The Book-Hunter
proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of
Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed
his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of
shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the facilities
which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening his political
position, and plotting for a fragment of the disintegrating empire. An
admiral of the Roman fleet had at one time established his power in
Britain, where he set up as Caesar, and sought to create a new imperial
centre. Thus the southern part of Britain was a province of the true
Roman empire awaiting the coming of the wild hordes who were gathering
for the general overthrow, and was not the place where either the
Christian Church or Italian civilisation could find permanent refuge.
The destined destroyer was indeed close at hand. Though the Romans had
their walls, their roads, their forts, and even a few villas in
Scotland, yet one going northward at that time through the territories
of the Gadeni and the Otadeni, would observe the Romanised character of
the country gradually decreasing, until he found himself among those
rough independent northern tribes, who, under the name of Picts and
Scots, drove the Romanised Britons into the sea, and did for the insular
portion of the empire what the hordes who were called Goths, Franks, and
Alemanni, were doing in the Roman provinces of the Continent.
Behind the scene of this destructive contest, Christianity, having been
planted, flourished in peaceful poverty. It grew here and there over
Ireland, and in a small portion of the remote part of Scotland; and the
distance from the scene of warfare necessary for its safety is shown by
the fate of St Ninian's little church in the Mull of Galloway. It was
too near the field of strife to live. The isolation in which the western
Christians thus arose, was productive of ecclesiastical conditions very
remarkable in themselves, but perfectly natural as the effects of their
peculiar causes. The admirable organisation for carrying out the civil
government of the Roman empire, was a ready-made hierarchy for carrying
out the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. It was far from
the object of those who seized on the power of the Caesars to abolish
that power. On the contrary, they desired to work it on their own
account, and thus the machinery of the empire lived, exercising more or
less vitality and power, down to the first French Revolution.
No part of its civil organisation, however, retained the comprehensive
vitality which the learning and subtlety of the priesthood enabled them
to preserve, or rather restore, to its spiritual branch. Hence, wherever
the conquerors of Rome held sway, there the priests of Rome obtained a
sway also. But the one little fragment of the primitive Church, which
had been so curiously cut off during the great contest, was beyond the
sway of the conquerors of Rome, as it had been beyond the sway of the
Emperors themselves. Hence, while the Church, as united to Rome, grew up
in one great uniform hierarchy, the small, isolated Church in the West
grew up with different usages and characteristics; and when afterwards
those who followed them were charged with schism, they asserted that
they had their canons and usages directly from the apostles, from whom
they had obtained the Gospel and the regulations of the Church pure and
undefiled. Thus arose the renowned contest between the early Scottish
Church and the rest of Christendom about the proper period of observing
Easter, and about the form of the tonsure. Hence, too, arose the debates
about the peculiar discipline of the communities called Culdees, who,
having to frame their own system of church government for themselves,
humble, poor, and isolated as they were, constructed it after a
different fashion from the potent hierarchy of Rome. The history of
these corporations possesses extreme interest, even to those who follow
it without a predetermined design to identify every feature of their
arrangements with a modern English diocese, or with a modern Scottish
presbytery; and not the least interesting portion of this history is its
conclusion, in the final absorption, not without a struggle, of these
isolated communities within the expanding hierarchy of the Popes.
In a few humble architectural remains, these primitive bodies have left
vestiges of their peculiar character to the present day. Neither
deriving the form of their buildings nor their other observances from
Rome, they failed to enter with the rest of the Church on that course of
construction which led towards Gothic architecture. The earliest
Christian churches on the Continent were constructed on the plan of the
Roman basilica, or court of justice, and wherever the Church of Rome
spread, this method of construction went with her. The oldest style of
church-building--that which used to be called Saxon, and is now
sometimes termed Norman, and sometimes Romanesque--degenerated directly
from the architecture of Rome. There are ecclesiastical buildings in
France and Italy, of which it might fairly be debated, from their style,
whether they were built by the latest of the classical, or the earliest
of the Gothic architects. The little Church in the West had not the
benefit of such models. Places of worship, and cells, or oratories, were
built of timber, turf, or osiers. The biographer of Columba describes
his followers as collecting wattles for the construction of their first
edifice. But they had also a few humble dwellings of stone, which,
naturally enough, had no more resemblance to the proud fanes of the
Romish hierarchy, than the primitive edifices of Mexico and New Zealand
had to those of modern Europe. They were first found in Ireland; more
lately, they have been traced in the Western Isles. They are small rude
domes of rough stone; and if it may seem strange that the form adapted
to the grandest of all architectural achievements should be
accomplished by those rude masons who could not make a Roman arch, it
must be remembered, that while the arch cannot be constructed without
artificial support or scaffolding, a dome on a small scale may, and is
indeed the form to which rude artists, with rude stones, and no other
materials, would naturally be driven. It is that in which boys build
their snow-houses. I shall not easily forget how, once, accompanying a
piscatorial friend on the Loch of Curran, near Ballyskelligs, in Kerry,
I stepped on a small island to visit a Norman ruin there, and saw,
besides the ruin and a stone cross, one of these small rough domes,
testifying, by its venerable simplicity, that it had stood there
centuries before the Norman church beside it. But the peculiar
characteristics of the architecture of the West did not stop short with
these simple types. It advanced, carrying in its advance its own
significant character, until it became mingled with the architecture
propagated from Rome, as the Christian community which worshipped within
the buildings became absorbed in the hierarchy. The Oratory of Galerus,
in Kerry, is a piece of solid, well-conditioned masonry, built after a
plan of no mean symmetry and proportion, yet with scarcely a feature in
common with the early Christian churches of the rest of Europe. Like the
ruder specimens, it struggles for as much solidity and spaciousness as
it can obtain in stonework without the help of the arch, and it makes a
good deal out of the old Egyptian plan of gradually narrowing the
courses of stones inwards, until they come so near that large slabs of
stone can be thrown across the opening. Some buildings of the same sort
have been lately revealed in the island of Lewis: one is named Teampul
Rona, and another, which is dedicated to St Flannan, Teampul
Beannachadh.[81] The specialty of both these, as well as of the Irish
buildings, is that they are edifices beyond all question raised for
Christian worship, that they have been built with pains and skill, and
yet that they have no vestige of that earlier type of Christian
architecture which Europe in general obtained from Rome.
[Footnote 81: See Mr Muir's very curious volume on "Characteristics of
Old Church Architecture in the Mainland and Western Islands of
Scotland."]
In offering a few stray remarks on the lives of the saints, or, more
properly speaking, the missionaries, whose labours lay in the British
Isles, it would be pedantic to cite the precise document, printed
generally for one or other of the book clubs, which supplies the
authority for each sentence. I must, however, mention one authority
which stands supreme among its brethren--the edition of Adamnan's Life
of St Columba, edited by Dr Reeves, under the joint patronage of the
Irish Archaeological and the Bannatyne Clubs. The original work has long
been accepted as throwing a light on the Christianising of the North,
second only to that shed by the invaluable morsels in Bede. With
wonderful industry and learning, the editor has incorporated the small
book of Adamnan in a mass of new matter, every word of which is equally
instructive and interesting to the student.
There is no doubt that the saints of Irish origin supply by far the more
important portion of our hagiology. They are countless. Taking merely a
topographical estimate of them--looking, that is, to the names of places
which have been dedicated to them, or otherwise bear their names--we
find them crowding Ireland, and swarming over the Highlands of Scotland
and the north of England into London itself, where St Bride's Well has
given a gloomy perpetuity to the name of the first and greatest of Irish
female saints. Some people would be content to attribute the
frequentness of saintship among the Irish and the Highlanders to the
opportunities enjoyed by them in consequence of the early Church having
found a refuge in Ireland. Others would attribute the phenomenon to the
extreme susceptibility of the Celtic race to religious enthusiasm, and
would illustrate their views by referring to the present Celtic
population in Ireland under the dominion of the priests, and their
brethren of the West of Scotland equally under the dominion of the
doctrinal antipodes of the priests; while the parallel might be
illustrated by a reference to those Highland Franciscans called "The
Men," whose belcher neckcloths represent the cord, and their Kilmarnock
bonnets the cowl.
At the commencement of Christianity the difference between the religious
Celt and the religious Saxon was naturally far more conspicuous than it
is now. Bede's description of the thoughtful calmness with which
Ethelbert studied the preaching of Augustin, with all the consequences
which the adoption of the new creed must bring upon his kingdom, is
still eminently characteristic of the Saxon nature. In the life of St
Wilbrord a scene is described which is not easily alluded to with due
reverence. The saint had prevailed on a Frisian Prince to acknowledge
Christianity, and be baptised. Standing by the font, with one foot in
the water, a misgiving seized on him, and he inquired touching his
ancestors, whether the greater number of them were in the regions of the
blessed, or in those of the spirits doomed to everlasting perdition. On
being abruptly told by the honest saint that they were all, without
exception, in the latter region, he withdrew his foot--he would not
desert his race--he would go to the place where he would find his dead
ancestors.
The conversion of the Picts by Columba seems to have proceeded
deliberately. We find him, in the narrative of his life, exercising much
influence on Brud their king, and occasionally enjoying a visit to the
royal lodge on the pleasant banks of Lochness. There he is seen