APOSTASY AMONG THE PICTS.

31

away all that could renew the memory of the religion in which they had been baptised.

At St Andrews, the metropolitan church, besides the archives where all the records and rights of the Church, such as bulls of popes, charters of the kings, all ecclesiastical Acts, such as those of national councils, of diocesan synods, of processes in the ecclesiastical courts,

consecration

of bishops, all ordinations, dispensations, &c., were preserved. Since the time of the Reformation all these original records have no less entirely and universally disappeared (excepting some of the chartularies) than if they had never been.”1

the early

Towards the middle of the sixth century, the Relapse of Church had obtained a footing among the Scots Church. of Dalriada in the present county of Argyle, the southern Picts living north of the Firth of Forth as far as the Grampians, and the mixed tribes of Britons, Picts, and Saxons south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. The light of the Gospel had not yet reached the northern Picts. Nor indeed, even in the districts just mentioned, does Christianity appear to have everywhere taken deep root, for evidence is extant which points to a relapse into paganism. In the letter of St Patrick to the subjects of the tyrant Coroticus, the ancestor of the princes of Strathclyde (written, according to Haddan and Stubbs, about the year 492), the

1 Innes's Critical Essay (ed. Grub), p. 312. Similar testimony is borne by the (Protestant) Archbishop Spottiswood (History, vol. i. p. 372).

Second or monastic period of the Scottish Church.

saint in feeling and vivid language deplores the vices of the Picts, whom he openly charges with apostasy; and he is not more indulgent to the evil deeds of Coroticus himself, on whom he calls down the severest judgments of God. Jocelyn, the biographer of St Kentigern, is probably reporting a perfectly genuine tradition when he states that the Picts, who had received the faith from the preaching of St Ninian, had relapsed into paganism.2 So, too, an older Life of St Kentigern terms one of the Pictish princes of Lothian "a semipagan.' Such statements as these leave no room for doubt that, in the course of hardly half a century, the Christian faith had been to some extent overthrown by the revival of paganism. In order to rescue it, there was need of an institution resting upon a solid basis, which should take up the well-meant but unproductive endeavours of the secular clergy, concentrate them in the strict discipline of the monastic life, and impart to them at the same time a stronger impulse and a more enduring efficacy. The Scottish Church enters now, under the influence of the Irish monks, on the monastic period of her history, which lasted until the middle of the ninth century, when it gave way to the Culdees, who were succeeded in their turn, about the middle of the eleventh century, by the ordinary constitution of the Church.

1 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, vol. ii. p. 314. "Socii Scotorum atque Pictarum apostatarum."

2 Vita S. Kentigerni, c. xxvii. "Picti . . . dein in apostasiam lapsi."

33

CHAPTER II.

ST COLUMBA, APOSTLE OF THE NORTHERN PICTS.

(A.D. 521-597.)

THE character of the second or monastic period of the Scottish Church can only be fully understood by first glancing at the development of the Irish Church, with which the Church in Scotland was at this time very closely connected, and whose impress she in large measure received.

orders of

saints in

the early

Church:

Usher published, from MSS. of the eighth Three century, a "Catalogue of the Saints of Ireland according to their different periods;" and we find Irish also in the Leabhar Breac,1 and in the Book of Leinster, the Litany of Angus the Culdee, in which he invokes the saints of the early Church in different groups. "The first order of Catholic 1. Secular. saints," says the Catalogue, "was in the time of

1 The Leabhar Breac, or Lebhar Breac (i.e., the sprinkled book), an MS., partly Latin, partly Irish, in the possession of the Royal Irish Academy. It belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, but is a compilation from more ancient sources.

VOL. I.

C

tic.

Patrick; and then they were all bishops, famous and holy, and full of the Holy Ghost-three hundred and fifty in number, founders of churches. They had one head, Christ, and one chief, Patrick; they observed one mass, one divine office, one tonsure from ear to ear. They kept one Easter, on the fourteenth moon after the vernal equinox ; and what was excommunicated by one church, all excommunicated. They rejected not the services 2. Monas- and society of woman. The second order was of Catholic priests. For in this order there were few bishops and many priests, in number three hundred. They had one head, our Lord: they celebrated different masses, and had different rules one Easter, on the fourteenth moon after the equinox; one tonsure from ear to ear: they refused the services of women, separating them from the monasteries. This order has lasted for 3. Eremit four reigns [to 572]. The third order of saints was of this sort. They were holy priests, and a few bishops, one hundred in number, who dwelt in desert places, and lived on herbs and water, and the alms; they shunned private property, and despised all earthly things; they had different rules and masses, and different tonsures, for some had the corona, and others the hair behind, and a different time for observing Easter. For some celebrated the Resurrection on the fourteenth moon, others on the sixteenth. These lived during four reigns, and continued to the great mor

ical.

SECULAR PERIOD OF THE IRISH CHURCH. 35

tality" (in the year 666). This passage enables us to trace three distinct periods in the development of the Irish Church in the first, we find a secular clergy; in the second, a regular or monastic clergy; in the third, an eremitical clergy.

or episco

The differences which characterised the early Secular Church during these successive periods, originated, pal period. as Skene rightly observes, to great extent in the social state of the people. It would therefore be a fatal error to infer from such accidental modifications any radical change in the constitution of the Church. On the contrary, this was carefully preserved, even when unable for a time to attain in all directions to its full development and authority. "The distinction in order," remarks Skene, "between bishop and presbyter, seems to have been preserved throughout, though their relation to each other, in respect to numbers and jurisdiction, varied at different periods." 2 The period of St Patrick may be termed the episcopal period: the saints of this epoch regarded Patrick as their leader or chief. The latter, in his Confession, states merely that he ordained clerics, but in the Catalogue of the Saints we read that "they were all bishops, three hundred and fifty in number, founders of churches ;" and Angus the Culdee, in his Litany,

1 The "Catalogue of the Saints," from which the above is quoted, is supposed to be the work of Tirechan, the author of the annotations on the Life of St Patrick in the Book of Armagh.

2 Celtic Scotland, vol. ii. p. 14.