" CELTIC SCOTLAND :" ITS CHURCH AND CULTURE.* IN Germany,
as at home, the first volume of this ]tanned and satisfying book drew much regard from competent judges of its value, and was welcomed by them with great cordiality. Its suc- cessor deserves, and is sure to get, a like favourable reception. It discusses subjects as to which there exists a keen and widely diffused interest. Remote, obscure, and long-neglected though the province of history be which is explored, it has been the battle-ground of many passionate disputes. Protestant aid Romanist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian have encountered eaca other on this field. Mr. Skene bears himself towards their quar- rels with a serene impartiality. He looks beyond them, and searches underneath them. He is no mere polemic, using history as a weapon for controversial purposes. With resolute endeavour he has set himself to the task of reaching the truth. Thus he has been led to put aside as fictitious much that is beautiful in old tradition, much that has been accepted on what was reckoned respectable authority, much that has commended itself to modern intelligence. The pietistic imaginations and credulous reasonings of Montalembert, the absurd conjectures and daring inventions of Hector Bcece, no less than the myths embalmed in many an exquisite legend and song, he has been forced to disown and ex- plode. This he does in no spirit of wanton iconoclasm, for he- is not insensible to their grace and attractiveness, only he cannot accept fable or metaphor for reality. Instead of building with materials derived from cloud-land, ho proceeds according to the best methods of historic criticism. The results have not been merely negative. The opinions he puts forward are so coherent, so intelligible, and so fitted to the facts, that they will often take the general mind as light takes the eye. The conclusions he announces may, no doubt, arouse some degree of that rancour which is usually directed, against the man who ventures to disturb fond beliefs, or who crosses ardent and dogmatic partisans. Yet such are his fairness, no less than his facility of suggestion, his painstaking enthusiasm, no less than the minute fidelity of his erudition, his reverent spirit, no less than his ingenuity and power of synthesis, that his views may be trusted assuredly to prevail. Most readers will instinctively detect in him qualities that suffice to protect novelty from the accusation of paradox.
The period covered by the work is the time which stretches from that way-mark where the historian has to surrender to the archeologist, down to the opening of the feudal era, and to the death of the young Maid of Norway, in 1290. The first volume was devoted to the ethnology and civil history of the Scottish Celts ; and of it we may simply say, that the author's acquaintance with the several varieties of the Celtic language, with the topography of the region which the Celts inhabited, and with all that historic criticism has lately done in this field, as well as his skill in the discovery and presentation of the ethnical suggestions this know- ledge contains and verifies, amply entitle it to the reputation it at once obtained. The third volume, now in preparation, is meant to discuss the Land and the People ; and as to it, we shall rest con- tent with the remark that we hope it may appear soon, and that we expect to find it in some respects the most interesting of the series. Meanwhile we confine our attention to the volume before us. It is a great and valuable book. For a long time it is certain to be the book on its subject. It unites the plodding diligence and thorough honesty which distinguish 1)r. Reeve's edition of Adanthan's Life of St. Columba with qualities of a more brilliant order, to the posses- sion of which Reeve can assert no claim. There is in it a vivid- ness of narrative such as betokens the expert writer. There is a habit of generalisation such as shows the philosophic student. Better still, the picturesqueness and animation of the story are not gained at the expense of facts; while, however complex, they are so grouped and co-ordinated that the generalisations based upon them stand secure.
Mr. Skene starts by strongly urging the historic importance of the fact that for the space of two centuries, commencing with the invasion by the Barbarians of the Roman provinces of Gaul and Britain,—that is to say, from the beginning of the fifth till nigh the end of the sixth centuries,—a barrier of paganism separated the Christian Churches of Britain and of the Continent. Before that time, he finds a Church in Roman Britain which had extended its sway beyond the Roman Wall, so as to command the allegiance of the southern Picts ; and bad been carried over to Ireland, then the only country inhabited by the people called " Scots." This Church was in close connection with that of Gaul, and like it, re-
• Cellk Scotland: a ilistory of Ancient Allan. By W. F. Skene, Author of the "Four Ancient Books of Wales." Vol.II. Church and Culture. Edinburgh: DaTkl Douglas. graded the Patriarch of Rome as the source of ecclesiastical . authority and mission. The Rome of that day, however, was not the Romeof the middle-ages. Its Church was the Church of Jerome and Augustine. No question about its supremacy had then arisen. The pre-eminence acorded to its Bishop was simply one of deference and respect. His position as the head of the Church throughout the Western provinces of the Empire depended largely on the fact that Rome was the capital. During the period of separation, however, a great development went on ; and when the Churches came into contact again, they were in many respects unlike and unallied. The meeting took place when Columbanus, with his missionary monks, set out from Ireland on that expedition in the course of which they traversed France, Germany, Switzerland, and reached the further- most extremity of the Italian peninsula. An interesting sketch of Church life during this period is presented, the materials being drawn from the Litany of Angus the Cuhlee, the Catalogue of the Saints of Ireland, and other sources. Mr. Skene thinks that at first the clergy were secular, St. Ninian and St. Patrick being taken as prominent types of their character and labours. He analyses the accounts given of them, concluding that they "failed to effect a permanent conversion of the native tribes to Christianity," St. Patrick having lived to witness "a great declension from the Christian Church and a relapse into Paganism." Then came the rise of monasticism, introduced from Galloway, in Scotland, from Bretagne, and from Wales. It was vastly more successful. A regular clergy was instituted, all of them embraced within the monastic fold ; Ireland was studded with conventual schools, each of them a foyer du mouvement intellectuel ; and she basked in an illumination, mental and religious, which no country enjoyed to a corresponding degree. In these communities the Abbot was chief ; the Bishop had his own sacred functions, no doubt ; but not unfrequently, the scribe, or even inferior officers, held the episcopate, as an adjunct to his other employment.
It was one of these communities Columba established at Iona, whence a copy was transferred to Lindisfarne, from whence, again, England—or at least the kingdoms of Mercia and of Essex, and partially those of Wessex and East Anglia—derived their knowledge and love of the Christian faith. Some unnecessary -controversy has been raised over a statement by M. Montalembert, as applied to the whole of the British Islands, that " no country in the world received the faith more directly than England from Rome ;" but the critics • overlook the limitations by which he guards it,—that he writes of "the districts under Saxon sway." It is probable that the two chapters in Mr. Skene's book which will become most popular are the third and fourth, in which he treats of Columba and the family of Iona. They arc ably and eloquently written ; but we do not find in them much that is new, though cross- lights are let in which shew things in more intelligible relations, and enable one to judge with greater confidence. The next chapter, which is devoted to the Churches of Cumbria and Lothian, we should think have cost him more trouble, for they contain an account of the labours of St. Kentigern (otherwise St. Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow) and of St. Cuthbert (who has the best claim to be deemed the patron saint of Edinburgh) more ex- haustive, distinct, and rational than can be readily found any- where else. The chapter on the Culdees is also valuable. The name is a post-corruption of their real title. They were the socii, rnariti, or servi of Celle,—that is, God. Even Bede knows nothing of them by the name now given to them. According to Mr. Skene, they were a later development of the Monastic system, —eremites, living in solitary places, who, we should think, were all unconsciously assimilating themselves more to the rule of Benedict than of Columba. Mr. Skene asserts that they "sprang from that ascetic Order who adopted a solitary service of God in an isolated cell as the highest form of religious life, and who were termed Dticob?w that they made their appearance at the same time as the secular clergy were introduced ; and that they were brought under the canonical rule, retaining, however, to some extent the nomenclature of the monastery, till the name Of Keledeus or Culdec became almost synonymous with that of a secular canon."
A chapter upon " The Abbots of Columkille "—as Mr. Skene has it, " The Coiirbs of Columcille "—covers a hundred and fifty years, at the expiration of which time the name " Scottish Church" first appears, the whole region betwixt Forth and Spey simultaneously becoming Alban, instead of Pictland. Here there -occurs a beautiful sketch of the life and influence of that saintly Qum Margaret whose biography was written in choice Latin by the antiquary Pinkerton, and a lucid account of how hereditary succession became the rule in regard to ecclesiastical benefices. Says Mr. Skene :—
" In the early Monastic Church of Ireland, celibacy was enforced at least upon one class of the monks, for the saints of the second order refused the services of women, separating them from the monasteries ;' but still there was a succession to the abbacy, the tribe or family in whom it was vested providing a fit person in orders to fill the office ; but when the stringency of the monastic rule was broken in upon, under the influence of the secular clergy, marriage was gradually per- mitted or connived at, and at length became general, the rebound to- wards a secular state being great in proportion to the enforced strict- ness of the previous system. The natural consequence was that a direct descent from the ecclosiastical persons themselves came in place of the older system of succession, and the Church offices became heredi- tary in their family. The next step in the downward process was that the abbots and superiors did not take Orders, and became virtually lay- men, providing a fit person to perform the ecclesiastical functions, but retaining the name and all the secular privileges and emoluments of the abbacy. The great ecclesiastical offices thus became hereditary in the persons of laymen in two ways—either by tho usurpation of the benefice by the lay chieftains from whose tribe or family it had been supplied, or in the family of the abbot by whose direct descendants the office was filled, and who ceased after a time to take Orders."
It is easy to see how this would work. There soon came a time when "nothing was left but the mere name of abbacy' to the lands, and of ' abbot,' borne by the secular lord." This internal decay invited external change. It also came, consisting, we are told,— " First, in placing the Church upon a territorial in place of a tribal basis, and substituting the parochial system and a diocesan episcopacy for the old tribal Churches, with their monastic jurisdiction and functional episcopacy; secondly, of introducing the religions Orders of the Church of Rome, and founding great monasteries as centres of counter-influence to the native Church ; thirdly, in absorbing the Culdees, now the only clerical element left in the Celtic Church, into the Roman system, by converting them from secular into regular canons, and merging them in the latter order."
Mr. Skene sums up as under his account of the decline and fall of the institution his studies have made him love
:- "Thus the old Celtic Church came to an end, leaving no vestiges behind it, save here and there the roofless walls of what had been a church, and the numerous old burying-grounds to the use of which the people still cling with tenacity, and whore occasionally an ancient Celtic cross tells of its former state. All else has disappeared, and the only records we have of their history are the names of the saints by whom they were founded preserved in old calendars, the fountains near the old churches bearing their name, the village fairs of immemorial antiquity held on their day, and here and there a few families holding a small portion of the land as hereditary custodiers of the pastoral staff or other relic of the reputed founder of the church, with some small remains of its jurisdiction."
It is a natural, as it is an eloquent, lamentation, yet who shall say that the change was wholly evil ? Grant that the system of
Columba, even more than that of the so-called Culdees, exhibited features akin to the liberal ideas of modern times, did it not also embody characteristics which would have been fatal to much that is wholesome and strong in Teutonic Christendom? The history shows us " the tender grace of a day that is dead," but that day could not have been prolonged to our time. The asceticism which the Culdees practised was compelled to take a new development, as the learning which was cultivated by those who did not go so far actually became more curious, more speculative, more scholas- tic, concerning itself in a manner its primitive professors never dreamt of with the relations of faith and logic, of revelation and philosophy, till the descendants of the simple men who spent their days in conning and producing hagiologies rich in myth and miracle, became the foremost of those learned adventurers who gathered round the brightest spot of Western Christendom, eager for metaphysic combat, applying dialectic to the most mysterious doctrines, and evincing an extremely rationalistic latitude of thought.
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