiocination- that unfathomed and inexhaustible well of wisdom in his eyes- never would have given the world the mariner’s compass, the printing press, the steam- engine, and the mechanical and chemical arts, which so abundantly minister to the comforts and elegance’s of modern life. And the Roman, with the yoke of imperialism on his thoughts, would never have introduced the era of free parliaments and constitutional government. Here, then, the world had halted, and over this same spot we should have found it anchored today had not a new objective revelation been made to all three- to the Jew the Cross; to the Greek, Nature; and to the Roman, Society.

But the old nations were not able to enter the new road now opened to them. The Jew disdained to accept the religion of the Cross. The Greek showed equal contempt for the teaching of Nature. And the Roman refused to make his government conformable to the laws and rights of Society. The enchaining power of habit, the blinding prestige of past achievement, and the pride of high attainment, incapacitated all three for compliance with the great intellectual and spiritual revolution, which was needed if the world was to advance. The Greek and the Roman were no more able than the Jew to become as a little child, that they might enter this new kingdom. The Great Ruler, therefore, made choice of a new race, and into their hands was the world’s farther progress committed- a race, which having no past to forget, and no acquisitions to unlearn, might sit down, docile and obedient, at the feet of new and better instructors, and in process of time resume the work at the point where their predecessors had left it.

Such a race was at that hour growing up amid the forests of northern Europe. That race was strong in those very points in which the Greek and Roman peoples were weak. Self- reliance and the passion of individual freedom were powerfully developed in them; and when, as afterwards happened, the Divine graft of Christianity, and the human product of Greek and Roman culture, came to be incorporated with that hardy stock, the result in due course was a race of more varied faculty, and capable of a wider and higher civilization than any nation that had yet flourished on the earth. Hence that great revolution, which divided the ancient from the modern times: a revolution in which the heavens and the earth that had been of old- to use the sublime metaphor in which the Hebrew Seers had foretold that grand transition- were taken down, and the ecclesiastical, the literary and the political firmaments shaken and removed. We behold the world of the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman dissolving in ruins, that the new heavens and the new earth of spiritual Christianity and constitutional liberty may be set up.

THE Scots are missing from the roll of barbarous nations that descended from the North in the fifth century upon the Roman empire and overturned it. Historians have been careful to enumerate the other races that left their homes in the deserts of Scythia at this eventful epoch, and journeyed southward on a mission of transcendent consequence to the world, though unknown to themselves. The Huns, the Vandals, the Lombards, and other nationalities whose existence was unknown till the gates of the North opened and suddenly revealed them to the world, all figure in that terrible drama. But the Scots have been passed over in silence. Yet the truth is that the Scoti ought to have stood at the head of this roll, inasmuch as they formed the van of the procession, and had an important part to play in the great revolution that followed the advent of these races.

This omission on the part of historians is not surprising. The Scots came early, in fact, pioneered the movement. We are accustomed to connect this uprising of the fresh, unbroken, vigorous barbarism of the North upon the effeminate and corrupt civilization of the South with the fifth century. As a general date this may be accepted as accurate, for in that century this great ethnical movement was in full flood, but in truth this upheaval of the nations neither began nor ended in the fifth century. It had been begun before the Christian era. Rome was yet in her zenith: along the vast sweep of her frontier no enemy dared show himself; and, far as her eye could gaze into the wildernesses beyond, sign of danger there was none. Yet even then the first contingent of what was to grow in the future into a myriad host, was on the move, but their march was with steps so noiseless that Rome neither heard nor heeded their advance; and when at last she came to have some knowledge of their peregrinations, the matter had no interest for her. Looking with eyes of pride, she deemed their movements not deserving her notice. The Scots were to her but a tribe of herdsmen and fighters, wandering hither and thither in quest of richer pastures, or it might be of more exciting combats. It was not likely that they would court battle with her legions. With the warrior tribes of Scythia, their neighbors, they might engage, but surely they would never invite destruction by thrusting themselves upon the bosses of her empire; -so did Rome reason. In what a different light would she have viewed the matter had Fate lifted the curtain, and shown her behind this little vanguard the terrible and almost endless procession of barbarous nations that was to follow- the Frank, the Goth, the Suevi, the Ostro- Goth, the Hun, the Vandal, the Lombard, and others from the same mysterious and inexhaustible region. In the southward march of this little company of Scoti the mistress of the world would have heard the first knell of her empire.

The descent of the Scots from the North was divided by considerable interval from that of the other nations. This is another circumstance that has prevented historians viewing the Scottish race as an integral part of the great irruption of the Scythean nations. The Scots left their original settlements probably about the times of the first Caesar; but it was not till the last emperors had filled up the cup of Rome’s oppression, and of the nations’ endurance, that the full stream of northern invasion began to flow. The four or five centuries that intervene betwixt the appearance of the Scots on the scene, and that of the hordes which were the last to issue from the gates of the North, do not affect the character of the movement, or invalidate the claim of the first, any more than it does that of the last, to be ranked as actors in this great providential drama. The Scots opened it in truth. They were sprung of the same stock as those who succeeded them; their dwellings had been placed under the same iron sky; they had buffered with the same northern blasts; they had tasted privation, and learned endurance on the same sterile earth; the same mysterious impulse acted on them that moved the others; and we are shut up to speak of them as part of that great torrent of emigrants which may be variously described as warriors or as missionaries, according as we view the work- destruction or restoration- they were sent forth to execute.

Another circumstance which tended to mislead historians, and to hide from their view the connection of the early Scottish immigration with the great movement which required centuries for its accomplishment, and which was so prolific in ethnical and political changes, was the comparative smallness of the numbers of the Scots. They were a mere handful compared with the swarms- countless as the sands of the sea- that followed them. This hid the importance of the movement from the age in which it took place, and has helped to conceal its peculiar character and preeminent significance from succeeding times. A contemporary historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, speaks disdainfully of the Scoti as “wanderers,” whose migratory steps and shifting encampments it were bootless attempting to follow. Today on this stream, tomorrow on the banks of that, as the necessities of water and pasturage demand, but ever holding on their course, by slow stages, to the south, and summer by summer drawing nearer the line guarded by the victorious standards of Rome. Even should they cross that line, why should Rome take alarm, or tremble for her empire? Her realms are wide enough surely to afford water and pasturage to the flocks of those roaming herdsmen without greatly taxing her own resources. Or should they drop their peaceful pursuits, and transform themselves into warriors, were they likely to cause undue dismay to the legions, or put their valor to any severe test? A capable statesman would have read this apparently trivial incident differently. He would have seen more in it than met the eye; and instead of counting the number of those he saw, he would have essayed to compute the millions or myriads he did not see, and which lay concealed in the dark recesses of the north. The appearance of these roving bands gave sure intimation that there were forces at work in the heart of the Scythean nations that might yet breed danger to Rome. They warned her to set her house in order, for she should die and not live. Who could guess how many swarms, far larger than the present, the same vast, populous, but unknown region might send forth; and having once tasted the corn and wine, the milk and honey of the south, it would not be easy to compel these hungry immigrants to go back to the niggard soils and scanty harvests which they had left behind them.

But able statesmen was just what the Rome of that age signally lacked. It is always so with empires fated to fall. Decay is seen at the council table before it has become manifest in the field. Corruption creeps in among the senators of a State, then discipline and valor forsake its armies. But even had Rome been as plentifully as she was sparingly supplied with sagacious statesmen, it is hard to say whether any forecast could then have been formed of the danger that impended. That danger was new; it was wholly unknown to former ages. Till now the ethnic stream had flowed in the opposite direction. The South had sent her prolific arms northward to people the empty spaces around the pole. That the tide should turn: that the North should pour down upon the South, overwhelming the labors of a thousand years in a flood of barbarism, and quenching the lights of science and art in the darkness of a northern night, was what no one could then have presaged. The Roman sentinel who first descried on the northern horizon the roving tents of the Scottish herdsmen, and marked that morning by morning they were pitched nearer the frontier he guarded, had the coming hailstorm prognosticated to him, but he could not read the portent. He failed to see in these wanderers the pioneer corps of a mighty army, which lay bound on the frozen steppes of the north, but which was about to be loosed, and roll down horde on horde on the fair cities of Italy, and the fruitful fields of the Romans.

In the march of these nations we see the advent of a new age. The world, as we have already said, had stopped, and had a second time to be put in motion. We now see it started on lines that admitted of a truer knowledge and a more stable liberty than it had heretofore enjoyed, or ever could have reached on the old track. But first must come dissolution. Much of what the wisdom and labor of former ages had accumulated had now become mere obstruction, and had to be cleared away. This was a work to which the nations of the classic countries would never have put their hands. So far from destroying, they would have done their utmost to preserve the splendid inheritance of law, of empire, of religion, and of art, which the wisdom, the arms, and the genius of their fathers had bequeathed to them. But no veneration for these things restrained the children of the savage North. The world of Greek art and Roman power, into the midst of which they had been so suddenly projected, fell beneath their sturdy blows.

Like a great rock falling from a lofty mountain, so fell the Gothic tribes upon the ancient world. Codes and philosophies, schools and priesthood’s, thrones, altars, and armies, were all prostrated before this rolling mass of northern barbarism, broken like a potsherd, ground to dust; and thus a political and mythological order of things, which, might otherwise have lingered on the earth for long centuries, and kept the nations rotting in vice and sunk in slavery, was swept away.

It has been customary to raise a wail over the destruction of letters and arts by the breaking in of this sudden tempest. But, in truth, letters and arts had already perished. It was not the Goth that wrought this literary havoc, it was the effeminate and dissolute Roman, it was the sensuous and enslaved Greek. The human intellect was no longer capable of producing, hardly even was it capable of appreciating, what former ages had produced; and never, to all appearance, would the world have recovered its healthy tone but but for the new blood which the northern races poured into it.

Nor had the world lost only its literary and artistic power, it had lost still more signally its moral rigor. The records of the times disclose a hideous and appalling picture. They show us a world broken loose from every moral restraint, greedily giving itself to every form of abominable wickedness, and rushing headlong to perdition. Greek and Roman society was too rotten to sustain the graft of Christianity. It was on that old trunk that it was set at first, and there its earliest blossoms were put forth; but the stock to which it was united lacked moral robustness to nourish the plant into a great tree which might cover the nations with its boughs. That plant was already beginning to sicken and die; the living had been united to the dead, and if both were not to perish the union must be broken, and Christianity set free from its companion which was hastening to the tomb. It was at this juncture that the Goths came down and saved the world by destroying it.

The work of bringing in the new age consisted of two parts. The Old had to be broken up and removed, and over the field thus cleared had to be scattered the seeds from which the New was to spring. This work was partitioned among the newly arrived nations. To certain of them was assigned the work of demolition. To others the nobler part of reconstruction. The fiercer of these tribes were to slay and burn. But when the Hun, the Vandal, and the Goth had done their work, the Scots were to come forward, and to lay, not by the force of arms, but by the mightier power of principles, the foundation of a new and better order of things. But they must, first, themselves be enlightened, before they could be light-bearers to a world now plunged into the darkness of a two- fold night. They had to stand apart, outside the immediate theater on which the tempests of barbarian war were overturning thrones and scourging nations, till the sword had done its work, and then their mission of reconstruction would begin.

It may startle the reader to be told that it is to this little pioneer band of northmen, the Scots to wit, that the modern world owes its evangelical Christianity. This may appear a too bold assertion, and one for which it is impossible to find authority or countenance in history. Let the reader, however, withhold his surprise till he has examined the trains of proof we have to lay before him, and we venture to anticipate that before he has closed the volume he will find himself shut up to the same conclusion, or at least he will find himself much nearer agreement with us than he now deems possible.

The honor of preserving Christianity, and transmitting it to modern times, is commonly awarded to Rome. She, herself, claims to have performed this great office to the nations of Europe. The claim has been so often advanced, and so generally concurred in, that now it passes as true, and is held a fact that admits neither of challenge nor of denial. It is nevertheless a vulgar fallacy. The history of all the ages since the era of the Gothic invasion refuses to endorse this claim, and assigns the honor to another and far humbler society. An error of so long standing, and which has come to be so generally entertained, can be met only by the clear, full, and continuous testimony of history; and this we shah produce as, stage by stage, and century by century, we unfold the transactions of churches and nations. But it may not be amiss to glance generally at the subject here.

What do we see taking place as soon as the Gothic tempests have come to an end, and something like settled order has again been established in Europe? From the sixth century onward pilgrim- bands of pious and earnest preachers are seen traversing the various countries. In the midst of perils, of poverty, and of toil, these scholars and divines- for they have been taught letters and studied scripture at the feet of renowned teachers-have come forth to enlighten races which have been baptized but not instructed, which have bowed before the chair of the Pontiff, but have not bowed before the cross of the Savior. We behold them prosecuting their mission on the plains of France, among the woods of Germany, and in the cities of Italy. Scarce is there tribe or locality in the vast space extending betwixt the Apennines and the shores of Iceland which these indefatigable missionaries do not visit, and where they do not succeed in gaining disciples for the Christian faith. As one generation of these preachers dies off, another rises to take its place, and carry on its work; and thus the evangelical light is kept burning throughout these ages, which were not so dark as we sometimes believe them to have been, and as they certainly would have been but for the exertions of these pious men. The monkish chroniclers have done their best to bury the memory of these simple evangelists, by disguising, or perverting, or wholly expunging their record; but we trace their footsteps by the very attempts of their enemies to obliterate them, as also by the edicts of popes to suppress their missions; and especially do we see their traces in the literary and theological writings they left behind them in the various countries they visited, and which modern research has drawn forth from the darkness of the museums and convents to which they had been consigned, and where for ages they had slumbered. We have a farther monument of the labors of this great missionary host in the training institutions which they planted in France and Germany and the north of Italy, and which existed for centuries as nurseries of missionaries and schools of evangelical light, but which eventually fell as evangelical posts, and were seized and made the foundation of Romish institutions.

Who sent forth these missionaries? From what school or church did they come? Was it Rome which commissioned those evangelists to teach the ignorant and savage tribes she had received within her fold, and on whose persons she had sprinkled her baptismal water, but whose hearts she had not purified by communicating to them a knowledge of the truth? No! these preachers had never visited the “threshold of the Apostles.” Rome disowned them. They had come from the missionary schools of Iona and of Ireland. They were Scotsmen from Ireland and Scotland- the two countries which were at that time the common seat of the Scottish nation.

These northern evangelists soon find coadjutors. As they pass on through the countries of Europe they kindle in the hearts of others the same missionary fire that burns so strongly in their own. Little parties of natives, whose souls their words have stirred, gather round them, and take part with them in their work. We see them opening schools on the Rhine, in the forests of France, and south as far as the Alps; gathering the native youth into them, and having instructed them in divine things, they send them forth to instruct their countrymen. It was thus that the rill of living water from Iona, as it flowed onward, widened into a river, and at last expanded into a flood which refreshed the thirsty lands over which it diffused its waters. These missionaries from the Scottish shores had not a little to do, we cannot doubt, with that remarkable awakening which the eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed in the south of France, and which drew whole populations to the Evangelical faith. Along the foot of the Alps sounded forth the same gospel which had been preached on the shores of the lake of Galilee in the first century; and the provinces of Languedoe and Dauphine became vocal with the lays of the Troubadours, who published, in their rich and melodious language, the evangelical tenets. Next came the sermons of the Barbes; and lastly there appeared in the field a yet more potential instrumentality, which at once quickened and consolidated the movement. This was the translation of the New Testament into the Romance language; believed to be the earliest vernacular version of modern times. The printing press was not then in existence; and copies of the Romance New Testament could be produced not otherwise than by the skill of slow and laborious scribes: but a speedier and wider diffusion was given the truths of the inspired volume by the traveling Troubadours, who recited them in song in the towns and villages of southern France. Barons, provinces and cities joined the movement, and it seemed, as if in obedience to the summons sent forth from Iona, the Reformation was to break out, and the world to be spared three centuries of spiritual oppression and darkness.

But the morning which it was believed had already opened, was suddenly turned into the “shadow of death.” The most astute of all the retired chiefs who have ruled the world from the Vatican now stood up. With Innocent

III. came the crusades. Armies of soldiers and inquisitors poured down from the Alps to extinguish a movement which menaced the kingdom of Rome with ruin. The smiling provinces of Languedoc and Dauphine were converted into deserts. The crusaders, armed with sword and torch, reddened the earth with blood, and darkened the sky with the smoke of burning towns. But this terrible blow did not extirpate this evangelical movement. In countries more remote from the seat of the Papal power, the missionary still dared to go forth sowing the good seed; and here and there, in convents, or in forests, or in the shady lanes and nooks of city, individual souls, or little companies, enlightened from above, fed in secret on the heavenly bread, and quenched their thirst with living water. So did matters continue till the days of Wycliffe. Wycliffe and his Lollards took up the work of the Elders of Iona. After Wycliffe came John Huss; and after Huss came Luther, and with the rising of Luther the darkness had fulfilled its period. Before expiring at the stake, Huss had foretold that a “hundred years must revolve,” and then a great voice would be heard, and to that voice the nations would give ear. The words of the martyr did not fall to the ground. The century passed on amid the thunders of the Hussite victories. And now the number of its years are complete, and the skies of Europe are seen to brighten, not this time with an evanescent and transitory gleam which after awakening the hopes of men is to fade away into the night, but with a light that is to wax and grow till it shall have attained the splendor of the perfect day. Such are the historic links that connect the first missionary band that is seen to issue from Iona in the seventh century, with the great army of evangelists and teachers, with Luther at their head, which makes its appearance in the sixteenth century.

What share has Rome in this work? Her claim is, that she is the successor of the apostles, and that to her the nations were committed, that she might feed and rule them. Where is the seal and signature of this? If she is the Light of the world, and its one Light as she claims to be, it must be just as easy to trace her passage along the ages as it is to trace the path of the sun in the firmament. The one can no more be hidden in history than the other can be hidden in the sky- their beams must reveal both. Where is the splendor Rome sheds on the World? We do not mean the splendor of power, of wealth, of authority; of that sort of magnificence there is more than enough: but where is the splendor of knowledge, of piety, of truth, of holiness? We see her exalting her chief bishop to the throne of Caesar, and, to maintain his state as a temporal monarch, enriching him with the territories, and adorning him with the crowns of three kings whom she had conquered by the arms of the Franks. Entered on the road of worldly ambition the Roman church makes for herself a great position among the princes and nations of Europe. She has armies at her service; her riches are immense, her resources are boundless; but what use does she make of her brilliant opportunities and vast influence? We see her building superb cathedrals, setting up episcopal thrones, loading her clergy with wealth and titles; but what efforts does she make to instruct and Christianize the ignorant and superstitious nations of the north who had now come to occupy southern Europe, and whom she had received within her pale? Where are the mission- schools she founds? where are the preachers she sends forth? and where are the copies of the Scriptures which she translates and circulates? The new races, though under the crook of the Christian shepherd, are still substantially the same in heart and life as when they lived in their native forests. They have been led to the baptismal font, and entered on the church rolls, but other Christianization they have not received from Rome.

From the fifth century onward any assistance which Christianity received from the Church of Rome was incidental. The order established at the beginning was Christianity first, and the church second. But after the fifth century, to take the latest date, that order was completely inverted. Henceforward it was the church first, and Christianity second. The main and immediate object was lost sight of. Instead of a spiritual empire which should embrace all nations, and be ruled by the scepter of the Heavenly King, Rome aspired to build up a monarchy which should excel that of Caesar, with a loftier throne for her earthly head, and wider realms for her sway, and she recognized Christianity only in so far as it might be helpful to her in the execution of her vast project. She soon came to see that an adulterated Christianity would serve her purpose better than the pure and simple gospel, and she now began to work her way steadily back to old paganism. It was the speediest way of procuring reverence in the eyes of barbarous nations, and of reconciling them to her yoke. These were the conversions which illustrated the power of the “church” in the sixth and seventh centuries.

This was the Christianity which the Church of Rome propagated east and west, and which she transmitted to modern times. This was the Christianity which she sent Boniface to preach to the Germans; and this, too, was the Christianity which she missioned Augustine and his monks to proclaim to the Saxons. This is the only Christianity which we find in the Church of Leo X., at the close of the dark ages, when the new times were about to open in the Christianity which Luther found partly in the Old Bible of the Erfurt Library, and partly in the proscribed doctrines of Wycliffe and Huss. The Christianity of the age of Leo X. was Paganism. The demoniac worship and hideous vices of the age of the Caesars would have been rampant in Europe at this day, but for the great missionary enterprise of the seventh and following centuries which had its first inception in the school and church of Icolmkill. An utter arid desert would the middle ages have been but for the hidilcn watcrs, which, issuing from their fountain- head in the Rock of Iona- smitten like the ancient rock that the nations might drink- flowed in a thousand secret channels throughout Europe. True, there were individual souls who knew the truth and fed upon it in secret, and who lived holy lives. But they were the exceptions, and their fight is all the sweeter and lovelier from the dark sky in which they are seen. We speak of the general drift and current of the Roman Church. The set of that current, as attested by the policy of her popes, and the edicts and teaching of her councils, was away from Apostolic Christianity, and steadily and with ever increasing velocity and force towards the paganism of old Rome. The laudations which the monkish chroniclers have pronounced on the Roman Church can avail but little in the face of the public monuments of the times which are overwhelmingly condemnatory of that church. These chroniclers naturally wished to glorify their own organization, and their knowledge of Christianity being on a par with that of their church, they wrote as they believed. But we cannot make the same excuse for later historians, who have been content to repeat, one after the other, the fables of the monkish writers. They ought to have looked with their own eyes, instead of using the eyes of the “holy fathers,” and they ought to have interpreted more truthfully the monuments of history, which are neither few nor difficult to read; and if they had done so they would have been compelled to acknowledge, that if Christianity has been preserved and transmitted to us, it has been preserved and transmitted in spite of the efforts of Rome, continued through successive centuries, and perseveringly put forth to disguise, to corrupt, and to destroy the Christian faith.

There is another service which the laudators of the Roman Church have credited her with, but which we must take leave to challenge. She preserved and transmitted, say they, letters and arts. They are loud in praise of her fine genius and the patronage she lavished on men of letters, and they are pleased to compare her taste and enlightenment with the Vandalic barbarism, as they style it, of the Reformation. History tells another tale, however. The unvarnished fact is, that under the reign of Papal Rome, letters and arts were lost, and what the “church” suffered to be lost to the world she never would have been able to recover for it. The vulgar imagination pictures medieval Europe astir from side to side, with busy hives of industrious monks, who devote their days and nights to original studies, or to the transcription of the writings of the ancients. The picture is wholly imaginary. We see the monks busy in their cells; but about what are they busy? With what occupations do they fill up the vacant spaces in the weary routine of their daily functions? Who are their favorite authors? What books lie open before them? Of this learned and studious race, as the imagination has painted them, few have Latin enough to understand the Vulgate. Not one of them can read a page of the Greek or Hebrew Bible. The sacred tongues have been lost in Christendom. The great writers of Pagan antiquity have no charms for the ecclesiastics of that age. They take the parchments to which the grand thoughts of the ancients had been committed, and to what use do they put them? They “palimpsest” them, and over the page from which they have effaced the glorious lines traced by a Homer or a Virgil, they gravely write their own stupid legends. It is this they preserve letters! What fruit has come of the toils of the laborious race of school- men, who flourished from the twelfth to the fourteenth century? The modern world has long since pronounced its verdict on that mass of ingenious speculation which they have transmitted to us, fondly believing that they were leaving a heritage which posterity never would let die. That verdict is-” rubbish, simply rubbish.” It is utterly worthless, and is now wholly disused, unless, it may be, to back up a papal brief, or to furnish materials for the compilation of a text- book for some popish seminary. A few names belonging to those ages have survived; but the great multitude have gone into utter oblivion. Bede, and Anselm, and Lafranc, and Bernard, and Aquinas, and Abelard, and a few more have escaped extinction. But what are these few when distributed over so many ages! What are six or a dozen stars in a night of a thousand years!

The truth is that we owe the revival of letters to the Turk; but the sense of obligation need not oppress us, seeing the service was done unwittingly. It was no part of the Turk’s plan to make it day in the West, when his arms plunged the East into night: yet this was what happened. When Constantinople fell in the fifteenth century, the scholars of the Greek empire sought refuge in Europe, carrying with them the treasures of antiquity. These they scattered over the West. A new world was unfolded to the eyes of men in Europe. The original tongues of the Scriptures, Hebrew and Greek, were recovered. The immortal works of ancient Greece and Rome were again accessible. These were eagerly read and studied: thought was stimulated, mind strengthened, the age was illuminated by a new splendor, and modern genius, kindling its torch at the lamp of ancient learning, aspired to rival the great masters of former days. The Reformation arriving in the following century the movement was deepened, and its current directed towards a higher goal than it otherwise would ever have attained. But it must be noted that the Renaissance broke on no Europe bathed, as the result of the genial patronage of Popes, in the splendor of letters and arts; it rose on a Europe shrouded in intellectual and spiritual darkness. We must except Celtic literature and art, of which many monuments still remain scattered up and down in the museums and libraries of Europe,- the attesting proofs of the refinement that accompanied the great missionary enterprise of which we have spoken. This Celtic art was indigenous to Scotland, and in simple beauty was excelled by no art of any country or age. But the new learning which the Renaissance brought with it found only a limited number of patrons and disciples among the hierarchy of Rome. We must go to the camp of the Reformation to find the scholars of the age. At Wittenburg, not at Rome, was the true seat of the Renaissance. The Grecians and Hebraists, the jurists, historians, and poets of the time are found among the reformers. The court of Leo X. was rich in dancers, musicians, players, jugglers, painters, courtesans, but it had little besides to boast of. When the Pope sought among his theologians for some one to proceed to Germany and extinguish the rising flame of the Reformation, he could find only Dr. Eck and Cardinal Cajetan, and the armor of these champions was shivered at the first onset of Luther, and they were fain to shelter themselves from the piercing shafts of his logic behind the aegis of the papal authority. The Pope can hardly claim Raphael and Michael Angelo. True, they worked for him, and took his wages- as they were entitled to do- but they declined submission to his creed. The same may be said of the two earlier and mightier names, Dante and Petrarch: they were Protestants at the core. Rome meted out persecution to them when alive, and appropriated their glory when dead. To do the Popes justice, however, they have enriched the world with one work of prodigious magnitude, the Bullarium, to wit. It is a monument of their labor; we wish we could add, of their charity.

It is with sincere regret that we find ourselves unable to write things of a “Church” which has stood so long before history, which has occupied so unrivalled a position, and which has enjoyed unequaled opportunities of benefiting the world. But we dare not credit her with services which she never performed, nor award her praise which is the due of others. The hour draws nigh when she must descend from the place she has so long occupied. Her descent into the grave is determined by a law as fixed and unalterable as that which brings the mid- day sun in due course to the horizon. Seen in the light of that terrible hour, even she must remoter that the record of her past should contain so little to awaken in her the hope that the nations will mention her departure, and that the ages to come will mention her name with respect and reverence.

WE have seen the Goths summoned from their native forests to shake into ruin the “heavens” and the “earth” of the ancient world. These structures had served their end, and must now be removed to make room for a political and social constitution better fitted for the development of the race, and the wider and more varied career on which they were about to enter. So vast a change could not be accomplished without the destruction of much that was intrinsically valuable, as well as of much that was no better than superannuated lumber. It was a world that was to be destroyed. The authority of ancient schools, the sanctity of ancient religions, and the prestige of ancient empires, round which had gathered the glory of arms and of arts- on all had doom been pronounced, and all must go down together into destruction, and lie whelmed in a common ruin. Like the house of the leper, the old world of Paganism and paganized Christianity must be razed to its very foundations, its stones and timber removed, and the ground on which it stood purified by fire, before the new structure can safely be set up.

For two whole centuries the sky of Europe was darkened by storm after storm. The northern hail did its work with impartial and unpitying thoroughness. It fell alike on Pagan shrine and Christian sanctuary, on Arian and orthodox, on the man of equestrian rank and the tiller of the soil, on the proud trophies of war and the beautiful creations of genius. What the Hun had spared the Vandal destroyed, and what escaped the rage of the Vandal perished by the fury of succeeding hordes. The calamity was tremendous, and seemed irreparable. Yet no shock less terrible could have lifted the world out of the groove in which it had been working three thousand years, in the course of which it had so stereotyped its methods, both of thought and of action, that progress had become impossible to it. If affairs had been left to their ordinary course, instead of pushing boldly on into the future, the human race would have dwelt with morbid tenacity upon its past, ever attempting to come up to the tide- mark of former achievement, but ever falling short of it, yet working on under a growing languor, till, wearied out by its abortive efforts, it would have sunk at last into the slumber of senility and dotage.

We have seen races first stagnate, then rot, and finally pass out of sight. “Turkey is dying for want of Turks.” The exhaustion, physical, intellectual, and moral, which is rapidly converting into a desert a region once so populous in men and cities, and still so highly favored by nature, would have been the fate of both the Eastern and Western worlds. The work of Rome in years to come would have been to bury the nations she had conquered; and this task performed, there would have remained to her but one other, even that of digging her own grave and celebrating her own obsequies. This catastrophe, which so surely impended over the world, was averted by the terrific blasts which rushed down upon the dying nations, bringing life upon their wings, by mingling or replacing the corpse- like men with new races, whose bodies were hardy, whose minds wore no fetters, who courted danger, loved freedom, and who saw before them the inspiring vision of a grand future.

A comprehensive survey of the whole terrible drama, from the first bursting of the northern barrier to the final settlement of the ten Gothic kingdoms, warrants the conclusion that the latter and nobler half of the work, that even of building up and restoring, was allotted to the Scots. The other races, it is true, were permitted to share so far in the good work of restoration, though the burden of their mission was mainly to destroy. The Franks, the Lombards, and the Ostro- Goths set up in their several provinces the landmarks of political order after the deluge had subsided. The new Italian race resumed the work of the ancient Greeks, following them longo intervallo in the arts of music, of sculpture, and of painting. The Franks, too, though not till after the renaissance, aspired to imitate the old masters in the drama, in history, and in philosophy. The schoolmen of the twelfth and the succeeding century strove to awaken the mind of Europe from its deep sleep, by speculations and discussions which were as ingenious and subtle as they were unquestionably barren of fruit. But in truth the glory of these ages was outside the Gothic world. It was then while the modern European intellect lay folded up, or rather had not yet opened, that the Saracenic genius blossomed. The renown of this people in arms was succeeded by a yet higher fame won in the fields of the severer sciences. To their knowledge of algebra and chemistry they added an enviable acquaintance with ancient letters and learning, and no country did they conquer on which they have not left the marks of their original intellect and their exquisite taste. All these laborers contributed to the setting up of the modern world. And yet into how small a compass have all these labors now come. The Saracenic noon, which shed a short but brilliant day on the south of Europe. and the north of Africa, has set in the night of Islam. The political institutions of the Goths, found to be incompatible with the modern liberties, are now in course of removal. Even their architecture, the earliest and the loveliest product of the northern mind, is unsuited for a worship in spirit: and its imposing majesty and grandeur can never again be united with utility unless adoration should be replaced with pomp, and a worship of soul by a ceremonial performed solely by the body. But there is one notable exception to the stamp of futility and transitoriness borne by all the labors of the world from the fifth to the fifteenth century. And these were ages during which man never rested. He toiled and warred: for in truth, there was a seed of unrest at the heart of the nations, a principle of agitation at the center of Europe, which made it impossible that its kingdoms should know repose. This incessant conflict and friction would have worn out the world a second time but for one remarkable fact, which merits our attention; for it is here that we discern the first signs that the storm is to abate, and that out of the night of dark ruin is to emerge the fair morning of a new creation.

Among the new races now occupying Europe, there was one race of marked and peculiar idiosyncrasy. This race had been the filet to leave their original country- the spacious region which stretched northward from the Rhine and the Danube, and which was then the dwelling- place of numerous but as yet nameless nations. There the earth, held in the chains of winter, save for a brief month or two in the year, brings few of its products to maturity; but the same rigors that stunt the creations of the vegetable world, nourish into strength the body of man. From this land of shrubless plains and icy skies came the Scots, with frames of iron, and souls of singular intensity and ardor. To care for their flocks, or do battle with their enemies, was alike easy and welcome to them. Today, it was the more peaceful part of the shepherd or husbandman which they were called to enact; tomorrow, it was that of the invader and warrior. Thus did they journey onward: feeling the attraction which every new day brought with it of richer pastures, and fearing no enemy who might dispute their advance. Their wandering steps brought them to the Rhine. Its banks were not yet clothed with the vine, nor its waters reddened with the slaughter which Caesar was to carry into this region of physical beauty, but tragic memories, at a future day. An extemporized fleet of canoes and rafts transports their families, their camp equipage, and their numerous herds across the “milk- white” river: and now the tops of the Vosges attract their eyes and draw them onward. From the summit of these hills the grassy plains of Gaul are seen spreading out at their feet. Their flocks now depasture the plains which the Soane and Rhone water, and on which the Burgundians are afterwards to find a seat. The Pyrenees are the limits of their farthest wanderings to the south, and from the shores of Spain they pass across the sea to Ireland. in that thinly- peopled country they find room for themselves, and abundant pasturage for their flocks,- and here their long journey terminates; but only for the time, for after a few centuries they cross the channel to a land destined to be their final home, and to bear permanently their name.

By- and- by this people began to addict themselves to other pursuits. In the parts into which they have come the first disciples of the gospel, fleeing from the sword of the Roman emperors, have found refuge. From these early Christians they learn a purer faith than any they have brought with them from their northern home. It is now that it begins to be seen that to them a higher mission has been assigned than to the other tribes, which by this time have begun to pour down upon the Roman empire. To the latter it had been said, “Go scatter the fires of judgment over the earth;” to the Scots was the command given, “Go forth and sow the seeds of new and better institutions.” For a work of this importance a special preparation was needed. The seed with which the fields, plowed by the sword, was to be sown, had to be got ready. A remote and solitary retreat, from which the sound of battle and the wrangle of the schools were shut out, must be found for the future “of Europe.” With a view to this the Scots were not permitted to settle within the limits of the empire. They were passed on from country to country, and at last were compelled to fix their permanent home at what was styled “the extremities of the earth.” There they could pursue without distraction their work of preparing the seed for their future sowing. The rising glory of the Roman church could not dazzle them; the Greek and Oriental philosophies, which had begun again to fascinate so many minds, could not withdraw them from the study of that one Book with which they were here shut in. Their thoughts were left free; their conclusions were unfettered; and their theology, drawn from its original source, was the same with that which the twelve fishermen had brought from the shores of Galilee in the first century. Christianity had lost its power in the schools of Alexandria and Jerusalem; but it recovered its first purity and vigor in the silence of Iona; and, when all was ready, its disciples came forth from their school amid the western seas to preach throughout Europe a purified and reinvigorated gospel. It is the men whom we see in the seventh and following centuries traversing Europe in the simple attire of sandals, of pilgrim staff, and long woolen garments, who turned the tide a second time in the great conflict betwixt Christianity and Paganism. Victory had forsaken the standards of Christianity in the seats of her first triumphs. The theories of Origin had covered the East with anchorites; Rome was planting the West with colonies of monks. From the school of Iona came forth missionaries and teachers who laid anew the foundations of law and order. These were the first builders, after the Gothic deluge, of the “new heavens and the new earth,” wherein were to dwell the inductive sciences, the constitutional liberties, and a purified Christianity; and, wherever in after ages these blessings shall extend, it will be acknowledged that the march of the new civilization was led by the missionaries of Iona.

Other causes, too, operated in the way of perfecting the isolation of the Scots during this eventful and formative period of European history. At nearly the same time when the Romans were taking their final departure from Britain, the Scots were crossing the Irish Channel to take possession of that country which was to be the permanent seat of their nation. Immediately consequent on these movements, came another great change which tended still farther to limit, if not extinguish for the time, the intercourse betwixt Scotland and the Continent, and especially betwixt Scotland and that city which was now to reign by her arts as her predecessor had reigned by her arms. The Frank rushed down and occupied Gaul. Next came the Goth, who pushed his bands across the Pyrenees into Spain. Thus, suddenly a wall of barbarism arose between the Scots and the nations of the Continent. That wall kept them separate for well nigh two centuries. The cessation of intercourse betwixt them and their continental neighbors is strikingly marked by the mystery, and even awe, with which the writers of the period refer to Britain when it happens to them to mention its name. They speak of it as a land which men trembled to visit, which was overhung by a cloud like that of night, and in which walked the doleful shapes which haunt the darkness. But, in truth, nothing better could have happened for British Christianity. Barbarous tribes were rushing to and fro upon the continent of Europe, giving its cities to sack, its fields to devastation, and extinguishing the lights of human learning and divine revelation. In Rome, the ancient saying was being fulfilled, “the day goeth away.” The churches, now beginning to gather beneath her scepter, sat in deep eclipse. She had wandered from the evangelical path, and could not show the true road to others. Nevertheless, in proportion as she became unfit to lead, the more ambitiously did she aspire to that high office. It was at this moment, when the prestige of her great name, and the arts she had begun to employ, might have wielded a seductive influence upon the Christians of Britain, that this partition wall of heathen barbarism suddenly rose between them and Rome. For two whole centuries they were shut in with the Bible- the book which Augustine boasted had in his day been translated into all the languages of the world. They drew their system of Christian doctrine from the Scriptures, and they framed their simple ecclesiastical polity on rules borrowed from the same divine source. They asked Rome to tell them neither what they should believe, nor how they should govern themselves. They had found a better instructor, even the Spirit speaking in the Scriptures; and they neither owed nor owned subjection to any authority on earth.

These two centuries of isolation were a singularly fruitful period in Britain, and in particular in the northern half of the island. They were a spring- time thrice welcome after the long dark winter of heathenism which had gone before. Christianity, indeed, had been planted in the country some centuries previously, but its organization was feeble, the times were unsettled, the spirit of ancient Paganism was still in the air; and, as the result of these hostile influences there had set in a period of decay. But now there came a second morning to Scottish Christianity. That morning broke on our country not from the Seven Hills; it descended upon it from the skies. Vigorous evangelistic agencies sprang up, one after the other, on our soil, by which the Christianization of our land was carried to its northern- most shore.

The tempests of Gothic invasion were overturning the Roman empire in continental Europe; and although it could not be said to be peace in Britain, yet, compared with the furious storms that were raging abroad, the convulsions that agitated the atmosphere of our country might almost be termed a calm. We had no Attila or Alaric, but the Picts from the north, and Scots from Ireland, were making periodic raids into the British kingdom of Strathclyde; and the pagan Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, were ravaging the eastern border of England. Nevertheless, in the midst of these convulsions and alarms, the good work of evangelization went on in our land, and the foundations of the Christian Church were laid deeper than before.

Great Christian individualities now appear on the historic stage. Of some the names still survive; and we can form to ourselves a tolerably well-defined picture both of the men and the work which they did. At the earlier epoch, that is, the first Christianization of Scotland, although we were conscious that the light was growing, we could not discern the agencies by which it was being spread. But it is different now. Great personalities stand out before us in connection with the evangelization of our country. Simple in life and courageous in spirit, they are seen prosecuting their work with devoted zeal in the midst of manifold confusions and perils. We see them establishing centers, from which they attack and subjugate the heathenism of the surrounding district. We see them kindle with strategic tact a line of lights at certain intervals from end to end of our country; and the evangelic day steadily grows in brightness from the appearance of the first beacon on the shores of the Solway; to that greater lamp which burned at Iona, and in such splendor, that its light, shining beyond the shores of Britain, penetrated the darkness of Gaul, of Germany, and of regions lying still farther north.

No authority outside our island, no foreign church or bishop, originated or directed this movement. It arose on our own soil, and was carried out by our own sons. Its authors sought no permission to preach, to baptize, to plant churches, and to rule them, even from Rome. Their anointing was from a higher source. One of the earliest evangelists, as we shall afterwards see, is reputed to have visited Rome, with what benefit to himself or to his work is not apparent; but with this exception, the early Scottish preachers of the gospel learned it from the Bible, sitting at the feet of native doctors, who sent them forth to teach others so soon as they judged them qualified and to whom they returned to tell how they had sped in the discharge of their commission.

Thus the Church of Scotland, placed in isolation, and growing up under native tutorship, was independent from the first. She was free born. It never occurred to her to ask right to exist from any foreign church whatever. She found that fight in her Heaven- bestowed charter; and the confirmation of a hundred pontiffs, or a hundred councils, would not have added one particle of weight to it. She honored the Church of Gaul, and she honored the Church of Rome, though her esteem of the latter might have been less, had she stood nearer to it and known it better; and she adopted what she believed to be good wherever she found it; but she called no church “mistress” in the way of framing herself on its model, much less of submitting to its government.

While affirming the historic fact of the independence of the British churches of the period, we must add that it does not concern us to establish that the early Church of Scotland was not prelatic; nor does it even concern us to establish that it was Presbyterian. The men of that day are not our rule; their opinions and their actings do not bind us. We go higher-higher in time, and higher in authority- for examples to follow, and models on which to frame ourselves. It is the pattern shown to us on the page of the New Testament, and it alone, with which we have to do. There is our exampler. The early Scottish evangelists may have done right or they may have done wrong; that determines nothing as regards the divinely appointed method of conducting the affairs of what Holy Scripture calls the “kingdom of heaven.” We have here to do with the question only as a historic one. And all history attests that the plan of evangelization adopted by the earliest founders of the Scottish Church was simple, that it was the plan which they judged best adapted to the circumstances of their country, and that in following it out they acted with conscious and perfect independence of all exterior authority. Details will come before us afterwards. Meanwhile it deserves our notice, that by the opening of the seventh century the Church of Scotland was so consolidated in both her doctrine and her autonomy, that she was able to resist the wiles of Rome, which now, the wall of separation thrown down, approached her more closely than ever, and in vastly enhanced power. The stamp of independence impressed thus early on the Scottish Church she long continued to retain. Like the disciple, when she was “young she girded herself and walked whither she would ; “like him too, when she was old, she stretched out her hands and another bound her, and carried her whither she would not. But the memory of her youth returned: the spirit of old days descended upon her; and under the influence of that spirit the fetters on her arms became but as “green withs,” and rising up she came forth from captivity to challenge more boldly than ever her birthright, which was Freedom.

THE breath of a new life was moving over the land. This new life created new men. The new men constituted a new society. Till this time hardly had there been social life in Scotland. There had been chiefs, clans, nationalities, and these nationalities had formed combinations and alliances for war; but the elements which conspire for the creation of social and civil life were lacking. Each man in his innermost being dwelt apart. Christianity, by imparting a common hope, brought men together, and summoned into being a new and powerful brotherhood. Around this new society, all interests and classes, all modes of thought and of action began to group themselves. On this root grew up the Scotland of the following ages. Three great personalities- great they must have been since they are seen across the many ages that have since elapsed- lead us onward into the wide field of Scottish history.

The first Scottish individuality that stands out distinct and bold before us is NINIAN. f176 He was born in Galloway towards the middle of the fourth century; the exact year of his birth, no biographer has ventured to fix. A Briton by blood, he was a subject of the emperor by birth, seeing his native district was comprehended in the Roman province of Valentia, of which the boundaries were the Clyde on the north, and the Solway or Roman wall on the south. On the west it extended to the Irish Sea, and on the east it was coterminous with the Roman province of Bernicia. Ninian’s father was a British king. So has it been affirmed. But we have not been told where the dominions of this king lay, and in the absence of any information on the point it is not easy to conjecture. The limits of the Roman empire extended at that time to the shores of the Clyde; and it seems vain to look for the kingdom of Ninian’s royal father on the south of that river. And it would seem equally vain to look for it on the north of it; for beyond the Clyde was the region of the Picts. There seems, therefore, no room for such a potentate as some have conjured up to grace the descent of the earliest of Scottish evangelists. “When you hear of Ninian being a king’s son,” says Alford, naively, “consider that it is the language of legendaries who are very liberal in bestowing that title. By it they understood the princes and petty chiefs of the provinces of whom Britain in every century had plenty.” The statement of Camerarius, that he was the son of a small chieftain, best accords with the facts of his life as well as with what is known regarding the state of society at the time. It was evidently no common home in which Ninian grew up. His education had more than the usual care bestowed upon it. He enjoyed advantages of home training and foreign travel which would never have fallen to his lot had he been peasantborn.

The landscape on which the youthful eyes of the future evangelist rested was thinly inhabited and poorly cultivated, and apt, when the scud came up the Solway from the Irish Sea, to look a little gloomy. It was a rolling country of knolls and Woodlands and grazing grounds, traversed by silvery rivulets which flowed into the Solway, beyond whose broad placid stream rose the dark hills of Westmoreland. It was dotted, moreover, by the mud huts, or dry- stone houses of the inhabitants. In the midst of these poor abodes there rose, but at wide intervals, edifices of a somewhat more pretentious character. These more imposing structures were churches; and they owed their attractiveness rather to the contrast they offered to the humble dwellings around them, than to ally grace of architecture, for their construction was of the simplest and rudest kind. Their wall of wattles, plastered with clay, was surmounted by a roof of thatch. So humble were the sanctuaries of the early Britons.

The district had already been Christianized. It had now for some centuries been under the civilizing influences of the Romans, but its religious life had ebbed of late, and the sway of Rome was now becoming dubious and intermittent. As a consequence, the inhabitants passed their lives amid frequent alarms and wars. The Picts and Scots hovered on their northern border, ever on the watch for a favorable opportunity for a raid into the debatable land betwixt the two walls. Such opportunities were of but too frequent occurrence, as the wretched inhabitants knew to their cost. The midland Britons had leaned for defense on the sword of Rome; the Roman Power was now about to withdraw; and left without protection in the presence of fierce and warlike enemies, the Britons greatly needed the invigorating power of a revived Christianity to inspirit them to withstand their invaders. It would still farther tend to the security and quiet of the Britons if they should carry the olive branch of a religious revival into the wild country on the north of them. The Christianization of the region would moderate if it did not bridle those furious blasts that ever and anon were bursting in from Pictland, and which left traces so frightful on the unhappy country lying betwixt the Clyde and the Solway. Such, possibly, were the views with which Ninian began his evangelization.

We behold Ninian at the opening of his career. What were the stages of his inner life previous to his coming forth as a public teacher? This is precisely what his biographers have not told us. We would have been well content to have been without the account of the miracles with which they have credited him, if only they had given us some of his experiences and wrestlings of soul. No one comes forth on such an errand as Ninian’s, and at such a time, without having undergone a previous, and, it may be, prolonged and severe mental discipline. So was it, as we shall see in the sequel, in the case of one of the greatest of his successors, and doubtless it was also so in the case of Ninian himself. But the length and severity of his inward training we have been left to conjecture. “Our saint,” says one of his biographers, f177 “was in infancy regenerated in the waters of baptism; the white garment which he then put on he preserved unsullied.” The business of his conversion is here dispatched in two sentences; but the process described is too summary, and, we must take leave to say, too mechanical to satisfy us of its reality. It is light, not water, that renews the soul. We should like to know how the light entered, and by what stages Ninian passed to the full apprehension of those great truths which alone can impart to the soul a new- life, and open to it a new destiny. His parents, professedly Christian, had told him, doubtless, that Christ was a Savior. This was a fact which it was pleasant for Ninian to know, even as it is pleasant for one in health to know that there is a physician within reach, although he feels no present need to avail himself of his skill. But one day Ninian fell sick- sick at heart, sick in soul; and he saw that his sickness was unto death- eternal death. Already he felt its sting within him, and a horror of great darkness fell upon him. The morning came, brightening the waters of the Solway, and scenting the flowers that grew along its banks, but now its coming brought no joy to his spirit. What availed these delights to one who felt himself encompassed by a night on which no morning would ever rise? He hid himself from the face of companion and friend. He communed with his own heart, and wept in the silent glen or by the solitary sea- shore. It was now that the fact, heard before, returned to his memory, with new and infinite significance, even that there was a physician who could heal the soul. He threw himself at the feet of this physician, and was healed. A new life had entered into Ninian. He had been born again into a new world.

Ninian now looked with new eyes upon the world of men and women around him. He saw that they too were sick unto death, even as he himself had been, though they knew it not. How could he forbear pointing these unhappy multitudes to that same physician who had wrought the “miracle of healing” upon himself? The multiform misery under which his native province groaned confirmed and intensified his resolution to make known the good news to its inhabitants.

The Christianity of the second and third centuries, which had created not a few beautiful lives, and fostered the order and prosperity of the province, was rapidly declining. There were still pastors in the church, doubtless, but they exercised a shorn influence, and they ministered to dwindling flocks. Of the population not a few had forsaken the sanctuary for the grove, and were now worshipping at the altars under the oaks. The counsels of scripture and the maxims of experience had been alike disregarded, and the Druidic shrines which the fathers spared to cast down, had become a snare to the sons. On every side was heard the loud laugh of the scoffer and the ribald jest or profane oath of the open profligate. Meanwhile disaster was gathering round the province. The Romans were retiring beyond the southern wall; and with their retreating steps was heard the advancing tread of the Picts and Scots. No longer held in check by the legions, these fierce marauders were breaking over the northern boundary, and inflicting untold calamities on the men of Valentia. The unhappy Britons were in an evil case. The night was often made terrible by the flames of burning raths, and the morning ghastly by the hideous spectacles it disclosed, of the inhabitants slaughtered, or carried captive. Fordun says:” 0 vengeance of Heaven, exclaims Geoffrey, for past wickedness! 0 madness in the tyrant Maximus, to have brought about the absence of so many warlike soldiers! . . .The enemy plied them (the Britons of Galloway) unceasingly with hooked weapons, wherewith the wretched populace were dragged off the walls, and cruelly dashed to the ground. . . .Then they speedily summoned the peasantry, with whose hoes and mattocks, pickaxes, forks, and spades, they all, without distinction, set to work to dig broad clefts and frequent breaches through the wall, whereby they might everywhere readily pass backwards and forwards.” f178

It was amid scenes like these that the daily life of Ninian was passed. What could he do to lessen the weight of a misery so intolerable? Such, doubtless, was the question he asked himself as he listened to the oft-recurring tale of rapine and slaughter. He could not recall the legions, nor could he chase from the northern frontier the hordes that were crowding to it and swarming over it. But might he not do something toward restoring the manhood of the Britons, who, instead of facing courageously their foes, were sending their “groans” to Rome for help. He knew enough to understand that Christianity is by far the mightiest creative power in the world. Rome had withdrawn her aegis; might he not replace it with the gospel, that nurse of bravery as of virtue? Such were the aims with which Ninian entered on his work.

The transition involved a great sacrifice of ease. His youth had been passed in the tranquil pursuit of knowledge, surrounded by the comforts, if not the elegancies of home. The quiet of the study, and the delights of the family, must now be forsaken, and he must brace himself for thankless labor among a rude and semi- barbarous population. The Romans were retiring, and the thin lacquering of civilization which they were leaving behind them had been purchased at the cost of the enervation of spirit which their long dominancy had engendered, and the love for Italian vices with which they had inoculated the simple natives. Moreover, Ninian’s missionary labors must be performed on a field liable to the sudden incursions of war, exposing him to daily peril, and compelling him to be the frequent witness of the agonizing sights which war brings in its train. Nor could he flatter himself that his mission would be welcomed by his countrymen, or that either his person or his message would receive much consideration or reverence at their hands. They were returning to the altars of the Druid, and were in no mood to receive meekly the reproofs he might find it necessary to tender to them for their apostasy. They were more likely to deride and scoff than to listen and obey. It was an evil time. The early glory of the British church had faded. When the altar of the Druid smoked in the land, the Britons were saying, it was better with us than now. There was then no ravaging Pict, no slaughtering Scot. But since the old shrines had been cast down, we have never ploughed our fields, or reaped our harvests in peace. We will return to the service of our fathers’ deities. With returning superstition had come dark minds, reprobate consciences, inhuman dispositions, and violent deeds. Such were the men among whom Ninian went forth to begin his missionary labors.

At the hands of the presbyters or bishops- for these two names were then employed to designate the same men and the same office, that, to wit, of the pastor of a congregation- at the hands of the presbyters and bishops that remained in these degenerate times to the British church of Valentia, did Ninian receive ordination. A late writer, speaking of the British church of that period, tells us that “a regular hierarchy with churches, altars, the Bible, discipline, and the creeds existed,” in it, and that “we know this from many sources.” f179 We are not told what these sources are, and we are unable to conjecture. But till we do know we must take the liberty to believe that this “hierarchy” in the early British church is a work of pure imagination. We possess a contemporary, or nearly contemporary description of the British church of Valentia in Ninian’s day. We refer to the “Confessions of Patrick,” written a few years later. There we can see only two offices, those of presbyter and deacon, in this church. If this is the “hierarchy” which this writer has in his eye, we grant that it did exist; but let it be noted that this is the simple hierarchy or order of the New Testament church: not the pompous gradation of offices and dignities which the Church of Rome instituted in the fourth century. That this was the order of the church of Valentia in Patrick’s day, appears from the fact that his father was a deacon, and his grandfather a presbyter; and of higher offices he says not a word; and such, doubtless, was the order of that same church in Ninian’s day. f180 The existing state of things, as revealed in the rccords of the time, make it undoubted that Ninian went forth to begin his evangelisation among his countrymen, holding no ecclesiastical rank save that of plain presbyter, or, to use the alternative designation, bishop. Had Ninian been a monk of thetwelfth century he would have gone to Rome to seek consecration, and on his return would have perambulated his native province in miter and crosier, followed by a suitable train of ecclesiastical subordinates. Ailred of Rievaux, who wrote his life in the twelfth century, when Gratian of Bologna was embodying the forgeries of Isidore in his “Decretum” as historic facts, does indeed send Ninian all the way to Rome for authority to teach the ignorant people of his native province the gospel. And Alford detains him not less than twenty- four years in Rome, and occupies him all that while in the study of the doctrine and discipline of the Western Church. Such are the astounding statements of his twelfth century biographers. That Ninian should deem a period of twenty- four years requisite to qualify him to preach to his simple countrymen, or that he should wait till a generation had passed away before returning with the evangelical message to Britain, is what is capable of belief only in the century in which it was first advanced- the century that accepted the Isidorean forgeries, and made them the foundations of Canon Law. We offer no refutation of these statements. Their huge improbability, indeed absurdity, place them beyond the need, we had almost said beyond the possibility of refutation. f181

What plan did Ninian follow in his missionary labors? None of his biographers have introduced him to us as he appeared while engaged in his ordinary every- day work. Ailred invests him with a halo of miracle; and seen through this luminous haze, his figure appears of more than mortal stature. A preternatural glory, according to Ailred, now broke on the wilds of Galloway. These moorlands became the scene of the same mighty works, which were wrought in Galilee when the Messiah opened his ministry. Ninian healed the sick, opened the eyes of the blind, cleansed the leper, and raised the dead. These stupendous acts conquered the incredulity and disarmed the hatred of his countrymen to the Gospel. So says his biographer, with an air so simple and confiding, as to leave no doubt that he firmly believed the truth of what he wrote, and could hardly deem it possible that any one should question the miracles of the saint. There will be only one opinion, we should think, among our readers, regarding these astounding statements; and yet some of Ninian’s modern biographers seem half inclined to believe that the saint did, indeed, possess miraculous powers, and that the extraordinary acts attributed to him by Ailred are not altogether fabulous.

The real Ninian, however, was simply a home missionary. In the circumstances of his time and country, he could be nothing else. Had we met him in his daily round of labor, we should, most probably, have seen nothing at all remarkable about him; nothing materially different from the same functionary whom we see, in our own day, prosecuting his labors in our city lanes and amid our rural hamlets. Had we understood his ancient tongue, we should have found Ninian telling to his countrymen the same message which the colporteur and the missionary carry to the outcasts of our own age. Truth acts upon the mind in essentially the same manner in every age- the same in the fourth as in the nineteenth century; and the teacher who would combat vice and dispel ignorance must adopt radically the same methods, whatever his era; or if there be aught of difference, it must be on the side of greater simplicity and directness in early ages than in later times. The men of Ninian’s day were rude, the times were calamitous, and, if the missionary really aimed at grappling to purpose with the gross ignorance and daring wickedness that surrounded him, the more simple his methods, and the less he burdened and lettered his message with forms and conventionalities, the greater would his success be. We credit Ninian simply with earnest piety and ordinary sense when we say that he resembled much more the home missionary of our own day than the stoled, tonsured, and girdled functionary of the twelfth century. Ninian went forth among his countrymen not to enlighten them touching the prerogatives of him who assumes to keep the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to tell them that the “Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” That such a message, delivered in a loving, earnest spirit, was followed by conversions, we cannot doubt. The fruits and monuments of his ministry remain even to this day.

BY- AND- BYE there comes a change over Ninian. The simple missionary of Galloway sets out on a visit to Rome. So do all his biographers relate, though none of them on what seems perfectly reliable authority. As we see him depart, we fear lest Ninian may not return the same man he went. The Church of Rome was just then beginning to forsake the. simple path of the Gospel for the road that leads to riches and worldly grandeur. As yet, however, her early glory was in good degree around her, although the prestige of the old city on the Tiber, and the rank to which her pastor had by this time climbed, was filling the air of western Christendom with a subtle, intoxicating element, which was drawing to Rome visitors from many lands who felt and yielded to the fascination. Of the number we have said was Ninian. Damasus, in whom the papal ambition was putting forth its early blossoms, then filled the Roman See. The pontiff welcomed, we cannot doubt, this pilgrim from the distant Britain. He saw in his visit an omen that the spiritual sway of the second Rome would be not less extensive than the political dominion which the first Rome had wielded. This journey painfully convinces us that even in Britain, Ninian had begun to breathe Roman air. This is seen in the motives attributed to him for undertaking this journey to “the threshold of the Apostles.” He began to suspect that the Christian pastors of Britain did not know the true sense of Scripture, and that he himself was but imperfectly grounded in it, and that should he go to Rome and seat himself at the feet of its bishop, he would be more thoroughly instructed, and the Bible would reveal to his eye many things which it refused to disclose to him in the remote realm of Britain.

We know of nothing in the Bible itself which warrants the belief that it is a book which can be rightly understood in but one particular spot of earth, or truly interpreted by only one class of men. It bears to be a revelation to mankind at large.

“There is nothing more certain in history,” says Bingham, “than that the service of the ancient church was always performed in the vulgar or common language of every country.” f182 From her first foundation it was the pious care of the church, when a nation was converted, to have the Scriptures translated into the tongue of that nation. Eusebius says, “they were translated into all languages, both of Greeks and barbarians, throughout the world, and studied by all nations as the oracles of God.” f183 Chrysostom assures us that “the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Persians, the Ethiopians, and a multitude of other nations, translated them into their own tongues, whereby barbarians learned to be philosophers, and women and children, with the greatest ease, imbibed the doctrine of the gospel.” f184 Theodoret asserts the same fact, “that every nation under heaven had the Scripture in their own tongue; in a word, into all tongues used by all nations in his time.” f185

The long residence of the Romans in the country had familiarized the provincial Britons with their tongue, and had access to the Word of God in Latin, and, doubtless also in Belgic or Armoric, if not British Celtic. The Bible till now had been regarded as a book for the world, to be translated, read, and interpreted by all. But towards the opening of the fifth century it began to be whispered that this was an erroneous and dangerous opinion. Only episcopal insight, and especially Roman episcopal insight, could see all that is contained in this book. Ordinary Christians were warned, therefore, not to trust their own interpretations of it, but to seek to have it expounded to them by that sure and unerring authority which had been appointed for their guidance, and which was seated at Rome. It is easy to see with what a halo this would invest that old city on the banks of the Tiber, and with what authority it would clothe its pastor. It was the first step towards the withdrawal of the Book, and the installing of the Roman bishop in its room as the sole dictator of the faith and the sole lord and ruler of the consciences of men.

These arrogant assumptions would seem to have gained so far an ascendancy over the missionary of Galloway, that he forsook for a while his labors among his countrymen who so greatly needed his instructions and guidance, and set out towards the eternal city. He crossed the Alps, it is said, by the Mons Cenis pass,- in those days a rugged path that wound perilously by the edge of black abysses, and under horrid rocks and gathering avalanches. His biographer, Ailred, in enlarging on the motives which led him to undertake this journey, speaks of him as assailed by the temptation “to throw himself on the resources of his own mind, to trust to the deductions of his own intellect, either from the text of Holy Scriptures, or the doctrines he had already been taught. For this he was too humble.”

Shielded by his humility from the snare to which he was exposed, that even of exercising the “right of private judgment,” Ailred makes Ninian break out into the following soliloquy, expressive of ideas and sentiments altogether foreign to the fourth century, but which had come to be fully developed in the twelfth, when Ailred puts them into Ninian’s mouth. “I have in my own country,” Ninian is made to say, “sought him whom my soul loveth, and have not found him. I will arise: I will compass sea and land to seek the truth which my soul longs for. But is there need of so much toil? Was it not said to Peter, thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it .9 In the faith of Peter then, there is nothing defective, obscure, imperfect: nothing against which evil doctrine or perverted sentiment, the gates as it were of hell, could prevail. And where is the faith of Peter, but in the See of Peter? Thither, certainly, I must go, that leaving my country, and my relations, and my father’s house, I may be thought worthy to behold with inward eye the fair beauty of the Lord, and to be guarded by his temple.” f186

There was now at Rome a galaxy of talent, which, doubtless, helped to draw Ninian thither. Jerome, and others, whose renown in learning and piety filled Christendom, and has crossed the ages to our own days, were then residing in that city. These men had no sympathy with the rising tide of superstition, or the growing ambition of the popes; on the contrary, they strove to repress both, foreseeing to what a disastrous height both would grow if allowed to develop. But their presence dignified the old city, and the simple grandeur of their character, and the fame of their erudition, shed upon Rome a glory not greatly inferior to that of its first Augustan age. It was natural that Ninian should wish to see, and to converse with these men.

The Itineraries and the Roman roads, portions of which are still traceable on the face of England, enable us to track the route by which Ninian would travel. Starting from Annandale, he crosses the Solway and traverses the great military way to Carlisle. Thence he would continue his journey along the vale of the Eden and over the dark hills of Stanemoor. We see him halt on their summit and take his parting look of the mountains amid which he had passed his youth. As he pursued his way, many tokens would meet his eye of the once dominant, but now vanished, power of the Druids. Here and there by the side of his path would be seen oak groves felled by the axe, dolmens overturned, and stone circles wholly or in part demolished. Even in our day these monuments of a fallen worship are still to be beheld in the north of England: they were doubtless more numerous in Ninian’s time.

Resuming his journey, Ninian would next cross the moorlands that lie on the other side of the Stanemoor chain. The Roman road that runs by Catterick would determine his path. Traversing this great highway, not quite obliterated even yet, and then doubtless in excellent condition, seeing it led to the main seat of the Roman government in Britain, Ninian in due course arrived at York.

This city was then one of the main centers of Christianity in Britain. It had its schools of sacred and secular learning; nevertheless its predominant air was still Roman. It had its courts of Roman judicature, its theaters, baths, mosaic pavements, and tutelary shrines within the walls; and suburbs in the Italian style. It was honored at times with the presence of the Emperor. It was, in fact, a little Rome on English soil. From York our pilgrim would proceed by the well- frequented line of Wattling Street to London, and thence to Sandwich, where he would embark for Boulogne.

Ninian’s steps are now on Gallic earth. He beholds around him the monuments of an older civilization than that of his native Britain. Pursuing his way he arrives at Rheims, a city which, in little more than a century afterwards, was to witness the baptism of Clovis, an event which gave to the “church” her “eldest son,” and to France the first of its Christian kings. Lyons is the next great city on his route. Here Ninian’s heart would be more deeply stirred than at any previous stage of his journey. The streets on which he now walked had been trodden by the feet of Irenaeus: for Lyons was the scene of the ministry and martyrdom of that great Christian Father. Every object on which Ninian’s eye lighted- the majestic Rhone, the palatial edifices, the crescent- like hills that wailed in the city on the north- all were associated with the memory of Irenaeus, and not with his memory only, but with that of hundreds besides, whose love for the Gospel had enabled them to brave the terrors of the “red- hot iron chair:” the form of death that here awaited the early disciples of Christianity. As Ninian ruminated on these tragedies, for they were of recent occurrence and must have been fresh in his knowledge, he accepted these morning tempests, now past, as the pledges of a long and cloudless day to Christian France. Alas, Ninian did not know, and could not Forecast, those far more dreadful storms that were to roll up in the sky of that same land in a future age and drench its soil with the blood of hundreds of thousands of martyrs.

Not long does Ninian linger on this scene of sad but sublime memories. Again he sets forth. His steps are now directed towards those white summits, which, seen across the plains of Dauphine, tower up before him in the southern sky, and admonish him that the toils and perils of his journey are in a measure only yet beginning. The Alps were already passable, but with extreme difficulty and hazard. The legions, marching to battle, and the merchants of the Mediterranean coast, seeking the markets of Gaul, had established routes across them; but to the solitary traveler the attempt to climb their summits was an arduous and almost desperate one. He was in danger of stepping unawares into the hidden chasm, or of being overtaken by the blinding tourmette, or surprised and crushed by the falling avalanche. Nor were their precipices and whirlwinds the only perils that attended the traveler in these mountains. He ran the farther risk of being waylaid by robbers or devoured by wolves. These hazards were not unknown to Ninian. His journey must be gone nevertheless. Classic story, and now the tale of Christian martyrdom, had made the soil of Italy enchanted ground to him. But a yet greater fascination did its capital wield. That city had cast out its Caesar, but it had placed in his seat one who aspired to a higher lordship than emperor ever wielded. These gates Ninian must enter, and at these feet must he sit. Accordingly, joining himself, most probably, to a few companions, for such journeys were now beginning to be common, we see him climbing the lofty rampart of rocks and snows that rose betwixt him and the goal of his pilgrimage, and their summits gained, he descends by an equally perilous path into the Italian plains. The Goth had not yet entered that fair land, and Ninian saw it as it appeared to the eye of the old Roman. The bloom of its ancient fertility was still upon its fields, nor had its cities lost the chaste glory of classic times. But the flower of Italy was Rome, the fountain of law, the head of the world, and now the center of the Christian church; and Ninian hastens his steps thither.

We behold the missionary of Galloway at the “threshold of the Apostles,” as the church of the first parish in Rome now began to be magnificently styled. Here the greatest of the Apostles had suffered martyrdom, and here thousands of humble confessors had borne testimony to the faith by pouring out their blood in the gladiatorial combats of the Coliseum, or at the burning stakes in the gardens of Nero. But now the faith for which they had died was triumphing over the paganism of the empire, and the churches of the west were crowding to Rome and laying their causes at the feet of her bishop, as if in acknowledgment that their homage was justly due to her who had fought so terrible a battle, and had won so glorious a victory. Such, doubtless, were the thoughts of Ninian as he drew nigh to the eternal city. We know the overpowering emotions with which a greater than Ninian, eleven centuries later, approached the gates of Rome. Ninian entered these gates, not, indeed, unmoved, but with pulse more calm, and mind less perturbed, than the monk of Wittenberg. In Ninian’s day the Papacy was only laying the foundations of its power, and laying them in a well- simulated humility; in Luther’s age it had brought forth the top-stone, and its vaulting pride and towering dominion made it the wonder and the terror of the nations.

How did Ninian occupy himself in Rome? How long did he sojourn in it? What increase did he make in knowledge and in piety from all that he saw and heard in the capital of Christendom? To these questions we are not able to return any answer, or an answer that is satisfactory. The mythical haze with which his mediaeval biographers invest him is still around him. In their hands he is not the missionary of the fourth century but the monk of the twelfth; and if we shall relate, it is not necessary that we shall believe all that they have told us of his doings in Rome. He was shown, doubtless, the prison in which Paul had languished, and mayhap the bar at which he had pleaded. He was taken to the dark chambers in the tufa rock beneath the city, which had given asylum to the Church during the terrible persecutions of her infancy. He saw the basilicas being converted into churches; and in the transformation of the ancient shrines into Christian sanctuaries, he beheld the token that the great battle had gone against paganism, despite it was upheld by all the authority of Caesar and by all the power of the legions. The descendants of those who had lived in the catacombs were in Ninian’s day filling the curial chairs of the capital, and the tribunals of the provinces, or leading the armies of Rome on the frontiers. The orations of Chrysostom, the “goldenmouthed,” and the writings of Augustine, were supplanting the orators and poets of pagan literature. These auspicious prodigies- the monuments of the irresistible might with which Christianity was silently obliterating the ancient pagan world, and emancipating men from the bondage in which its beliefs, philosophies, and gods had held them- Ninian did not fail to mark. These victories he could contemplate with an unmixed delight, for in their train no nation mourned its liberties lost, nor mother her sons slaughtered. They enriched the vanquished even more than the victor; and they gave assurance that the power which had subdued Rome would yet subdue the world.

But there were other things to be seen at Rome fitted to awaken a dread that a new paganism was springing up, which might prove in time as fomidable a rival and as bitter a persecutor of the Gospel as that whose decay and fall was to be read in the deserted altars and desolate fanes of the metropolis. Crowds were flocking to the catacombs, not fleeing from persecution like their fathers, but seeking to enkindle their devotion, and add merit to their services, performed in the gloom of these sanctified caverns. The supper was celebrated at the graves of the martyrs: the dead were beginning to be invoked: art, which is first the handmaid, and next the mistress, was returning with her fatal gifts: the churches were a- glow with costly mosaics and splendid paintings. But the “holy of holies” in Rome was the tomb in which slept the Apostles Peter and Paul. Their bodies, exempt from the law of corruption, exhaled a celestial odor, able to regale not the senses only, but to refresh and invigorate the spirit. Thither, doubtless, was Ninian conducted, that he might return to his own country fully replenished with such holiness as the bones of martyrs and the mystic virtue of sanctified places can confer.

But what of the new truths and deeper meanings with which Ninian hoped his understanding was to be enlightened, when, lifting his eyes from the page of Scripture, he fixed them on the holy city of Rome, and set forth on his journey to it? Some things met his gaze in Rome that were indeed new, and which, if they did not minister to his edification, we may well believe, excited not a little his surprise. The temples which the followers of the humble Nazarene had reared for their worship, presented by their magnificence a striking contrast to the wattle- built churches of Galloway! And then came the pomp of the church’s services: the rich and costly vestments of the clergy ! the splendid equipages in which they rode out! the luxurious tables at which they sat !- all these things were new to him. Compared with the golden splendor in which Ninian found the Roman Church basking, it was but the iron age with the Church in Scotland. Ninian saw something in Rome more magnificent still. There he beheld, with wonder, doubtless, the blossoming power of her chief bishop; fed by riches, by adulation, by political power, and the growing subservience of the western churches, the Roman prelate was already putting forth claims, and displaying an arrogance which gave promise in due time of eclipsing the glory of the Caesars. And not unlike their shepherds, were the flocks of the Eternal City. The members of the church, not slow to follow the example set them, were delighting in pomps and vanities. The days were long past when the profession of Christianity exposed one to the sword of the headsman, or the lions of the amphitheater. The bulk of the professors of that age had succeeded in converting religion into a round of outward observances, which cost them far less pain than self- denial and sanctification of heart.

The bishop and clergy of Rome at the time of Ninian’s visit have been pictured to the life by historians of unimpeachable veracity, eye- witnesses of the men and the scenes which they describe. Let us enter the gates which those writers throw open to us, and observe what is passing within them. It is the year 366. We find Rome full of violence, war is raging on its streets; the very churches are filled with armed combatants, who spill one another’s blood in the house where prayer is wont to be made. What has given rise to these sanguinary tumults? The Papal See has become vacant, and Rome is electing a new bishop to fill the empty chair. Two aspirants offer themselves for the Episcopal dignity- Damasus and Ursinus. Both are emulous of the honor of feeding the flock; but which of the two shall become shepherd and wield the crook, is a question to be determined by the sword. Damasus is backed by the more powerful faction of the citizens; and when the struggle comes to an end, victory remains with him. He has not been elected to the chair in which we now see him seating himself -he has fought his way to it and conquered it, as warrior conquers an earthly throne, and he mounts it on steps slippery with blood. He has fought a stout if not a good fight, and his miter and crook are the rewards of victory. The choice of the Holy Ghost, say the scoffers in Rome, has fallen on him who had the biggest faction. So do contemporary historians tell us. “About the choice,” says Ruffinus, speaking of the election of Damasus and describing what was passing before his eyes, “arose a great tumult, or rather an open war, so that the houses of prayer, that is, the churches, floated with man’s blood.” f187 The historian Ammianus Marcellinus has drawn a similar picture of Rome at that time. The ambition that inflamed Damasus and Ursinus to possess the episcopal chair was so inordinate and the contest betwixt them so fierce, that the Basilica of Sicinius, instead of psalms and prayers, resounded with the clash of arms and the groans of the dying. “It is certain,” says Marcellinus, “that in the church of Sicinius, f188 where the Christians were wont to assemble, there were left in one day an hundred and thirty- seven dead bodies.” The historian goes on to say that when he reflected on the power, the wealth, and the worship which the episcopal chair brought to its occupant, he ceased to wonder at the ardor shown to possess it. He pictures the Roman prelate in sumptuous apparel proceeding through the streets of Rome in his gilded chariot, the crowd falling back before the prancing of his steeds; and after his ride through the city, he enters his palace and sits down at a table more delicately and luxuriously furnished than a king’s. f189 Baronius admits the truth of this picture, when he replies that Marcellinus, being a pagan, could not but feel a little heathen envy at the sight of the Christian Pontiff eclipsing in glory the Pontifex Maximus of old Rome. And as regards the “good table” of the bishop, Baronius rejoices in it “as one who delighted,” says Lennard, “to hold his nose over the pot.” f190 Again we find the pagan historian counseling the Christian bishop thus: “You would consult your happiness more if, instead of pleading the greatness of the City as an excuse for the swollen pride in which you strut about, you were to frame your life on the model of some provincial bishops, who approve themselves to the true worshippers of the Deity by purity of life, by modesty of behavior, by temperance in meat and drink, by plain apparel and lowly eyes;” f191 a piece of excellent advice doubtless, which, we fear, was not appreciated by him of the “western eyebrow,” as Basil styled Pope Damasus.

When these sordid humors, to speak leniently of them, infected the Head, what was to be looked for in the clergy? With such an example of pomp and luxury daily before their eyes, they were not likely to cultivate very assiduously the virtues of humility, abstinence, and self- denial. The Roman clergy of the day, it should seem, were devoured by a passion for riches, and that passion was fed by the wealthier members of their flocks, whose profuse liberality ought to have more than satisfied their avariciousness. A stream of oblations and gifts flowed without intermission into the episcopal exchequer. Not on the dignitaries of the church only did this shower of riches descend; it fell in almost equal munificence on many of the lower clergy. It was the practice of the time for the matrons and widows of Rome to choose a cleric to act as their spiritual director. The office gave occasion to numerous scandals and gross abuses. The pagan Protestratus, the consul of the city, could afford to be jocular over the subject of clerical magnificence. “Make me bishop of Rome and I shah quickly make myself a Christian,” said he to Damasus, putting his satire into the pleasant form of a jest. Jerome, who was then in Rome in the midst of all this, was too much in earnest to give way to pleasantry. It was indignation, not mirth, with which the sight filled him. He denounces the salutations, the cozenings, the kissings, with which these reverend guides flavored their spiritual counsels.

f192 He describes, in terms so plain that we cannot here reproduce them, the devices to which the clergy had recourse to win the hearts and open the purses of their female devotees. He addresses his brother ecclesiastics now in earnest admonition, now in vehement invective, and now in keen sarcasm. The world aforetime honored them as poor, now the Church blushed to see them rich. “There are monks,” says Jerome, “richer now than when they lived in the world, and clerks which possess more under poor Christ than they did when they served under rich Beelzebub.” But grave admonition and cutting sarcasm were alike powerless. The rebukes of Jerome, instead of moderating the greed of the clergy, only drew down their hatred upon their reprover; and soon he found it prudent to withdraw from the metropolis, which he styles “Babylon,” and to seek again his cave at Bethlehem, where, no longer pained by the sight of the pride, ambition, and sensuality of Rome, he might pursue his studies in the quiet of the hills of Judah.

Even the Emperor Valentinian found it necessary, by public edict (A. D. 370), to restrain the wealth and avariciousness of the ecclesiastics. More striking proof there could not be of the extent to which this contagion had grown in the Church. The edict was addressed to Damasus, and was read in all the churches of Rome. The emperor prohibited, under certain penalties, all ecclesiastics from entering the houses of widows and orphans. And, farther, it was made illegal for one of the ecclesiastical order to receive testamentary gift, legacy, or inheritance from those to whom he acted as spiritual director, or to whom he stood in religions relations only. The money or property bequeathed by such illegal deeds was confiscated to the public treasury. This edict had respect to the clergy alone; and it is worthy of notice that it proceeded not from a pagan persecuting ruler, but from a Christian emperor. Its significance was emphasized by Jerome, when he pointed out that of all classes, not excepting the most sunken, this edict singled out and struck at the ecclesiastical order. “I am ashamed,” said he, “to speak it: but the priests of idols, stage- players, charioteers, and courtesans, are capable of legacies and inheritances; only clergymen and monks are disabled from inheriting. Neither do I complain of the law, but grieve to see that we should deserve it.” Approving the wisdom of the law, Jerome yet bewails its utter inefficiency. The avarice of the clergy baffled the vigilance of the emperor. The law stood, but methods were devised for circumventing and evading its enactment. Donations and deathbed bequests to ecclesiastics continued, only they reached them in a more circuitous way. They were made over to others, to be held by them in trust for clerical uses. This law was renewed by succeeding emperors in even stricter terms. Theodosius and Arcadius attempted to grapple by statute with this great evil, but the churchmen of the day were fertile in expedients, and the patriotic intentions of these legislators were completely frustrated. Legal enactments cannot reach the roots of moral maladies. The thirst for gold on the part of the clergy continued unabated; and with the increase of superstition, the disposition to load priests and monks with the good things which they professed to have renounced, grew stronger, baffling not only legal restraints but the sanctity of personal and family obligations. Eight centuries later the evil had come to such a head in England that the sovereigns of that country found it necessary to revive the spirit of the laws of Valentinian and Theodosius. These statutes came just in time to prevent the absorption of the whole landed property of England into the “Church,” and by consequence, just in time to save the people from inevitable serfdom, and the public order and liberties from utter destruction.

To return to Rome, where Ninian was still sojourning, the growth of ecclesiasticism and the decay of piety went on by equal stages. The citizens of the metropolis and of Italy generally were leading careless and luxurious lives. They had invented a devotion which could be slipped on or off at pleasure. A few moments were all that was needed to put them into a mood fit for the church or for the theater.

They passed with ease from the secular games to the religious festivals, for both ministered an equal excitement and an equal pleasure. They thought not of what was passing on the distant frontier. There the Scythian bands were mustering, prepared to take vengeance on the mistress of the world for centuries of wrong endured at her hands. The Romans deemed themselves far removed from danger under the aegis of an empire the prestige and power of which were a sufficient guarantee, they believed, against attack or overthrow. Rome was entering on a new and grander career. There awaited her in the future, victories which would throw into the shade those her generals had won in the past. She had linked her destinies with Christianity; and that would never perish. She had become the seat of a pure faith, and this, it was presumed, had imparted to her a new life and a higher intellectual vigor. Her bishop was filling the place of Caesar. Her city was consecrated by the labors and blood of martyrs. Within her were the tombs of the apostles, and their protection would not be wanting to a city in which their ashes reposed. Bishops and Presbyters, as of old kings and ambassadors, were crowding to her gates. The churches East and West were beginning to recognize her as umpire and judge by submitting their quarrels and controversies to her decision. The barbarous nations were beginning to embrace her creed and submit to her sway; and surely her children in the faith would never come with armies to destroy her. If ever they should appear at the gates of Rome, it would be to bow at the footstool of her bishop, not to rifle her treasures and slay or carry captive her citizens. In all sides were prognostications of growing power and extending dominion. Deceived by these signs of outward grandeur, the Romans failed to note the cloud of barbarian war which was every day growing bigger and blacker in the northern horizon.

NINIAN returned to Britain before the storm burst. He stands once more amid the scenes of his youth. It is the silver tides of the Solway, not the yellow waves of the Tiber that flow past him: and over him is spread the hazy canopy which encircles the brown moorlands of his native land, not the vault of sapphire light which is hung above the vineterraced hills and marble cities of Italy. This brilliance of earth and air he left behind him when he crossed the Alps. But Ninian knows that there is a better light than that which kindles the landscapes of southern countries into glory; and the supreme wish of his heart is to diffuse that light over his native Britain, and carry it into every mud lint and wattlebuilt dwelling of his beloved Galloway; and if he shall succeed in this he will not envy Italy those natural splendors in which it basks, and in which it so far transcends the dusky plains of the land of his birth.

The statement may be accepted as true, that on his way back to Britain, Ninian visited Martin of Tours. This doctor was beyond doubt a man of capacious intellect, of large and bold conceptions, of resolute will, and, we may add, of fervent piety. His genius stamped itself not only upon his own age, but also upon the ages that came after him. He aimed at elevating society by exhibiting to it a new, a grand, and a striking model of self-denial. We must be permitted, however, to caution our readers when we speak of these great fathers, by asking them to bear in mind that their greatness was relative rather than absolute. The general level of knowledge and piety in those ages was low, and men like Martin towered, therefore, all the more conspicuously above their fellows. Their contemporaries were somewhat prone to worship what seemed so far above themselves. It behooves us at this day, in taking the real measure of these giants, as they seemed to the men of their own age, and still more to the chroniclers of succeeding centuries, to reflect that we view them through the mythical and magnifying clouds of the Middle Ages; and the effect of being seen through such a medium may be fairly judged of when we say that the biographer of Martin, Sulpicius Severus, relates of him, that he was made bishop of Tours (A. D. 371) for the benevolent act of raising two men from the dead. Christianity was then young, and it breathed its spirit of youthful enthusiasm into some of its disciples. We, at this day, walk by precedents; we inquire for the “old paths.” There was room in that day for bold, original, and untried experiments; and it was ill this way that Martin of Tours put forth his great powers, and sought to benefit his age.

After Jerome, Martin of Tours was the great patron and promoter of monachism in the West. It seemed to him the one only cure for the great evil of his age. He could not help contrasting the self- indulgent, easygoing lives of the Christians of the West with the austerities practiced by the anchorites, amid the sands of Nubia, or the rocks of Arabia Petraea; and he sought, by transplanting the monastic system into Gaul, to restore the moral tone of society. Martin would have better succeeded had he restored the purity of the church’s worship, and the rigor of her early discipline, the decline of which had occasioned the universal laxity and corruption he bewailed. Instead, he grafted on the church an order unknown to primitive times. He did not, however, transplant the monachism of the Thebaid into the West without very materially modifying it. In the East eremitsm had been an utterly idle thing. The hermit could n