Patrick Geddw and Colleaguef 
 Edinburgh and Cbelwa 
 
/ : 
 
GIFT OF 
 JANE'KolSATHEE 
 
L. 
 
 ST COLUMBA 
 
ST COLUMBA 
 
 A STUDY OF SOCIAL INHERITANCE 
 AND SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ^ 
 
 BY 
 
 VICTOR BRANFORD 
 
 
 PATRICK GEDDES AND COLLEAGUES 
 
 OUTLOOK TOWER, EDINBURGH, AND 
 
 2 MORE'S GARDEN, CHELSEA, S.W. 
 
 1913 
 
The Frontispiece— St Coluinba 071 the Hill of Angels^ 
 is from a draiving by Mr John Duncan, A.R.S.A. 
 
 The drawing on Cover is from a sketch model for 
 the statue of St Columha, by Mr Percy Portsmouth, 
 A,R.S.A., Professor of Sculpture ifi the Edinburgh 
 College of Art. 
 
 Around this model centres the Epilogue Scene of the 
 Masque of Ancient Lear?iing, which follows upon the 
 commemoration of St Columha afid his missions. This 
 Epilogue anticipates the erectio7i of the statue, and sug- 
 gests a site — a literal ^St Columbd's Place'' — upon the 
 Historic Mile of Old Edinburgh, which after lo7ig 
 dilapidation and neglect, is again in process of conser- 
 vation and renewal. 
 
 After lona itself, no situation can be more appro- 
 priate than this one, ?nidway between four Assemblies 
 of kindred denominations, and central amoiig so many 
 other churches and centres of goodwill and fellowship 
 
 not far away. \' 'c^.' '. .' i \/\ \ f 
 
 • • « < » « « 
 
 As a contpiUi^\ Utg.^isU\}k — mdt 'as; an appreciable 
 sacrifice — any proceeds to autfior and publishers from 
 this vohime will be devoted to the Tnove'inent for the 
 erection of this memorial. (The ainount req^uired is 
 £800.) 
 
 > 
 
 .6^ 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 For the information of those who may he inter- 
 ested to pursue further the line taken in this essay, 
 of re-interpreting old and familiar phenomena into 
 the phrasing and form of current science, it may 
 he mentioned that the writer has depended, (i) 
 mainly upon ivhat may he called the Comte-Le- 
 Play-Geddes formulae, zvhich resume the sociology 
 of the past two generations ; and (2) in less degree 
 upon the Lange-James-Hall formulae, which, in 
 more empirical fashion, have done a similar service 
 for psychology. Vide Prof. Geddes' papers in 
 'Sociological Papers' Vols. I, II, III, puhlished hy 
 the Sociological Society; President Stanley HalVs 
 'Adolescence' (Appleton) ; and William James' 
 'Varieties of Religious Experience." 
 
 300656 
 
THE RUNE OF ST PATRICK 
 
 At Tara to-day in this fateful hour 
 
 I place all Heaven with its power, 
 
 And the sun with its brightness. 
 
 And the snow with its whiteness, 
 
 And fire with all the strength it hath. 
 
 And lightning with its rapid wrath. 
 
 And the winds with their swiftness along their path. 
 
 And the sea with its deepness. 
 
 And the rocks with their steepness. 
 
 And the earth with its starkness: 
 
 All these I place. 
 
 By God's almighty help and grace. 
 Between myself and the powers of darkness. 
 
COLUMCILLE, later COLUMBA 
 
 A.D. 
 
 Born in Donegal . . . . . . . 521 
 
 Studied under St Finnian, &c 
 
 Religious Life at Clonard, &c. 
 
 Built his first church at Daire (Derry) . . 546 
 
 Founded Durrow 553 
 
 Battle of Culdremhne 561 
 
 Excommunicated 562 
 
 Settled at lona 563 
 
 Revisited Ireland; made terms for Bards . 575 
 
 Died 597 
 
COLUMCILLE FECIT 
 
 Delightful would it be to ine to he in Uchd Ailiun 
 On the pinnacle of a rock. 
 
 That I might bless the Lord 
 
 Who conserves all 
 Heaven with its countless bright orders. 
 
 Land, strand and flood; 
 
 That I -might search the books all, 
 
 That would be good for my soul; 
 At times kneeling to beloved Heaven; 
 
 At times psalm singing; 
 At times contemplating the King of Heaven, 
 
 Holy the chief; 
 At times at work without compulsion. 
 
 This would be delightful. 
 At times plucking duilisc from the rocks; 
 
 At times at fishing; 
 At times giving food to the poor; 
 
 At times in a prayer-cell. 
 The best advice in the presence of God 
 
 To me has been vouchsafed. 
 The King whose servant I am will not let 
 
 Anything deceive me. 
 
ST COLUMBA 
 
 rA STUDY OF SOCIAL INHERITANCE 
 AND SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 I 
 
 To sociologize the saints will, to many pious souls, 
 sound hardly less sacrilegious than to 'botanize 
 upon a mother's grave.' But what if science has 
 come not to destroy but to fulfil? It will be hard, 
 no doubt, to make the aforesaid pious souls believe 
 that any good intention towards the saints can 
 come from that quarter, any more than from philo- 
 sophy. In the seventeenth century, philosophy 
 was sceptical of the saints; in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, it ridiculed them; in the nineteenth, using 
 the apparatus of science to complete the desecra- 
 tion, it pronounced sanctity a form of hysteria. 
 The Patroness of Hystericists is what Monsieur 
 Janet calls St Teresa. What now of the twentieth 
 century in its turn? 
 
 And, as to the attitude of science towards the 
 saints, it certainly does not sound promising that 
 anthropology should be so ostentatiously inclined 
 to continue the discussion of religion as something 
 arising out of the dreams of primitive man. 
 
 There is emerging, however, a new psychology 
 
 which has a word of comfort for the pious, without 
 
 being committed to any feud with the critical. 
 
 The exponents of this new psychology would 
 
 h 
 
- • • 
 
 lO 
 
 probably accept the anthropologist's account of the 
 origin of religion, with the addition of a couple of 
 qualifying words. They would be prepared to 
 maintain that religion comes mainly out of the day- 
 dreams of that perennial primitive man called a 
 Poet. 
 
 II 
 
 But who and what are the poets? The singing 
 poets we know by their song, and we have even 
 been taught to recognize the possible existence as 
 'mute inglorious Miltons' of singers whose song, 
 in the ordinary sense, has never been achieved. 
 What is not yet a part of our common knowledge, 
 or a subject of our common school education, is 
 the more obvious and important fact that there are 
 Poets — Makers — by the million, whose works — 
 whose poetry or making, does not come out of them 
 in the form of song, in the usual sense, at all. 
 
 There are first and foremost the silent poets of 
 the workshop and the home, who 'give to barrows, 
 trays and pans, grace and glimmer of romance.' 
 Then there are the poets of the pulpit and the 
 cloister, of the rostrum and the chair, of the labora- 
 tory and the studio, of field and city, whose song, 
 if we must have the word, goes into oratory and 
 counsel, theorisation and discovery, adventure and 
 service, into the 'making' of pictures and music, 
 of buildings and gardens, and even of those supreme 
 utilities of common life. Love and Worship. How 
 may we discover and observe the operations of all 
 these? For there, if anywhere, in the work of the 
 singing and non-singing poets alike, is to be found 
 the material in action which we wish to sociologize 
 
II 
 
 — i.e., to observe and understand in the spirit of 
 science. Here, according to our formula, is the 
 stuff out of which religion renews itself, out of 
 which sanctity emerges, and the saints — perhaps 
 even the gods — are recreated afresh by and for each 
 generation. And thus— as is the way of science — 
 by observing similar things going on around us, 
 we prepare ourselves to go back into the past and 
 understand the divinities o£ former times, and it 
 may be to foresee and to some extent determine the 
 sanctities of the future. That this idea of reversing 
 the doctrine of predestination is no new aspiration 
 of modern science, let an earlier, and, as some 
 think, a greater Christian Father than St Augus- 
 tine, bear witness. It was Clement of Alexandria 
 who said that *man predestines God, as much as 
 God predestines man.' 
 
 For a description of the poets proper, we might 
 do very well with O'Shaughnessy's confession and 
 claim, that 'We are the dreamers of dreams.* A 
 still greater poet has declared that 'II existe en 
 effet, chez les trois quarts des hommes, un poete, 
 mort jeune, a qui Thomme survit.' Is this a too 
 generous estimate? — as most men would probably 
 say, forgetting that they had ever been in love (if 
 they ever were). Or, on the other hand, are we 
 to believe the prophets of that new scientific gospel, 
 the psychology of adolescence? These tell us that 
 there is a time in each life, when to have and 
 pursue poetic ideals is as normal as hunger and 
 thirst are at all times; that, in short, there is in 
 the life cycle of every normal human being, a 
 period of flowering, when personality means poetry. 
 With many this florescent period may be but a 
 moment, and they promptly lapse, in the midst of 
 
12 
 
 their teens, into premature senility. Sad is the 
 best that may happen to these ; outwardly blameless 
 citizens, paying their rates with grudging but 
 punctual regularity, during a life unnecessarily 
 long. 
 
 With others, the dreams of adolescence are 
 cherished and cultivated into deeds. 
 
 'When the dream is gone, the passion stamped 
 remaineth.' 
 
 The resulting deeds are infinite in variety, and 
 bewildering in complexity. Of the poets proper, 
 how great the diversity ! Most of them at best 
 half poets — some indeed barely the sixteenth of a 
 minor kind — but with here and there a Virgil or 
 a Dante, a Milton or a Goethe, who sweeps the full 
 circuit of life. 
 
 That most plastic of animals, the human adoles- 
 cent, our potential poet, may be developed and 
 cultivated to respond to any sort of ideal; or 
 dwarfed and distorted to yield to any sort of 
 temptation. Can it be showm that the saint is a 
 developed variant of this poetic type? In these 
 days when the writing of poetry is the surest way 
 to unemployment, and when sanctity is taken as 
 an indication of social inefficiency, if not of mental 
 defect, a proposal to link the poet and the saint is 
 to risk scornful repudiation by each. And yet, of 
 our poet-saints, who alike wrote good poetry and 
 lived saintly lives, there is a long line of examples 
 beginning with (say) St Patrick and not ending 
 with Keble. But what if it can be shown that, 
 given a particular moral discipline, and a certain 
 historical impulse and example, then the saint is 
 just the poet grown grey, writing his love poem 
 in the dreams and deeds of life? 
 
13 
 III 
 
 When Schopenhauer said religion was the meta- 
 physics of the people, he meant of course that the 
 folk-mind wants some sort of answer to the ques- 
 tions — What am I? — Whence do I come? and — 
 Whither do I go? — by which the metaphysician 
 is tormented, sometimes obsessed. But the folk- 
 mind, if it is embodied in a ploughman or a 
 shepherd, has not diurnally assisted at the sunrise 
 and sunset, has not experienced the procession of 
 the seasons and the crops, and sat up night upon 
 night with lambing ewes, without preserving and 
 even developing something of the adolescent spark 
 of idealism, which, as these psychologists of adol- 
 escence go on reminding us, breaks once into light 
 in all men. For these there are religious questions 
 other than the metaphysical ones. The folk-mind 
 in its recurrent moods of idealistic tendency reaches 
 out, however vaguely and sporadically it may be, 
 towards asking — What at my best would I like to 
 be? — and to do? What ways are there of starting 
 and moving on that road? How can I build into 
 myself the memories and examples of great and 
 good lives I have known or heard tell of? And it 
 may be — What memory of myself would I leave to 
 my descendants and my friends? 
 
 These, to be sure, are not precisely the kind of 
 query put into the mouth of the rustic, in the news- 
 papers written for smart townsmen of London by 
 smart gownsmen of Oxford. But, granting such 
 questions as occasional possibilities, let us see if it 
 helps to account — in a different way from that of 
 M. Janet and the mad doctors — for the fact that 
 there have been saints in the world. 
 
14 
 
 IV 
 
 In point of fact, who and what are the saints of 
 historic memory? 
 
 To the last great wave of militant idealism which 
 surged through the Roman Church — the Jesuit 
 movement — we owe our systematized biographical 
 knowledge of the saints. To a Jesuit father — one 
 Rosweydus — it occurred to recall the western world 
 to its inheritance of ideals by collecting and pub- 
 lishing in one series of volumes — 'The Deeds of 
 the Saints.' When this great undertaking was 
 reported to Cardinal Bellarmine, he said of Ros- 
 weydus — 'What is this man's age? Does he 
 expect to live 200 years?' The critical Cardinal's 
 scoff fell short of the occasion ; for the beginning 
 of an issue was made by Bollandus in 1643, and 
 the work is still in process of publication. And 
 we may add, for the discomfiture of the Cardinal, 
 that Rosweydus is perhaps more alive than ever. 
 For he has not only helped to preserve and transmit 
 to pious Catholics their inheritance of ideals, but 
 he has been an instrument in restoring to the 
 impoverished Protestant section of the Christian 
 world something of that wealth of spiritual tradi- 
 tion of which the Reformation deprived it. Mr 
 Baring Gould, for instance, has cut down for 
 English Protestants, into a modest score of volumes 
 containing some three to four thousand lives, the 
 monumental records of the Bollandists. And what 
 was the Oxford or Tractarian Movement — that 
 start-point of the nineteenth century Anglican 
 revival — but the discovery and recovery by a group 
 of Oxford adolescents of a stock of ideals congruent 
 with Oxford culture, but which their Cavalier and 
 
15 
 
 Jacobite ancestors had forsaken, or exchanged for 
 a mess of loyalty, and which their utilitarian 
 fathers and grandfathers had too easily learnt to 
 despise. It was a natural consequence of such a 
 re-discovery that these 'hot-headed and fanatical 
 young men' (as Kingsley, with accurate enough 
 psychological severity, called the Newman-Pusey 
 group) should have projected the publication of a 
 series of volumes of the lives of the Knglish Saints. 
 By this work — certainly the most notable literary 
 promise of the Oxford Movement — they hoped to 
 re-establish the broken succession of saintly types, 
 and transmit the long forgotten and new found 
 inheritance to succeeding generations of responsive 
 adolescents. 
 
 V 
 
 To return, however, to the Bollandists collectors 
 and editors of the 'Deeds of the Saints.' These 
 drew their material mainly from the records in the 
 libraries of churches and monasteries. And as, in 
 response to their requests to local keepers of 
 records, material poured in, none perhaps were 
 more astonished than the editors themselves at the 
 overwhelming multitude of saints whom their call 
 had summoned into congregation. Bollandus, who 
 took over the direction of the scheme from Ros- 
 weydus, began by publishing for the month of 
 January two folios in double columns, close print, 
 of 1200 pages each. February occupied three 
 volumes. May swelled into seven folios, Septem- 
 ber into eight, and October into ten. 
 
 Now, it is important to note that, of all the 
 saints whose deeds were sent in for inclusion in 
 
i6 
 
 the general Calendar, comparatively few had been 
 formally canonized at Rome. That elaborate 
 ceremonialization was a relatively late creation, 
 and it was not until the eighteenth century that a 
 formal and authoritative papal treatise on the prin- 
 ciples of canonization appeared. Up to the twelfth 
 or thirteenth centuries — that is, throughout the 
 active period of saint worship — all that was neces- 
 sary to obtain a day in the Calendar, for the worship 
 of a particular saint in any diocese, was the consent 
 of the Bishop of that diocese. And in all suc^h 
 cases the episcopal consent was regarded as being 
 nothing more than the formal recognition and 
 official approval of a demand spontaneously evoked 
 by reverence and loving gratitude towards the 
 memory of an exceptional life, which, here and 
 there, in hamlet and village, town and city, had 
 kept alight the torch of the ideal. The folk-mind 
 has its own standards of what is good and true and 
 beautiful, and, in terms of these, it selects for 
 idealisation, the types that appeal most to its poetic 
 sense. Self-sacrifice, as Emerson said, is the 
 original miracle, out of which all the other miracles 
 grew ; and the life in which self-seeking is systema- 
 tically subordinated to bringing into other lives 
 what is felt to be good and true and beautiful, 
 will seem most miraculous and most sacred. There- 
 fore the Bollandists properly call their publications 
 not the Ivives, but the Deeds of the Saints. Like 
 Adamnan's Xife of Columba,' they are not so 
 much biographies as records of 'miracles, pro- 
 phecies, and visions.' Interpret them as recording 
 poems of the dreams and the deeds of ideal regional 
 and occupational types — then we have in these 
 lives a concrete historical basis for studying the 
 
^7 
 
 rise and growth, the decay and degeneration, and 
 the re-birth of folk ideals. It is perhaps for the 
 lack of such knowledge that so many admirable 
 experiments of social reformers in town and coun- 
 try are distressingly futile. Fruit-growing and 
 co-operative dairies are admirable and indispensable 
 things, but even with mutual banks, tea meetings 
 and the cinematograph, they fall short of making 
 a model village, by just that element that makes 
 the difference between Dante and the daily news- 
 paper. Fundamental is it in the village economy 
 to cultivate a stock of pedigree pigs and prize 
 poultry, but supreme is the (not un-related) prob- 
 lem of how to preserve and develop the stock of 
 ideals. Every village garden is an Eden in making 
 or in decay; and the most the city can do for itself 
 or the village, is to advance one process or the 
 other. And for the better of these purposes a little 
 knowledge may be worth a great deal of good 
 intention. 
 
 VI 
 
 It was thus entirely natural that the group of 
 adolescents who stirred up the Oxford Movement 
 should seek to resuscitate the stock of saintly 
 ideals ; and, by making their Calendar national and 
 regional, they returned to the original principles 
 of sanctifi cation, and rightly hoped thereby to 
 reawaken a traditional idealism adapted to the 
 Christian culture of the English people. This 
 aspect was apparently too obvious to call for 
 special reference in the Prospectus of the project 
 issued by Newman; for, in that document, the 
 main purpose of the undertaking was declared to 
 
i8 
 
 be the disciplinary one of diverting into regional 
 and practical activities, the adolescent tendency to 
 run into excessive subjectivities of one kind and 
 another. *I thought,' he says, in reference to his 
 colleagues, 'the writing of the lives would be useful 
 as employing the minds of men who are in danger 
 of running wild, bringing them from doctrine to 
 history, from speculation to fact, and again as 
 giving them an interest in the English soil and 
 the English church.' 
 
 VII 
 
 A GLANCE at Newman's Calendar reveals many 
 gaps, the supply of English saints being appar- 
 ently insufficient to go round the 365 days, not- 
 withstanding the inclusion of various names which 
 had never been sanctified even in popular worship. 
 The shortage of English saints could have been 
 more than made up by the inclusion even of the 
 Cornish ones. But here the difficulty was just of 
 the opposite kind. The number of Cornish saints 
 was so large as to be unmanageable, and conse- 
 quently Cornwall was excluded from the English 
 Calendar. There was never any intention, pre- 
 sumably, of including the saints of Wales, Scotland 
 or Ireland. Translated into the language of the 
 impartial sociological observer, this omission of 
 Cornwall means that the stock of ideals available 
 for transmission in Cornwall was more ample than 
 the mental resources of the Oxford Tractarians 
 were able to deal with. It is currently counted that 
 Cornwall is a place of folk-lore, and Oxford of 
 culture. But it would seem that there is a point 
 Df view from which the culture appears to be in 
 
19 
 
 Cornwall, the folk in Oxford, and the lore in its 
 libraries, fossilised as learning. This wealth of 
 idealism possessed by the Cornish people is char- 
 acteristic, as is well known, of the whole Celtic 
 fringe, and, above all, of Ireland. This idealist 
 culture-inheritance of the Irish is indeed what 
 essentially distinguished them, not only from the 
 less imaginative English, but even from all other 
 nations of mediaeval Europe. 
 
 For several centuries in early mediaeval times, 
 Irish saints were as common in Europe as Irish 
 policemen in America to-day. It is said to be a 
 working rule of the Bollandist editors, that if the 
 birthplace of a saint is unknown, he may safely be 
 counted an Irishman. The contemporary story 
 (esteemed of political hibernophobes) of the Kil- 
 kenny sweep, who excused himself for drunkenness 
 on the ground of over-fatigue, as he had to do the 
 work of all the other sweeps ('they being away 
 attinding to their parli'ment'ry duties at West- 
 minster'), may be balanced by the twelfth century 
 story in Giraldus, concerning an Archbishop of 
 Cashel, who, when taunted by a Roman ecclesiastic 
 that the Irish church had never produced a single 
 martyr, retorted : 'Quite so ! My country has not 
 earned, by the universal consent of Christendom, 
 her title of Isle of Saints by persecuting God's 
 elect, but by cherishing them.* 
 
 VIII 
 
 Now, there was in early mediaeval Ireland, a verit- 
 able proliferation, not only of saints, but also of 
 poets. Can we correlate these two historical facts ? 
 
20 
 
 May we interpret them as manifestations of a single 
 national characteristic and tendency? 
 
 Columba, the most typical perhaps, if not the 
 best known of Irish saints, was himself of the 
 order of Bards. Several poems attributed to him 
 are still extant. It would, indeed, be strange, if 
 a man of Columba' s emotional intensity and cease- 
 less initiative, should spend a good portion of his 
 life in making those MS. copies of the psalms, 
 which were the chief propagandist documents of 
 early Christianity, without himself running into 
 poetic composition. It is symbolic of the method 
 and the persistent continuity of the Irish endeavour 
 to civilize England, that a translation of the very 
 hymn of St Patrick which he is said to have sung 
 at Tara, should have been sung in procession at 
 the enthronement of Bishop Magee at Lincoln on 
 St Patrick's Day, 1891. 
 
 In or after transforming themselves into Christian 
 singers, the Druidic Bards, or Minstrel Poets of 
 Ireland, apparently waxed fat and multiplied ex- 
 ceedingly. The profession grew so popular and 
 attractive, apparently even lucrative, that, in the 
 sixth century, nearly a third of the population, it 
 is even said, had become bards. This was too 
 much even for the Irish ; and, in anger and resent- 
 ment at the exactions and abuses of the chief bards, 
 there would seem to have been a proposal to abolish 
 the order, at a great national Convention in 575 
 A.D. Columba came over from lona to attend the 
 Convention, for the double purpose of protecting 
 the bardic order and acting as pacificator in certain 
 disputes between Ireland and Scotland. Under his 
 wise and benign influence, the corporation was 
 judiciously reformed. The retainers of the chief 
 
21 
 
 bards were diminished, and grants of land made to 
 them in place of their previous exigent privileges. 
 Thus strengthened by purging, purification, and 
 lighter diet, the bardic order persisted, and survived 
 the evil times, not only of the Scandinavian inva- 
 sions and ravages, but even the Tudor and Stuart 
 persecutions. The last representatives of the order 
 — their customary privileges reduced to a seat by 
 the kitchen fire in winter and a meal on the door- 
 step in summer — lingered on into the nineteenth 
 century, and disappeared just as the new spirit of 
 Irish poetry was reviving, out of the ruins of the 
 old national literature. 
 
 IX 
 
 The number, the influence, the persistence of the 
 Irish and Scotch bards is accounted for, not only 
 by their providing music and poetry for a people 
 passionately athirst for both, but also by the fact 
 that they were regional historians and chroniclers. 
 All through the middle ages, each district had its 
 appropriate number of bards. Historians differ 
 essentially, not as the Germans have taught us tc 
 think, in the external accuracy of the facts they re- 
 cord, but in their deeper veracity of spirit, above all, 
 their choice ; for both choice and spirit depend upon 
 the kind of ideals they seek, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, to transmit from one generation to another. 
 Thus, when in the nineteenth century Irish mill- 
 hands were of greater utilitj^ in Manchester and 
 Glasgow than saints or heroes, it was natural 
 that varieties of local historian should replace the 
 l^ard — viz., the Registrar of births, deaths and 
 
22 
 
 marriages, and the economic statistician generally. 
 This accurate counting of heads is a necessary and 
 excellent public function; but, to make that the 
 prime duty of the local historian, is to ensure that 
 he transmits the ideals of the drill sergeant. A 
 society which keeps separated the labours of its 
 poets and its historians — as Europe for the past 
 three centuries has done — is endeavouring, by per- 
 verting its poets, and dessicating its historians, to 
 starve itself of idealism, and to obliterate its 
 inheritance of ideals. That these efforts are sub- 
 conscious makes matters all the worse. It is 
 perhaps the instinctive effort of a degenerating 
 organism to disencumber itself of an impediment 
 to decay. 
 
 The true historian is a link between the poet 
 and the saint. Set the poet to write history, and 
 he will, according to the usages and standards of 
 his time and training, count heads as accurately 
 as the best. But he will not be stopped there. 
 Transmitting the deeds of the heroes and dreams 
 of the saints, he will make other heroes and saints, 
 at times even he has the reward of highest hope, 
 and becomes a saint himself. 
 
 X 
 
 The middle ages might well be defined as times 
 when saints were made wholesale. It w^as their 
 later centuries that gave us the fullest examples — 
 like St Bernard and St Francis, St Catherine and 
 St Teresa. The psychological formula, for the 
 development of the saintly type, and even its 
 educational routine, became explicit ; and both were 
 
23 
 
 theoretically perfected in the system and the writ- 
 ings of those saints who, like Ignatius Loyola and 
 Teresa, emerged as monastic institutions were in 
 full decline. Indeed, the writings of Teresa are 
 masterpieces of psychological analysis such as can 
 hardly be matched in modern treatises ; and they 
 are not likely to be adequately utilized, still less 
 equalled, till the union of her mode of thought and 
 its branch of science again engages the attention 
 of women — its natural cultivators. 
 
 But for the elemental conditions of saintly origin 
 and growth, while utilizing fully these later sources, 
 we must look to earlier times, of pristine simplicity, 
 and spontaneous initiative; and above all to those 
 Celtic monasteries of the fifth, sixth, and seventh 
 centuries, which were veritable laboratories of the 
 saintly mode of life. The credulity of Montalem- 
 bert is to be deprecated, and the exaggerations into 
 which it led him avoided; but it remains that no 
 other historian of monasticism has touched the 
 subject with the same truth of imaginative insight. 
 
 'The first great monasteries of Ireland,' Montalem- 
 bert truly says, 'were nothing else, to speak simply, 
 than clans reoro:anized under a religious form. Frcm 
 this cause resulted the extraordinary number of their 
 inhabitants, who were counted by hundreds and thou- 
 sands ; from this also came their influence and produc- 
 tiveness, which were still more wonderful. In these 
 vast monastic cities, that fidelity to the church which 
 Ireland has maintained with heroic constancy for four- 
 teen centuries, in face of all excesses, as well as all the 
 refinements, of persecution, took permanent root. There 
 also were trained a veritable population of philosophers, 
 of writers, of architects, of carvers, of painters, of call- 
 graph ers, of musicians, poets, and historians ; but, above 
 all, of missionaries and preachers, destined to spread 
 the light of the Gospel and of Christian education, not 
 onlv in all the Celtic countries, of which Ireland was 
 
24 
 
 always the nursing mother, but throughout Europe, 
 among all the Teutonic races — among the Franks and 
 Burgundians, who were already masters of Gaul, as well 
 as amid the dwellers by the Rhine and the Danube, and 
 up to the frontiers of Italy. Thus sprang up all those 
 armies of saints, who were more numerous, more 
 national, more popular, and, it must be added, more 
 extraordinary, in Ireland than in any other Christian 
 land.' 
 
 Of all the early Irish saints, Columba is perhaps 
 the most typical, as alike regional, national and 
 international, and in respect of his being at once 
 amply historical and deeply legendary. 
 
 XI 
 
 The biographers of St Columba are fond of insist- 
 ing on his royal lineage alike by paternal and 
 maternal descent. We may take this to mean 
 that he had good shepherd blood in his veins. The 
 Celtic people who settled in Ireland found there 
 grassy plains and valleys which permitted and even 
 compelled some continuance of their primitive 
 pastoral form of life. The people, in becoming 
 peasants, of necessity remained half shepherds, 
 and their tribal chiefs, in becoming territorial 
 princes and petty kings, remained half patriarchs, 
 and only partly degenerated into an aristocracy of 
 war and sport. Thus geographical conditions 
 determined the continuance of the shepherd occupa- 
 tion, with its necessary pastoral ideal of the perfect 
 man as 'good shepherd,' and its corresponding and 
 equally necessary pastoral Utopia — of a perfect 
 world in which loving-kindness universally pre- 
 vails, and the Shepherd is Ivord Supreme who 
 
25 
 
 'maketh man *to lie down in green pastures and 
 leadeth him by still waters.' 
 
 True that his biographers do not expressly tell 
 us of the boy Columba having, like David, tended 
 his father's flocks. But that it was the custom for 
 sons of great territorial chiefs to serve such an 
 apprenticeship we know, if only from such stories 
 as that of Columba' s contemporary, St Mochuda 
 (the son of a great lord of Kerry), who founded 
 the monastic city of Lismore, and of whom this 
 legend is told. He , was tending his father's 
 flocks, when 
 
 'there passed one day a Bishop with his suite, chanting 
 psalms in alternate strophes as they continued their 
 course. The young Mochuda was so rapt by this 
 psalmody that he abandoned his flock, and followed the 
 choir of singers to the gates of the monastery where 
 they were to pass the night. He did not venture to 
 enter with them, but remained outside, close to the 
 place where they lay, and where he could hear them 
 continue their song till the hour of repose, ^he Bishop 
 chanting longest of all after the others were asleep. 
 The shepherd thus passed the entire night. The chief, 
 who loved him, sought him everywhere, and when at 
 last the young man was brought to him, asked why he 
 had not come, as usual, on the previous evening. "My 
 Lord," said the shepherd, "I did not come because I 
 was ravished by the divine song which I have heard 
 sung by the holy clergy. Please Heaven, Lord Duke, 
 that I was but with them, that I might learn to sing as 
 they do." The chief in vain admitted him to his table, 
 offered him his sword, his buckler, his lance, all the 
 tokens of a stirring and prosperous life. "I want none 
 of your gifts," the shepherd always replied, "I want 
 but one thing— to learn the chant which I have heard 
 sung by the saints of God." In the end he prevailed, 
 and was sent to the Bishop to be made a monk.' 
 
26 
 
 XII 
 
 AvS at another time and place, when idealism was 
 an effective force, no man could be a knight without 
 being first a squire (i.e., a groom), or later could 
 be a gentleman without being first a page {i.e., a ser- 
 vant), so it is likely that in early Ireland to learn to 
 be a shepherd was part of the training for a chieftain. 
 For in the long run, what is the chieftain but the 
 best shepherd of all the clansmen ? To understand 
 the imposing historical figure, St Columba, Abbot 
 of lona, let us then go back to Colum O'Donnel, 
 the shepherd boy of Donegal. The seeding of 
 senescent sanctity in lona, need lose none of its 
 evocatory wonder and admiration, its truly mira- 
 culous elements, if we can understand it as con- 
 tinuing the flowering of poetic adolescence in 
 Donegal, and this again need lose none of its 
 romance if we can connect its idealism with the 
 keeping and the tending of sheep. 
 
 The supply of Irish shepherd boys being per- 
 ennial and dependent, in last resort, only on grass 
 and sheep, it becomes a matter of historical investi- 
 gation' to ascertain what changes in the social 
 milieu determine the direction of latent adolescent 
 idealism towards lona and missionary enterprise in 
 one age, or in another to New York and the 
 organisation of philanthropy, or to Chicago and 
 the creation of a great University, or to West- 
 minster and Nationalist politics. But here the 
 problem is only with Colum O'Donnel of the sixth 
 century, and not with Irish American philanthro- 
 pists, nor with the President Harpers and the 
 Michael Davitts of the nineteenth century. 
 
27 
 
 Adamnan relates with great wealth of poetic 
 detail a parental vision of Columba's mother in 
 which she saw her son as a Prophet of God and a 
 missionary of the Christian faith. Every mother 
 has ideals for her son. Her idea of the perfect 
 man and the perfect life to lead are just what her 
 personality, her education, her rank prompt her to 
 select from the inherited stock of ideals transmitted 
 to her milieu. Combining^ this selection of social 
 and customary standards into a unique personal 
 ideal, she dreams of its realisation in her son. 
 And here in the maternal urge and impulse to 
 vicarious realisation, we are at the very fountain- 
 head of idealism. For here, if anywhere, the 
 altruistic element in idealism is irresistibly linked 
 with a natural tendency to self-sacrifice. 
 
 XIII 
 
 In a wholly pastoral community, i.e., a community 
 which lives and moves by, with, and for its flocks— 
 the mental and emotional processes will be coloured 
 throughout by the conditions of the shepherd's 
 occupation.* In such a community sheep are kept 
 essentially for wool (and milk) and not for mutton. 
 The welfare of a pastoral people depends, there- 
 fore, on the quantity and quality of the wool yielded 
 by its flocks, and the skill and taste of the women 
 in spinning it and weaving it into fabrics. The 
 more numerous and vigorous the flocks and the 
 
 *For a study of pastoral ideals and their geographical 
 and occupational origins vide P. Geddes, Flower of the 
 Grass, in The Evergreen, Book of Summer (P. Geddes 
 and Colleagues, Edinburgh, 1896). 
 
28 
 
 finer the wool, the more prosperous the tribe. 
 The selection and care of the best types for breed- 
 ing, implies the scrupulous record and scrutiny of 
 pedigree, and the progressive improvement of stock 
 leads naturally to aspirations of an indefinitely per- 
 fect able type as a goal of achievement. Thus, it 
 is easy to see how amongst pastoral peoples, the 
 evolution of pedigree stock, and pride of family 
 genealogy, are correlative. And it equally follows 
 that, since economic success is, in a pastoral com- 
 munity, inevitably in terms of maximum and opti- 
 mum of life, the human ideals which grow up in 
 that milieu will be correspondingly coloured. The 
 sentiments of the people will tend to shape their 
 ideas of moral perfection towards the dream of an 
 ideal type of the race, who shall come as a 
 Redeemer. The Messianic hope is the poetry of 
 pastoral maternity, renewing itself with each gen- 
 eration ; and in the elan of adolescence it is no 
 remote and unattainable ideal, but may be a very 
 present hope and a mainspring of conduct. And 
 that being so, the presence and continuance of the 
 ideal will tend to create the conditions of its own 
 fulfilment. The tradition of the ideal will gradu- 
 ally build up a congruent moral discipline, under 
 which an approximating movement is made towards 
 its realization. Thus are kept alive the moral 
 qualities of hope, which lights the adolescent flame, 
 and faith {i.e., belief in ideal perf ectability) , which 
 is the sustenance that keeps it burning. 
 
 From the caravan connection, which the great 
 pastoral communities have from time immemorial 
 maintained with the trading cities, many moral and 
 social reactions ensue. But here a single one calls 
 for reference. One of the very oldest romance 
 
29 
 
 legends of the world is the Quest of the Golden 
 Fleece — already ancient in the time of Homer. 
 The original Jason was doubtless a pastoral caravan 
 hero, whose prowess in adventurous exploit won 
 him wealth and a wife in the wonderlands of distant 
 trade. The quest of love and adventure is, to be 
 sure, a normal characteristic of awakened youth in 
 any social formation ; for where youth is, romance 
 is not far to seek. But to pastoral caravan origins 
 we have probably to look for the finer developments 
 of the quest as idealised romance. 
 
 XIV 
 
 Pastor ALivSM is the admitted parent of Christi- 
 anity; but it is also the grandparent of the com- 
 plementary religion — Hellenism. The interest and 
 significance of Apollo, to the sociologist, is that the 
 god did, as the legend affirms, keep flocks ; that he 
 did slay real, live wolves; that he did (on a caravan 
 journev) barter the fleeces of a whole flock for i 
 coveted musical instrument in a one-sided bargain 
 with a young Hebrew trader (his brother Hermes^ ; 
 and that he zt'as the king's herdsman, who could 
 and did do two things better than all the others — 
 
 'And first, that he was better with the bow 
 Than any 'twixt Olympus and the sea ; 
 And then that sweet, heart-piercing melody 
 He drew out from the rigid-seeming lyre, 
 And made the circle round the winter fire 
 More like to heaven than gardens of the May. 
 So many a heavy thought he chased away 
 From the King's heart, and softened many a hate. 
 And choked the spring of many a harsh debate.' 
 
 As a far-darting god, there is a natural tendency 
 to associate Apollo with the far-going paravan ; but^ 
 
30 
 
 leaving that as a problem (that is to say, a quest) 
 for a young archaeologist, note Apollo's own quest, 
 for which he was celebrated in the recently dis- 
 covered Delphic hymn — 
 
 'Thou who didst conquer with thy darts the unspeakable 
 
 dragon 
 And didst drive him writhing before thee into the clefts 
 
 of the hill.' 
 
 Having conquered the unspeakable dragon (of 
 lust), Phoebus Apollo became the god of honour, 
 light, and purity. Here his story is symbolical of 
 the task which confronts every youth and the quest 
 to which each is called. In setting out to conquer 
 his own dragon, every youth may draw inspiration 
 and courage from the thought that he is treading in 
 the footsteps of Apollo. In preparation of this 
 quest the discipline of the body has a special place, 
 and therefore is Apollo the ideal athlete and god of 
 the Palaestra. But the source of the moral dis- 
 cipline is not so obvious. By what means may the 
 great miracle of Nature be performed, the trans- 
 mutation of egoistic passion into altruistic love? 
 For one of the social origins of this we may go 
 back to the shepherd's calling and find a germ of 
 altruistic tendency in the capacity for tenderness 
 and self-sacrifice which the constant reaction of 
 sheep and shepherd inevitably develops. This is 
 further disciplined by the abstinence and control 
 required on the long caravan journey. And if that 
 journey, with many, ends in a debauch in the city 
 of its destination, the very fact of such a loss of 
 'integrity' will tend, in the more ideal types, to 
 prompt to a still higher perfection of restraint. 
 Hence it may happen that the young caravanier will 
 
3i 
 
 conceive it his highest reward to be able to bring 
 back as a wife, not for himself, but for another, 
 the very flower of maidens; for so did Apollo on 
 another quest gain Alcestis for the bride of Ad- 
 metus. This supreme exercise of fidelity and self- 
 effacement is the severest test to which any human 
 youth can be put, and rightly forms a part of the 
 story of Apollo, both as shepherd-boy and as the 
 god of ideal youth. Where Lancelot, the flower of 
 Christian chivalry, failed, the shepherd Apollo suc- 
 ceeded ; and so made a like achievement easier for 
 every youth thereafter, in proportion as his train- 
 ing, his occupation, and his personality could 
 respond to the suggestion of the great exemplar. 
 And it is as an endeavour to make the exemplar 
 valid and helpful for youth, that we must under- 
 stand and interpret all that elaboration of ceremony 
 and ritual in the worship of the god of purity, by 
 and through which the young mind was to be sug- 
 gestionised into the incorporation of that ideal. 
 The worship of a god of purity, known himself to 
 have been a shepherd-boy, was fitly made part of 
 the necessary training of all other shepherd -boys in 
 a society fundamentally pastoral . 
 
 XV 
 
 Having conquered the Delphian Dragon, and 
 become Master of Music and Poetry, Apollo was 
 trained for a still greater quest, which was also a 
 mission. As Musagetes, he is engaged on the 
 quest of finding the Muses, and bringing them 
 together ; that is, of orchestrating all the Arts into 
 a unified service of life and love. This is the 
 
supreme quest-mission, and it is the merit of the 
 Greeks that they came nearer to achieve it than 
 any other people. The Greeks might be described 
 as a people who, like Apollo, went on the quest of 
 the Muses; but, unlike him, although they sighted 
 the goal, they got lost on the way. Some of them 
 became arrested in the gymnasium — those who 
 worshipped Apollo as a beautiful athlete, forgetting 
 that muscular training is only a preparation, and 
 for the quest which is the way out of that school. 
 And, as an Adolescent too often sacrifices his ideal 
 by hypostatizing prowess or agility, so in the same 
 way a Senescent may also only too easily get stuck 
 in the Cloister, and become a mere gymnast of the 
 mental life; dialectic being but the mental gym- 
 nastics of senescence. 
 
 It is of the very meaning of youth that it has its 
 problems ; and here the Quest is the moral discip- 
 line by which the youth may be initiated into the 
 altruistic point of view. He learns that what seems 
 his unique and personal problem is also a general 
 one; and that as his fellows have similar problems, 
 his instructive rivalry must take the form of higher 
 and higher quest; and his instinct of fellowship 
 be applied to helping their quests, even at hazard 
 to his own. 
 
 XVI 
 
 As the Quest is the discipline of the caravan 
 idealised by the romance of youth, so the Mission is 
 the same discipline carried into mature manhood. 
 It is no accident that the greatest of missionaries 
 was a tent-maker. When St Paul started on his 
 mission of converting the world to the ideals of the 
 
33 
 
 Sermon on the Mount, he was probably approach- 
 ing middle age. Another great world-missionary 
 passed from shepherd-boy to be caravanier at five- 
 and-twenty, and at thirty-seven started on his 
 mission of proclaiming the ideals of the Koran. 
 The quest of the youth is embodied in an adventure 
 for a concrete and personal object, and naturally so, 
 for much time and training are normally required 
 to bring the human mind to think and feel in any- 
 thing else than personalities and concrete images. 
 But by maturity a man should have learned that, 
 even given the desire to serve, there is a higher 
 form of service than personal help. The mission- 
 ary is the man who has seen that the world may 
 be served most by general truths — more by good 
 doctrine than even by good doctoring; and that 
 there is more effective philanthropy in discovering 
 and applying a general social formula, than feed- 
 ing the hungry and clothing the naked of a genera- 
 tion or an hour. Hence the missionary impulse is 
 of high emotional intensity, even when it seems to 
 know inhumanly little of persons. The mission is 
 the romance of adult service, and the larger the 
 ideal that is sought to be realised the greater the 
 flowering of love and beauty in the achievement. 
 
 XVII 
 
 It was the theory of Monasticism, tenaciously held 
 and specially developed in Celtic monasticism, that 
 there are three chief crises in the history of the 
 human soul. They were called the three vocations 
 or calls from God. The first was the idealisation 
 of the heart, or Conversion, corresponding to the 
 
34 
 
 psychic awakening which results in the Quest. 
 The second was the seeking of the Salvation of 
 others, achieved by what we have seen as the 
 Mission. The third was known as the Call of 
 Abraham, and eventuated in becoming a citizen of 
 heaven. This was achieved by the Perfect Pil- 
 grimage. 
 
 In what is called 'The Old Irish Life of 
 Columba ' (a panegyric composed by some un- 
 known monk to be read for the edification of the 
 brethren on the Saint's day) the theory of the 
 perfect Pilgrimage is worked out in biblical phrase- 
 ology, of curiously mixed Gaelic and Latin. Trans- 
 lated into the half-technical, half-popular terms of 
 current sociology, it means that the perfect pilgrim 
 is one who has been able to rid himself of the 
 prejudices of his own people and incorporate the 
 best ideals of other peoples. And the state of 
 perfect pilgrimage is to be objectively reached, if 
 possible, by travel and sojourn amongst foreign 
 peoples, until one can possess and practise their 
 particular virtues ; or if we may not do it by actual 
 voyaging, then we may approach indefinitely near 
 by cultivating goodwill towards foreign ideals and 
 all the human personalities which they have formed 
 and animate. In seeking the perfect pilgrimage, it 
 is declared that the example of the old men of the 
 past has to be followed ; and above all, that of 
 Abraham, who 'went into the land of the Chaldees 
 to Haran where his father died, and went from 
 thence to the Land of Promise.' And, later on in 
 the text, the Land of Promise is generalised as 
 'the possession of Paradise in the presence of God 
 for ever.' In this theory, or plan of a perfectly 
 achieved life, the Pilgrimage is the discipline of 
 
35 
 
 senescence— the corrective of the old man's tend- 
 ency to lapse into uninspiring purposeless reminis- 
 cence. As a regimen objectively obeyed, it begins 
 with a visit to the ancestral tomb, where the virtues 
 of the departed are remembered and hallowed, and 
 their defects and shortcomings forgotten, in the 
 moment of tender worship evoked even at a simple 
 and unadorned grave ; but it flames into a passionate 
 zeal for righteousness, where the tomb-temple lifts 
 the mind to the contemplation of the starry heavens 
 — and of all that they signify to men whose occu- 
 pation has committed them to a life lived under 
 the open skies, and to all the emotional and intel- 
 lectual results of this. The pilgrimage thus 
 normally arises and is maintained amongst a pas- 
 toral people; their temple-observatory is built on 
 the ground where ancestors are buried : and thus 
 the senescent shepherd may be stimulated, in the 
 glow of a cosmic and human vision, to renew his 
 youth and aspire even to lead his people into a new 
 Land of Promise at the end of days. Islam thus 
 does not go to Mecca for nothing, as we Westerns 
 have been too much wont to think since we threw 
 away our own palmer-shells. By the discipline of the 
 pilgrimage, the miracle is wrought, of transform- 
 ing the old man's reminiscences of an irreclaimable 
 past into the young man's quest of a priceless 
 future. Of all social formations the pastoral is 
 that in which the influence of the aged is most pro- 
 nounced and prolonged; and this it is easy to see 
 rests in the very nature of the occupation of shep- 
 herding itself; for muscular force of youth, and 
 half -ripe experience of manhood, count for little 
 where guidance depends upon accumulated experi- 
 ence of the seasons and pastures, of the habits of 
 
36 
 
 animals and the customs of people. Moses was 
 nearly a septuagenarian when he started on the 
 pilgrimage that was to take the tribes of Israel to 
 the Promised Land. Mahomet, when he made 
 his pilgrimage to Mecca, was young for a patri- 
 arch. He was only sixty ; but he had prematurely 
 worn himself out — and worn the ideal in — by 
 the more arduous and ceaseless adventuring of the 
 caravanier. 
 
 With the pilgrimage, the cycle of life-disciplines 
 completes itself, when, at the holiest of places in 
 the sacred city, the senescent pilgrim meets the 
 adolescent journeying on his quest, and gives him 
 the final exhortation to pursue the ideal — the most 
 eifective transmission of ideals from the old to the 
 new generation. Mahomet's farewell charge to his 
 fellow-pilgrims, old and young, at Mecca, con- 
 densed into a tetrad of exhortation the whole teach- 
 ing of the Koran : 'Your lives and property are 
 sacred and inviolable among you. Treat your 
 women well, for they are in your hands, and ye 
 have taken them on the security of God. See that 
 ye feed your slaves with such food as ye eat, and 
 clothe them wdth the stuff ye wear. Know that 
 every Moslem is the brother of every other. All 
 of you are equal. Ye are one brotherhood. I have 
 fulfilled my mission. I have left amongst you a 
 plain command — the Book of God ; and manifest 
 ordinances, the which if ye hold fast ye shall never 
 go avStray.' 
 
 XVIII 
 
 From this long excursion — to the great steppe of 
 Asia, the grassy valleys of Hellas, and the deserts 
 
37 
 
 and oases of Arabia, with their respective varieties 
 of pastoral folk — we return to the problem of how 
 a Donegal shepherd boy became an abbot, a mis- 
 sionary and a saint. What, let us ask, was the 
 education that started Columba on the way to lona, 
 and that progressively forwarded his development 
 when he had arrived there ? We think of education 
 as threefold in purpose — education for youth, for 
 maturity, and for old age. What is it that deter- 
 mines at adolescence whether a youth flames into 
 passionate idealism or lapses into animalism, be- 
 comes poet or potboy — whether at manhood he 
 hardens into mammonolatry or vibrates to the con- 
 viction of a message — whether at senescence he 
 becomes a garrulous egotist or a noble patriarch? 
 
 Piecing together items from the many early bio- 
 graphies of Columba, we can construct a fairly 
 complete picture of his intellectual and moral 
 education. 
 
 Youth must derive its ideals mainly through love 
 of persons; manhood through interest in work and 
 ideas; age through the significance of symbols. 
 These then are the channels through which each 
 vital system of education must run — its rivulets 
 uniting into a stream that flows on continuously 
 and expansive throughout life. 
 
 The education of Columba began with the dream 
 of his mother that her son would become a prophet 
 of God. This means that the first person the 
 boy would love and desire to please, was herself 
 an idealist. Again, not the least influence which 
 a mother's ideals exercise on her son is the direc- 
 tion they give to her choice of teachers for him. 
 Columba' s first teacher was an aged and saintly 
 hermit, to whose retreat in a beautiful valley 
 
38 
 
 Columba was sent for his early instruction. It 
 was a characteristic of the Irish saints to choose 
 the beauty-spots of nature for their dwelling; and 
 this tradition was continued by Columba himself, 
 when he came to found his own churches and mon- 
 asteries. The aged hermit, we learn, was wont to 
 take counsel of a certain Druid on matters touch- 
 ing the education of his charge. The boy thus 
 came under the influence of a Naturalist as well 
 as a Humanist, and the store of his impressions 
 of nature was doubtless enriched from druidical 
 sources. 
 
 The personalities whom a child, through pleasing 
 associations, may be taught to love, include, of 
 course, the noble types of the past. There is a 
 story of Columba that when his tutor-priest one 
 day failed to go on with the service, through lapse 
 of memory in the middle of the 119th Psalm, the 
 boy finished the psalm, having learnt it by heart, 
 though he was not supposed to have proceeded so 
 far in his studies. Yet even a boy brought up on 
 stories of the Biblical heroes, as Columba was, will 
 effectively accept them as ideals of personal achieve- 
 ment if — and only if — their heroic deeds touch the 
 experience of his own life, and are congruent with 
 the traditions of his own people. The Irish, in 
 becoming Christianised, were able to incorporate 
 so much of the stock of Hebraic ideals, just because 
 shepherding was one of the dominant factors in 
 their own mode of life. The use of sheep, after 
 all, is not to supply mutton, or even wool; it is to 
 educate young men into reverence for Abraham, 
 love for David, and understanding of Solomon. 
 And if the lad's admiration goes out to David, the 
 slayer of Goliath, rather than to David the poet 
 
39 
 
 and psalmist, that is all to the good in its season, 
 and for the purposes, as we shall see, of a season 
 beyond. 
 
 To begin with, obviously it will go ill with the 
 young knight of idealism who would venture out 
 against the lords of the Philistines, if he be not 
 trained to perfection of muscular strength and 
 suppleness, and equipped with the essential tricks 
 of the warrior's craft. In short, whatever ultimate 
 supremacy we may accord to the things of the 
 spirit, we must recognise that there is a more 
 simple and material ideal to which normal youth 
 owes a natural and even aesthetic homage, in its 
 place and hour. Apollo, the god of light and 
 purity, was also the god of the gymnasium; and it 
 is to the young athlete in the palaestra that he gives 
 the answer to the question which the poet-philo- 
 sopher asks — *My body at its best — how far can it 
 project my soul on its lone way?' It was a dart of 
 the slighted Apollo which wrung from the poet- 
 ascetic St Francis the warning and the confession : 
 'We must needs use great discretion in the way 
 we treat our brother the body, if we would not have 
 it excite in us a storm of melancholy.' The slay- 
 ing of Goliath, therefore, is a necessary initial 
 adventure in the adolescent quest. The thick skull 
 of Goliath, that has to be broken, is the thought- 
 killing crust of custom, that seeks to harden itself 
 around the soul of every adolescent as he comes to 
 his years of decision. The resources of strength, 
 confidence, and courage for that exploit are gained 
 by the young shepherd fighting, along with Apollo 
 the wolves, with David the bears, that prey upon 
 his father's flocks. Columba slew his Goliath with 
 a weapon even more primitive than the sling of 
 
40 
 
 David : the naked fist of a man. It is his first 
 recorded miracle, the story of which is told as 
 follows in the prose-poem called 'Adamnan's Life 
 of St Columba* : — 
 
 'When the blessed man, as yet a young deacon, was 
 living in the district of the Lagenians (Leinster), learn- 
 ing Divine wisdom, it happened one day that a certain 
 man, a fierce, cruel persecutor of innocent persons, pur- 
 sued a certain young girl as she fled on the level surface 
 of the field. And when by chance she saw the old man 
 Gemman, the tutor of the above-mentioned young deacon, 
 reading in the field, she fled to him in a direct course, 
 with all the speed she could. And he, alarmed by this 
 sudden occurrence, calls to him Columba, who is reading 
 at a distance, that both of them, to the best of their 
 power, may defend the girl from her pursuer. But he, 
 immediately coming up, and showing no reverence to 
 them, stabbed the girl under their cloaks with a lance, 
 and leaving her dead body lying over their feet, turned 
 and began to go avva3^ Then the old man, greatly dis- 
 tressed, turns to Columba and says, **For how great 
 length of time, O holy youth Columba, will God, the 
 just Judge, suffer this crime, with the dishonour to us, 
 to be unavenged?" Then the Saint fitly pronounced this 
 sentence upon the evil-doer himself, saying : "In the 
 same hour in which the soul of the maiden slain by him 
 ascends into the heavens, the soul of the murderer, him- 
 self shall go down into hell." And, sooner than can be 
 said, with a word, like Ananias before Peter, so also that 
 slaughterer of innocents, before the eyes of the holy 
 youth, fell dead on that same spot of ground.' 
 
 In brief and prosaic summary, we may take it 
 that while the ordinary respectable young man 
 would have gone for a policeman — if the journey 
 was not too far — Columba executed summary jus- 
 tice, by one terrific blow, so swift and sudden that 
 the good Gemman observed it not. After this dis- 
 play of Columba' s prowess with biceps and knuckle 
 bones, it is eas}^ to believe in his other youthful 
 
41 
 
 miracle, that while he was a student at the monastic 
 college of Moville, an angel came to help him when- 
 ever it was his turn to grind the corn overnight for 
 the use of the monastery next day, so that Columba 
 did it faster and better than any other. 
 
 XIX 
 
 During the last five years of his student life (20- 
 25), Columba wandered from monastery to monas- 
 tery, selecting his own teachers and pursuing the 
 post-graduate studies of the time. One of the 
 teachers thus chosen by the young man himself, 
 was the Gemman of the foregoing adventure. He 
 was an aged Bard who had come to the monastery 
 of Moville during Columba' s residence there, asking 
 from the Abbot, in exchange for his music and his 
 poetry, the Roman secret of fertilising the soil. 
 Columba went off with the Bard to join his school 
 and share his labours and his studies; and it was 
 when they were studying together out of doors in 
 the open fields (as was the custom largely of the 
 Irish monasteries) that the assassination of the 
 maiden occurred. After leaving Gemman, he 
 sought a new master in Finnian of Clonard, whose 
 fame as a philosopher as well as a theologian 
 attracted to his monastic college of Clonard (it is 
 said) 3000 students, not only Irish, English, Scots, 
 and Welsh, but also from the Continent. 
 
 The adolescent quest becomes, in course of normal 
 development, a search for an intellectual as well as 
 a moral foothold. At first a unifying emotion — love 
 of person — satisfies; but later comes inevitably, 
 if mental life continues, a desire for unifying idea^ 
 C 
 
42 
 
 (philosophy, or love of wisdom). Now it is the 
 capital re-discovery of modern psychology, that we 
 think with our hands as much as with our brains. 
 It follows that there are as many ways of thinking 
 as there are elemental and diverse forms of labour. 
 There is a shepherd way of thinking, a peasant 
 way, a fisher way, &c. ; but though there is a shep- 
 herd religion, there can be no (adequate) shepherd 
 philosophy, since philosophy is the unification of 
 all ways of thinking. Whence, then, is the requi- 
 site guidance in the adolescent quest for intellectual 
 unity? The illusion — for with all its academic 
 prestige and popular acceptance, it is an illusion — 
 that philosophy, like art, is a product of the leisure 
 class, derives from the confusion of belief with 
 make-believe. It belongs to the nature of a leisure 
 class that, as such, it can have neither religion nor 
 philosophy, but only superstition or sophistry. 
 And the nineteenth century, one of the most super- 
 stitious and sophistical ages in occidental history, 
 was naturally one of the most atheistical (i.e., un- 
 idealist) in religion, and most sceptical (i.e.y 
 unbelieving in unity) in philosophy, just because, 
 to be lifted unto unearned leisure, was the secret 
 ambition of nearly all Englishmen, most French- 
 men, and too many Germans. Each endowment of 
 research becomes deteriorated in its turn through 
 the research of endowment; that is the ruin of 
 monasteries in one age as of colleges in ours — but 
 the temptation arises, the evil begins, far more 
 subtly than any crude and conscious pot-hunting — 
 as of ' Put me, I pray thee, in the priest's office, 
 that I may eat a piece of bread.' 
 
 The adolescent preparation of mind and hand for 
 philosophy — as teachers to-day in American schools 
 
43 
 
 begin to organise, as to-morrow in all our univer- 
 sities — is to participate in turn in all the elemental 
 occupations — to use the aptitudes and earn the 
 experience of peasant as well as shepherd, of fisher 
 and forester, of hunter and miner, as far as oppor- 
 tunity may in practice allow. Here and here only, in 
 fact, is the better training than that of militarism ; 
 which we now understand afresh, as the natural 
 rebound from the futile and failing education of the 
 leisured and the clerkly classes. 
 
 XX 
 
 Now, this occupational education, and carried of 
 old to a very real and large extent, is just the 
 discipline to which monasticism, and especially 
 Celtic monasticism, submitted its novices. Why 
 then, it may be asked, did not the monasteries 
 produce a philosophy? The answer is twofold. 
 In the first place, they did produce the only philo- 
 sophy which appeared in Europe between the decay 
 of Greek thought and the beginnings of a philo- 
 sophy of science in the nineteenth century. The 
 test of belief is action; and if philosophy does not 
 pass into life, it is but a dialectical amusement, or 
 a sophistical make-believe. In both characters, 
 perhaps, it has a function; but that function is not 
 nutritive, even when it is not sinister. The schol- 
 astic philosophy was thought out by the monk and 
 friar, far more than by laymen ; and it did explain 
 the world and man, their past, present and future, 
 in terms of current belief; hence it could and did 
 serve as the intellectual basis of education and art, 
 statecraft and ecclesiastical polity. Those who 
 
44 
 
 condemn it off-hand as the poorest of philosophies, 
 must make their peace, if they can, with the fact 
 that it produced the greatest of poems, the 'Divine 
 Comedy.' It did this because it was thorough- 
 going and honest ; because its exponents were Ver3^ 
 sure of God,' and therefore very true with them- 
 selves. 
 
 In the second place, we have to remember that 
 labour is synthetic, only if it is sympathetic. The 
 discipline of manual labour is of two kinds — evoca- 
 tory and repressive. Labour leads to light through 
 love. It is love alone that makes labour lift up the 
 heart. Sursuin corda is a necessary preliminary to 
 the intellectual vision. It was a cardinal defect of 
 monasticism, that it used manual labour too largely 
 as a repressive discipline. 'Work till you weep, or 
 if the tears are not free, till you copiously sweat,' 
 was an item in the Columban Rule. Through the 
 labour of the field, the youth may be reduced to the 
 =P stupor of drudgery; or he may be lifted to love of 
 the peasant poets, Virgil and Hesiod, to sympathy 
 and understanding of Confucius, the peasant philos- 
 opher — who was a clearer thinker because he had 
 been a conscientious farm steward. Christian mon- 
 asticism here failed to apply one of its own most 
 cherished principles — 'Non stupor, sed Amor.' 
 Why? There were gaps in its inheritance and 
 transmission of ideals, and this was one. Chris- 
 tianity idealised the chief products of the peasant 
 culture, bread and wine; but it did not, as Hellen- 
 ism had so nobly and beautifully done, idealise the 
 processes. Thus opening the door to an element of 
 idolatry, it left the adolescent exposed in his moral 
 quest to a crop of temptations (i.e., evil dreams), 
 and liable on his intellectual quest to a host of 
 
45 
 
 fallacies (i.e., logical attempts to justify tempta- 
 tions). It is partly because 'Stupor' has for ages 
 so generally precluded even the possibility of 
 ' Amor,' that Christian civilisation in the peasant 
 communities of England, while it has produced 
 one Roger Bacon and one Francis Bacon, has been 
 so much more prolific of Chaw-Bacon, both in village 
 and town. i 
 
 XXI 
 
 It was amongst the assemblage of picked youths at 
 the Monastic College of Clonard, where Columba, 
 at the age of twenty-five, closed his student life, 
 that he met the friends by whose cohesion into a 
 like-minded group, the individual quest of adoles- 
 cence developed into the collective mission of man- 
 hood. This group of young men, being Irishmen, 
 and monks, had their heads full of dreams ; and 
 their pockets of little but their own poems. 
 
 This richness of dream-life, and the habit of 
 carrying dream into deed, imagery and idea into 
 practice, is what distinguishes from the rest of 
 mankind, the saint, the criminal, and the vicious. 
 How far there is any organic difference between 
 the saint on the one hand, and the criminal and 
 the vicious on the other, we do not know. The 
 saints have often said the}^ did not. We suspect 
 some of our good eugenists as yet know too little of 
 either tendency. What we do know is that there 
 is a difference in their social inheritance of ideals, 
 their effective inheritance that is, of course. Give 
 a boy the Roman Hadrian for a hero, and he may 
 become a great organiser of peace. Give him the 
 
46 
 
 English Charles II, and if he escapes being profli- 
 it is by a miracle of grace. Being shepherd boys 
 brought up in the love of David and his psalms, 
 Columba and his fellow students would, in the 
 period of their Wanderjahr, physical and intellect- 
 ual, pass by an easy transition into hero-worship 
 of St Paul, the tentmaker, of caravan traditions 
 and missionary ideals. Columba, we are told, 
 deliberately trained himself on the Pauline model. 
 Thus were the defects of David made good by the 
 qualities of Paul. For David, though he started 
 valiantly on his quest and slew Goliath, yet failed 
 to conquer the unspeakable dragon ; and he never 
 bethought him at all of a mission, till it was too 
 late in life; and when there was only time to 
 bequeath it to his successor. 
 
 A legend tells in characteristic fashion of the 
 conversion of Columba when a boy with his first 
 teacher : — 
 
 'His guardian angel often appeared to him; and the 
 child asked if all the angels in heaven were as young 
 and shining as he. A little later Columba was asked by 
 the same angel to choose among all the virtues those 
 which he would like best to possess. "I choose," said the 
 youth, "chastity and wisdom," and immediately three 
 young girls of wonderful beauty, but seeming not to oe 
 of that country, appeared to him, and threw themselves 
 on his neck to embrace him. The pious youth frowned, 
 and repulsed them with indignation. "What!" they 
 said ; "then thou dost not know us ?" "No, not the least 
 in the world." "We are three sisters whom our father 
 gives to thee to be thy brides." "Who, then is your 
 father?" "Our Father is God, He is Jesus Christ, the 
 Lord and vSaviour of the world." "Ah, you have indeed 
 an illustrious Father. But what are your names ?" "Our 
 names are Virginity, Wisdom, and Prophecy; and we 
 come to leave thee no more, to love thee with an incor- 
 ruptible love." * 
 
47 
 
 XXII 
 
 As seen typically in a case like this, conversion 
 means to the psychologist, the first clear glimpse 
 of an ideal with the accompanying emotional 
 ecstasy, and it is therefore a normal, and may 
 even be an oft-repeated, experience of adolescence. 
 The sociologist, on the other hand, is interested 
 in observing and regulating the sources from which 
 are derived the ideas and images of perfection, that 
 fuse and unify into an ideal for the adolescent. 
 The mediaeval monks were admirable psycholo- 
 gists ; and if they were not so good as sociologists, 
 that is partly because they were more interested 
 in the making of history, than in recording or 
 generalising it. 
 
 Columba's ideals of Purity and Wisdom were 
 pertinent to the adolescent phase, because they are 
 normative ideals, determining the type and quality 
 of personality aspired to. And, a wise selection of 
 such ideals having been made, the best which 
 monkish or other preceptor can do for the youth 
 who is converted (using that word in the proper 
 religious sense) is to give him a blessing and start 
 him out upon his quest : he must have his own 
 adventures and explorations. At the time of 
 Columba, the monks had not come to the idea of 
 sending the converted adolescent out as a mounted 
 policeman dedicated to the service of the Virgin 
 Mother, with a warrant for the rebuke of all 
 unrighteous, lewd, and heathenish persons. Still 
 less had they thought out that further refinement 
 of the Quest in which the adventuring searcher 
 should be both monk and knight in one. But the 
 
48 
 
 moral necessity of the advance from the personal 
 Quest to the social Mission was understood and 
 provided for. 
 
 The Pauline form of mission and the Pauline 
 ideal of a Community linked not by Law but by 
 Love, had special grounds of appeal to the Irish. 
 It continued and developed pastoralist traditions 
 in a way particularly applicable to clan custom;*. 
 The caravan form of attack, as necessarily also 
 that of the clans, is a swift and sudden descent — 
 preferably upon the rich cities of law-abiding 
 property owners. That was the Pauline form of 
 mission : a spiritual raid. St Peter, the fisherman 
 and stern nautical disciplinarian, was the organiser 
 of congregations and the founder of a hierarchised 
 priesthood. St Paul, the contemplative but pas- 
 sionate traveller, was the deliverer of a burning 
 message — the shepherd's doctrine of love, the shep- 
 herd's philosophy of history. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 The main psychological and sociological discov- 
 eries made by sheep-educated men, and unified by 
 Paul as a doctrine of redemption, were : — 
 
 (i) We inherit a tradition of evils which weighs 
 as a burden on each of us. ('The burden of sin 
 into which we are born.') 
 
 (2) There is also awaiting us in this life an 
 ideal world in which the spirit is delivered from 
 its burden. (*We have an inheritance in Christ.') 
 ('We are heirs of God through Christ.') ('God's 
 promise to Abraham.') 
 
 (3) This ideal world may be entered, by always 
 
49 
 
 acting as if we loved our neighbour as ourselves. 
 ('Let all that ye do be done in love.') (Xove is the 
 fulfilling of the Law of God.') 
 
 (4) Awake to a belief in the ideal state, and you 
 will achieve it. ('Awake, thou that sleepest, and 
 arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee 
 light.') ('By grace ye are saved through faith.') 
 
 (5) The reality of your belief is tested by such 
 sympathy with sufferers, that you willingly seek 
 and joyfully take on their burdens. (' Who is 
 weak and I am not weak, who is scandalized and 
 I am not on fire.') ('Take ye on one another's 
 burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.') ('Faith 
 worketh by Love.') 
 
 (6) Belief in this ideal of a spiritual community 
 makes a closer tie than kinship or sex, and obliter- 
 ates all social and racial barriers. ('Ther^ is 
 neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor 
 free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are a!( 
 one in Christ.') 
 
 (7) Believers in this ideal state alone are free, 
 ('The liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.') 
 
 (8) This ideal is inherited independently of 
 family or race. The believers are the real aristo- 
 cracy. ('Ye that are of the faith, the same are the 
 children of Abraham.') 
 
 (9) A community that believes in this ideal has 
 no need of laws ; but everyone should pay his 
 taxes and obey the laws of his country. ('If ye 
 be led of the spirit, ye are not under the law.') 
 ('The law hath dominion over a man as long as he 
 liveth.') 
 
 (10) Jerusalem is any city built by a community 
 of believers. ('Jerusalem which is above us is 
 free, which is the mother of us all.') 
 
50 
 
 It would define the sociological status of St 
 Paul, to say that he generalised Jerusalem; and to 
 generalise dynamic truth is to democratise moral 
 power and privilege. St Paul's generalisation 
 transformed a cumbersome body of esoteric truths 
 into a magic tool for all the world to use. There- 
 after every one could — under certain conditions- 
 be his own saint; every city, every village, might 
 be its own Jerusalem. The ideal of the saint, and 
 the Utopia of the holy city, had become common 
 human assets, for the secret of the process was 
 revealed. The general social inheritance was en- 
 riched to that extent. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 The Pauline doctrine and ideals, already trans- 
 mitted through three or four generations from 
 senescent monk to adolescent novice, had, before 
 the time of Columba, wrought great changes in 
 Ireland. The formal distinction of a half pastoral 
 clan society, is that the relations of members to 
 one another and to their chiefs, are personal and 
 moral rather than economic and political : in other 
 words, are ' spiritual ' rather than ' temporal.' 
 Hence the adaptability of such a society to the 
 spiritual type of community upheld in the Pauline 
 ideal. And, with the custom already set in for clan 
 chiefs to become abbots, with the clansmen grouped 
 round in a loose monastic formation, Ireland was 
 obviously on the way to a unique experiment in 
 spiritual government. To the many varieties of 
 Christians which Professor Bosanquet enumerates 
 (there are, he says, Hebraic Christians, Hellenic 
 
51 
 
 Christians, Roman Christians, Pagan Christians, 
 and even Christian Christians), there should be 
 added mediaeval Irish Christians; albeit, at best, 
 we hasten to say, rather as a special variety of the 
 last-named group. An interesting Irish variation, 
 and one which doubtless facilitated the absorption 
 and transmission of Pauline ideals, was the custom 
 of the 'Anmchara.' In the usage of the Celtic 
 Church, confession was made to the abbot, not in 
 private but 'in the presence of all,' and the abbot 
 enjoined penance and gave absolution. But for 
 positive guidance in thought and conduct, every 
 one looked to his Anmchara, his ' soul-friend,' 
 henceforth far closer even than the foster-brother 
 from which this rarely ideal kinship of the spirit 
 so obviously comes, in due pastoral evolution. As 
 spiritual guardian, the soul-friend would mediate 
 between the individual and the stock of ideals of 
 which he was an heir, but not a possessor, until due 
 preparation had done its work upon him. So 
 general was this custom, that a popular maxim, 
 possibly of the time of St Bridget (a generation 
 before Columba), declares that 'a man without a 
 soul-friend is like a body without a head.' 
 
 Under the Pauline regime, the half pastoral, 
 half free-booting clans were being gradually broken 
 in, to a life of labour and of peace, and to the idea 
 that a clansman of an adjacent valley was a neigh- 
 bour to be respected, even loved, rather than an 
 enemy to be pillaged ; and the continuance and 
 extension of this Pauline work of regeneration in 
 Ireland constituted, in fact, the first mission of St 
 Columba and his collegian associates. 
 
 During this mission phase of his life, Columba 
 founded not less than thirty-seven churches in 
 
52 
 
 Ireland, most of them with monastic institutions 
 attached. Some of these, such as Durrow and Kells, 
 became famous as centres of Art and Learning for 
 the western world. The illuminated copy of the 
 Gospels made at Kells (now in Trinity College, 
 Dublin) is by general consent, the most elaborately 
 beautiful book in the world. It is later in date of 
 execution than Columba, though a legend attri- 
 butes it to his pen. 
 
 XXV 
 
 Another member of the Columban group — Com- 
 gall — founded an even larger number of churches. 
 Another, St Brendan, also founded monasteries, 
 but first of all he became haunted and possessed by 
 the old Mediterranean dream of an island paradise 
 in the far western ocean. And, like a well-trained 
 monk, he rested not from the quest of transmuting 
 his dream into deed. He became a sailor-monk, 
 and made a series of daring voyages westwards 
 into the Atlantic, being once gone into the strange 
 world of waters for full seven years. There 's 
 evidence, as a fact, that he penetrated as far as 
 the Canaries. Transmuted through legend and 
 history, his quest became a part of the rich inheri- 
 tance of ideals that was to inspire ' a still greater 
 dreamer. ' I am convinced,' wrote Columbus, 
 'that the terrestrial paradise is in the island of St 
 Brendan, which no man can reach, save by the will 
 of God.' Through this line of transmission, the 
 sixth century visionary, St Brendan, thus persists 
 as a living force of our own times. For he thus 
 enters into the composition of that first patron 
 
53 
 
 saint of America, whose effective Triad to-day is, 
 it has been perspicuously remarked, so curiously 
 parallel to the English one named above, St 
 Columbus, St Washington, and, alas — St Bun- 
 combe. Let the Americans cultivate the Brendan 
 strain in their stock, and they will discover the 
 cause and the cure of their unvisionary restless- 
 ness, which is the malady of a questless people — 
 that is, a people whose ideals are arrested at 
 the adolescent stage. Vacillation begins where 
 vision ends. The American type, so far from 
 being the most modern and 'unique' (as their jour- 
 nalists claim), is one of the oldest and commonest. 
 It proliferates ubiquitously. It reappears in ever3^ 
 social group throughout history. The Columban 
 specimen was one Cormac, a member of the little 
 brotherhood which started out from the monastery 
 of Clonard on the quest-mission of converting Ire- 
 land to Pauline ideals. Cormac adventured out 
 bravely with the others, but arrest overtook him 
 at the initial stage of the quest. In fact, his life 
 went in looking for a suitable spot for a monastery ! 
 His disease was what monastic therapeutics kne^' 
 and treated under the name 'Babylonian Malady' 
 — rediscovered by recent psychology as the general 
 disease of adolescence and called Dementia praecox. 
 
 XXVI 
 
 Coi.UMBA''s biographers have expended much pains 
 and ingenuity in explaining his exile from Ireland 
 to lona. The bloody battle of Culdremhne was 
 doubtless in part due to Columba's resentment and 
 vindictiveness. Hence arose the theory of his 
 
54 
 
 excommunication and banishment to a heathen 
 land, with the imposed penance of converting to 
 Christianity a soul for every man slain at the battle 
 of Culdremhne. This need not be disputed. But 
 it takes many causes to make one event. Columba 
 at this period was no longer a shepherd boy, but 
 neither was he yet a saint. He had passed into 
 the forties and was closing a period of life that had 
 been, and normally is, full of activity. With what 
 happens at such a juncture to the ordinary middle- 
 aged man who has had neither a Quest nor a 
 Mission, we are not here concerned ; but that he is 
 an irretrievably lost soul Paul hinted, Augustine 
 demonstrated, and Calvin confirmed. But even the 
 man who has enjoyed the discipline of a Quest and 
 a Mission, is not necessarily saved. There is at 
 every critical life-stage a Siege Perilous, with its 
 tempting invitation to those whose special merits 
 make them an object of the devil's desire. The 
 siege perilous of the mature knight is the cush- 
 ioned armchair of comfort, allotted to the virtuous. 
 Columba doubtless at this period of his life detected 
 himself falling into the habit of putting off his 
 slippers later in the morning and putting them on 
 earlier in the evening. He detected himself talk- 
 ing to the brethren less of their future and more 
 of his past. He detected himself stealing more 
 and more of the working day for his dreams. 
 But here his monastic training came to his rescue. 
 The monastery was above all else a regulator of 
 dreams. This it effected by its regimen and its 
 ritual of the day, of the week, of the season, of the 
 year, and of the life cycle. Taking over those 
 primal pastoral institutions — the Quest, the Mis- 
 sion, and the Pilgrimage — Monasticism refined and 
 
55 
 
 adapted these as specialised correctives of the 
 tendency to fall into excessive subjectivity, which 
 is the besetting sin of man at each of the three great 
 crises of his life cycle. The remedy consisted in 
 giving the patient an increase of objective images, 
 by sending him out to observe and travel in a new 
 world, and to labour therein for a new ideal, one 
 chosen in appropriate adjustment to the age, the 
 powers, and the previous training and record of the 
 patient. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 The pilgrimage to Rome was a journey at once of 
 discipline and of stimulus to a holy city. But 
 Rome, we have to remember, was made holy not so 
 much by the Pope living there, as by St Peter 
 dying there. The Pope was but the custodian of 
 Peter's tomb, and the pilgrims' conduit of Petrine 
 ideals. And when the conduit became choked, as 
 it recurrently did, with the golden garbage of the 
 Vatican, the papal spell ceased to work. As 
 Innocent III was one day watching the papal coffers 
 being filled with the gold of Peter's pence, he re- 
 marked to Thomas Aquinas, 'Passed are the days 
 when the chief Pontiu had to say, ''Silver and 
 gold have I none." ' 'Yes, Holy Father,' replied 
 St Thomas, 'and passed are the days when the 
 chief Pontiff could say, "Arise and walk !" ' The 
 papal miracle worked just so far as the Pope could 
 transmit the ideal that awoke and inflamed the 
 heart of the pilgrim. If it failed, and the dis- 
 appointed pilgrim was no amiable senescent, but 
 that adolescent firebrand Martin Luther (who made 
 
56 
 
 his pilgrimage to Rome at the age of twenty- 
 eight, youthful still, for the ablest,) what wonder 
 that he should return home with the idea that 
 made the Reformation — to every Region its own 
 Rome. The supply of holy cities, to be sure, still 
 remains limited; but the truth in the Lutheran 
 doctrine is that every place where an ideal is evoked 
 is made holy thereby. 
 
 Two of the greatest of historic pilgrimages were 
 made within the walls of a jail — Bunyan's fourteen 
 years' pilgrimage to the City Celestial and Cam- 
 panella's twenty-seven years' flight to the City of 
 the Sun. Between these and the Sunday afternoon 
 walk of the quiet suburban business man to his 
 mother's resting-place in the neighbouring ceme- 
 tery, there are many varieties of pilgrimage, objec- 
 tive and subjective. But there is one which may 
 be taken as the arch-type of them all, so perfectly 
 does it symbolise the quintessential character of 
 the pilgrimage. Historians, unless also something 
 of poets, are apt to misunderstand the significance 
 of events. And so we need not take the historians 
 quite at their word, when they tell us it was merely 
 penance for the murder of the Red Comyn that 
 prompted the dying Bruce to commit his heart to 
 be carried on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by 
 his soul-son Douglas. Rather let us look at it as 
 the consummating act of what had become increas- 
 ingly a heroic life, symbolic of its unity, and there- 
 fore holy. Here is the senescent, now selfless, mak- 
 ing his symbolic sacrifice, and transmitting to 
 posterity his ideals, through its emotional impulse, 
 given to his picked and trained successor. This 
 vicarious pilgrimage, of an old man's disembodied 
 heart, initiating the mission of a successor, has 
 
57 
 
 often seemed to critical spirits almost too beauti- 
 fully symbolic of the mode of social inheritance to 
 be historical. But the discovery of Bruce' s skele- 
 ton, disinterred last century at Dunfermline Abbey, 
 established the literal truth of the record. Nature, 
 as Aristotle remarked, is not episodic like a bad 
 tragedy. She is, indeed, always moving towards a 
 romantic denouement. Her successive failures to 
 reach that climax make up the history of idealism. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 Where did Robert the Bruce get his ideals? He 
 certainly had a poor stock to start with. His wife, 
 with unerring conjugal insight, described him in 
 his early days as *a summer night.' There were 
 three phases in his career. His vacillating, be- 
 cause questless, youth ended at thirty, his father's 
 death then awaking him to the need of spiritual 
 guidance. He had the good sense to put himself 
 in the hands of Bishop Lamberton, of St Andrews, 
 who had been the spiritual guide of Wallace. The 
 bishop made a man and an idealist of Bruce by 
 sending him out to continue and complete Wallace's 
 mission of liberation : one of the greatest of mis- 
 sions, because it preserved the most precious indi- 
 genous possession of Western Europe — its stock of 
 Celtic ideals — against the obliterating hands of 
 Anglo-Norman pirates, who did not enter these 
 things in their loot-inventories of Domesday Books, 
 and would have destroyed them without a sense of 
 loss. The third phase of Bruce' s career was a brief 
 senescence of pious and constructive statesmanship, 
 of which the best feature was his training of true 
 D 
 
58 
 
 spiritual successors like Douglas; and the worst, 
 his common paternal failure to see that one of these 
 was his proper heir in the kingship. The last lust 
 of the flesh is its inability to distinguish between 
 organic descent and social inheritance; its perpetu- 
 ally repeated refusal to recognise that ideals are 
 transmitted by the spirit and not by the body. 
 
 If we ask whence, in turn, Bishop Lamberton, ot 
 St Andrews, derived the ideals with which he in- 
 spired Bruce, we are on the way back to lona, with 
 which St Andrews is in direct filiation, having re- 
 ceived its ecclesiastical foundation from the Colum- 
 ban monastery of lona, probably in the lifetime of 
 Columba and possibly by the saint himself. Next 
 to lona itself, St Andrews is the most venerable 
 culture-capital of Scotland. And to say the names 
 of these — lona and St Andrews — is to resume the 
 spiritual history of that country, to which the 
 things of the spirit have perhaps meant more than 
 to any other in Western Europe. These have been 
 the twin citadels of Scottish idealism. 
 
 XXIX 
 
 The early Christian biographers of Columba ac- 
 count for lona as the place of his exile by the fact 
 that, as he sailed away north-east from Derry 
 (Londonderry) , lona was the first island from which 
 his beloved Ireland could not be seen ; and at lona, 
 therefore, he was dispensed from the visual tempta- 
 tion to return to his native land. That, maybe, 
 was one of the disciplinary elements in his pil- 
 grimage. The early Christian biographers, how- 
 ever, omit to record, or pass lightly over, the fact 
 
59 
 
 that Columba was not the first apostle of culture- 
 even, perhaps, of Christian culture — to settle in 
 lona. There is evidence to show that lona was one 
 of the holy places of Druidic tradition, and that 
 the two 'bishops,' whom Columba found established 
 there, were half -Christianised Druids. The sit- 
 uation and configuration of the island designed it 
 for that combination of cemetery and observatory, 
 which made the first temples of primitive pastoral 
 and peasant peoples. A coastline combining the 
 perfection of bold, rocky cliffs and gently sloping 
 beaches, with miniature natural harbours; a few 
 square miles of forest (now wholly cleared) and 
 pasture (now largely choked with weeds) ; a central 
 plain, gently rising out of the sea and broken by 
 two eminences, a minor one crowned by a circle of 
 stones (the primitive Druidic cemetery and sanct- 
 uary — now all disappeared), and the other a conical 
 hill, 330 feet in height and of easy and rapid 
 accessibility from the plain to the summit, from 
 which is presented, to north, south and east, an 
 almost incomparable panorama of ever-changing 
 sea and sky, mountain and moor, and to the west 
 the unbroken horizon of the ocean, expectant of the 
 setting sun; these are the geographical character- 
 istics of lona, which a priest of contemporary 
 geography (writing in the Encyclopcedia Britan- 
 nica) calls 'its deficiency in natural features of 
 special interest.' The priests of primitive science 
 presumably found it otherwise. The hill of lona 
 was apparently one of those natural observatories 
 where generations of patriarchs, under the alter- 
 nating stimulus of observing the heavens and 
 meditating by the graves of the dead, developed 
 traditions eventuating on the one hand in the 
 
6o 
 
 practical astronomical discoveries of years, seasons, 
 months, &c., and on the other in the elemental 
 religious symbolisms, which relate Man to Nature. 
 The name lona distinguishes it from the innumer- 
 able other islands of Scoto-Irish seas, for it means 
 the island. Amongst the Scottish Highlanders it 
 has been known as 'the island of the Druids.' 
 
 Thus it is clear that in going to lona Columba 
 was making a pilgrimage in which there were 
 evocatory elements both cosmic and human; the 
 one of deep natural intensity and the other of 
 remote tradition. The antagonism between Celtic 
 Christianity and Celtic Druidism was, as always 
 between the outgoing and incoming faith, more a 
 matter of terminology and ceremonial than of spirit 
 and ideal. And, in any case, the call of lona was 
 perhaps quite as much to Columba the bard as to 
 Columba the monk. 
 
 How stimulating was the evocatory appeal of 
 lona to Columba, is disclosed in his thirty-four 
 years of labours in Scotland. What, then, did 
 Columba do in lona? He did what the active type 
 of monk aspired everywhere to do. It is true that 
 the active type of monk has not been familiarised 
 to our Protestant imaginations as some other types, 
 which lent themselves more readily to the purposes 
 of moral or theological brickbat-throwing. At best 
 we know, and pass by with commiseration, such 
 innocuous examples of the passive type as St Peter 
 of Alcantara, who lived many years in a Carmelite 
 monastery without knowing whether the oratory 
 had a carved oak roof or a plain ceiling. But the 
 good man Peter, when all is said, is merely the 
 monk arrested at the quest stage, and the ex- 
 treme form of him is called a hermit. The normal 
 
6i 
 
 monk, however, had a different end, if not different 
 objects. He eventuated in the abbot, who, in the 
 Celtic order of monaster^^, was both a secular and a 
 regular — a bishop and an abbot in one. The ideal 
 of the Celtic abbot was to be at once a priest and 
 a philosopher, a statesman and an educator. It 
 was his task and his ambition to transform his 
 region into a heaven on earth. His monastic 
 settlement he aspired to build into a city dispens- 
 ing with both the policeman and the lawyer. In 
 fact, he anticipated a modern sociologist in the 
 discovery of Eutopia. 
 
 Columba's work in lona looked to the care both 
 of the place and the people. He conserved the 
 forest. He introduced the culture of fruit trees 
 and of bees, and improved the stock of the island. 
 He shortened the time between seed-time and har- 
 vest. He organised the fishing and navigation. 
 He drained the bog between the observatory and 
 the cemetery hills, dammed up the water in a lake 
 and ran it down the ravine to turn the millwheel 
 of his monastery. The piety of moderns has 
 'restored' the post-Columban cathedral, and like- 
 wise the bog. He tended the sick, comforted the 
 afflicted, admonished and advised the erring, and 
 was a holy and wholesome terror to evil-doers. He 
 took special pains to exclude from his island citadel 
 all persons of bad character. But the chief purpose 
 of the island monastery was to train the successive 
 bands of missionary monks who sallied forth — 
 often with Columba at their head — into the islands 
 and mainland of Pictish Scotland, and established 
 therein a network of monastic settlements {i.e., 
 radiating foci of practical idealism) which owed 
 allegiance to lona and looked to it for inspiration. 
 
"^' 
 
 62 
 
 XXX 
 
 The pilgrimage to lona was thus eminently suc- 
 cessful in restoring to Columba the energy needed 
 to correct the impending over-subjectivity of senes- 
 cence. But the practical virtues do not make a 
 saint. By what discipline of the body and by what 
 thaumaturgy of the soul did Columba, that master- 
 ful and successful servant of God, eradicate his 
 two besetting sins, of pride and vindictiveness ? 
 Until he had transformed the one into humility 
 and the other into love, he could be no saint, if 
 even saintly. This apparently he had not wholly 
 achieved some ten years after he landed in lona. 
 It was then he made a journey to Ireland to attend 
 the National Convention which reformed the Bardic 
 order. In recognition of Columba's services, the 
 chief bard composed a song in his honour, the 
 flattery of which excited such visible self-satis- 
 faction in Columba that one of his monks openly 
 reproved him for a display of pride. Theologians 
 were psychologists in those days; and we may 
 believe the observing monk when he said he saw 
 'a sombre cloud of demons flying and playing round 
 Columba' s head.' 
 
 A defect — or at least a dangerous quality— in 
 youth, humilit}^ is an indispensable element in the 
 sanctity of age; otherwise how could the saint pass 
 that crucial test of universal love — the loving of 
 those who despise and slight you ? Because humility 
 is so contrary to the nature of the male animal, 
 ever a creature of display, the saint seeks its 
 achievement as the final triumph of the spirit over 
 the flesh. 
 
63 
 
 Columba, it is said, could even in his old age, out- 
 walk and outrun an ordinary man. He kept the 
 body in perfect training. His muscles were the 
 adequate servants of his will. That is the first con- 
 dition of realising an ideal. In the transmutation 
 of dream into deed, there is a dead point of inertia, 
 to overcome which requires heroic effort. The 
 ecstasy of feeling which the vision of the ideal pro- 
 duces, fades into the lethargy of inaction, unless 
 there are tense muscles awaiting the command of 
 the will, to carry the aspiration into act and make 
 real the dream. It is now that juvenile gymnastics 
 find their final justification and their supreme use. 
 The muscular polish of the gymnasium, at first 
 consciously sought as the ceremonial preparation 
 for an adolescent quest to be presently adventured 
 in the eyes of all comers, becomes servant at last to 
 the strong will of the old man, determined to pro- 
 ject his ideal into a reluctant world. 
 
 There is another primary bodily condition of 
 idealism about which all the ps^^-chologists of sanc- 
 tity are agreed. 'All the saints have entered upon 
 the path of perfection by the mortification of the 
 taste,' said St Leo. 'Whoso desires to make pro- 
 gress in perfection should begin by mortifying the 
 taste,' said St Andrew Avelin. In the therapeutics 
 of sanctity it is not the eye, the ear, the nose, the 
 fingers that have to be mortified, but the palate. 
 The impressions conveyed through the other senses 
 have to be controlled and cultivated, those of taste 
 all but eliminated. No more cakes and ale for the 
 good monk who has proceeded to sainthood ! And 
 concurrently with this mortification of taste, there 
 develops an increased keenness of the other senses. 
 St Augustine would only eat out of a silver spoon. 
 
64 
 
 St Philip Neri could never bring himself to drink 
 out of an3^ but his own particular glass. Both 
 these instances are of course refinements of tact — 
 of an exquisite sense of cleanliness become spiritual 
 — not of mere taste. St Francis was so ravished 
 by music as to become unconscious of pain. St 
 Bernardine of Siena was herself so responsive to 
 the pure joy of flowers, and so believed in their 
 religious value, that she made a ritual of distribut- 
 ing flowers gathered by her own hand. A tender and 
 intense sensibility is the leading psychic character- 
 istic of sanctity. St Bernard could not attend a 
 stranger's funeral without shedding tears. The 
 tenderness of the typical saint to animals and chil- 
 dren is too well known to need illustration. 
 
 Alike in the mortification of his taste and in his 
 cultivation of, and responsiveness to, other sensuous 
 impressions, such as music and scenery, Columba 
 was a typical saint. In lona he maintained his 
 bodily activity at its optimum, on a diet of oat- 
 cakes, barley scones, and spring water. The 
 poverty of his diet was compensated by the rich- 
 ness of the impressions he daily absorbed from 
 the music of the liturgy, and from sky and sea as 
 he walked the shore or climbed the high hill to see 
 the sun setting in the western ocean. The poems 
 attributed to him well show his appreciativeness of 
 Nature. One (with manifest Druidical leanings) 
 begins : 
 
 'Alone am I on the mountain, 
 O royal sun ; prosper my path, 
 And then I shall have nothing to fear. 
 
 Another, said to be an early poem of his mission 
 days in Ireland, when for a time he was cut off 
 from sight of the sea : 
 
65 
 
 Delightful would it be to me to be in Uclid Ailiun 
 
 On the pinnacles of a rock 
 That I might often see 
 
 The face of the ocean; 
 That I might see its heaving waves 
 
 Over the wide ocean, 
 When they chant music to their Father 
 
 Upon the world's course; 
 That I might see its level sparkling strand, 
 
 It would be no cause of sorrow ; 
 That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds. 
 
 Source of happiness ; 
 That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves 
 
 Upon the rocks ; 
 That I might hear the roar by the side of the church 
 
 Of the surrounding sea ; 
 That I might see its noble flocks 
 
 Over the watery ocean. 
 
 To the regularity of routine, upon which modern 
 hygienists so much insist as the secret of produc- 
 tivity, monastic hygiene added other vital condi- 
 tions. These were prayer, ritual of worship, 
 systematised alternation of cloistered dream and 
 active deed, and finally the continual presence of 
 an ideal, acknowledged as essentially trophic — i.e., 
 not only as a source of impulse, but literally as 
 sustenance of the soul. Columba, it is said, prayed 
 two hundred times a day. Most of these invoca- 
 tions of the ideal were not vocal but mental prayers 
 — i.e.y silent concentrations of the mind upon an 
 ideal ardently desired. This process of self-culture 
 has been rediscovered by modern hypnotism as auto- 
 suggestion. There is, however, this difference be- 
 tween the mediaeval abbot and the modern hypnotist 
 — that the former, if not a master of the process, 
 yet was a competent journeyman, while the latter 
 is hardly more than a fumbling apprentice. Sug- 
 gestion and auto-suggestion can serve effectively 
 
as instruments for the higher education of the mind, 
 just so far as they are utilised to build up a type 
 of character adjusted to a social order which has 
 the sanction and the impulse of accredited ideals. 
 Lacking an integrated system of ideals personal, 
 social, historical, and even cosmic (for man is a 
 part of Nature), the hypnotists and all the other 
 fragmentary specialists of mental hygiene are like 
 a group of blind masons building a house without 
 a plan, and stopping every now and then to call for 
 an architect, who is not there. And — to push the 
 metaphor further — to expect that routine can re- 
 place ritual is to assume that the blind masons will 
 build the house and a cathedral also. 
 
 XXXI 
 
 Given a certain inheritance of ideals, given an 
 inherited ritual and symbolism (the spiritual block 
 and tackle of life), given lona with its situation, 
 natural features, and its implied round of daily 
 occupations — given all these, Columba was able in 
 his old age to simultaneously re-make himself and 
 make a social order congruent with his personality. 
 To state the process accuratelj^ one has to say that 
 lona and its monastic family made Columba, and 
 Columba — himself inheriting, developing, and 
 transmitting the ideals of Celtic Christianity- 
 made lona and its monastic family. 
 
 In the following picture from Adamnan, illustra- 
 tive of the inter-relations of Columba and his 
 monks, the details may be taken as literal tran- 
 scription of actual emotions : 
 
 'During one of the last summers of his life, the monks, 
 returning in the evening from reaping the scanty harvest 
 
67 
 
 of their island, stopped short as they approached the 
 monastery, suddenly touched with strange emotion. 
 The steward of the monastery, Baithen, the friend and 
 future successor of Columba, asked them, "Are you not 
 sensible of something very unusual here?" "Yes," 
 said the oldest of the monks, "every day at this hour 
 and place I breathe a delicious odour, as if all the 
 flowers in the world were collected here. I feel also 
 something like the flame of the hearth, which does not 
 burn but warms me gently; I experience, in short, in 
 my heart a joy so unusual, so incomparable, that I am 
 no longer sensible of either trouble or fatigue. The 
 sheaves which I carry on my back, though heavy, weigh 
 upon me no longer; and 1 know not how, from this spot 
 to the monastery, they seem to be lifted from my shoul- 
 ders. What, then, is this wonder?" All the others 
 gave the same account of their sensations. "I will tell 
 you what it is," said the steward; "it is our old master, 
 Columba, always full of anxiety for us, who is disturbed 
 to find us so late, who vexes himself with the thought 
 of our fatigue, and who, not being able to come to 
 meet us with his body, sends us his spirit to refresh, 
 rejoice, and console us." ' 
 
 Here we have a picture of a social order, which, 
 of its type, is relatively perfect. The old abbot's 
 love for his monks is so real, so wonder-working, 
 as to impart to them that joyous energy of the 
 spirit, which works without fatigue, and experi- 
 ences without suffering. When he did not accom- 
 pany them at their labours in the fields, Columba 
 himself performed the menial office of washing the 
 brethren's feet on their return to the monastery. 
 It is not hard to believe that this duty, built into a 
 habit by thirty years' practice, went a long way 
 towards curing Columba of his pride. 
 
 For the psychologist, pride and humility are 
 alike responses to stimulus, repeated into habit, 
 hardened into character; in short, they become 
 fixed as in the trained animal, albeit upon a higher 
 
68 
 
 scale of life, and with widening range. The saint 
 is a person who by practice has got the response and 
 habit of humilitj^ to an unusual degree of perfec- 
 tion : he differs from practised musician and bard 
 in that he has for audience, just God and himself. 
 His image of perfection is, therefore, always a 
 Sunday ahead of him. For on that day of physical 
 rest and psychic stimulus the cerebrum of the saint 
 reintegrates its power after the experimental striv- 
 ings of the week ; and the resulting vision of a 
 higher perfection makes the sabbatical day a holy 
 one. The ideal is therefore unattainable, simply 
 because it is alwaj^s being pushed in front of him, 
 by the practising idealist. 
 
 The aphorism of Pascal that 'man is neither an 
 angel nor a beast, and the misfortune is that he 
 who tries to make an angel makes a beast,' is too 
 much the despairing lament of the literary dyspep- 
 tic, who cannot recuperate on the seventh day, 
 because he has not worked adequatel^^ on the pre- 
 vious six. The shepherd psalmist naturally made 
 a different generalization : *It is but lost labor that 
 ye haste to rise up early, and so late take rest, and 
 eat the bread of care; for He giveth to his belo^^'^'i 
 in sleep.* 
 
 XXXII 
 
 Humility and all the other virtues of the saint are 
 but preliminary to the culminating quality — the 
 supreme secret of sanctity — love. And that here, 
 too, the process is one of approximating attainment 
 by the infinite gradations of cumulative practice, 
 there is an overwhelming mass of biographical evi- 
 
«9 
 
 dence to show. Love, to revert to the sure ground 
 if vulgar phrase of psycho-physiology, is the prize 
 trick of Nature's pet animal, Sarasate, when asked 
 the secret of his success, replied, 'Practising six 
 hours a day since twelve years of age.' If it takes 
 that to make a first-rate fiddler, need it be wondered 
 that one can only become a perfect lover by prac- 
 tising all day, every day of a long life. Sanctity is 
 the perfecting of love by a lifetime of willing {i.e., 
 heroic practising) to see oneself in others. 'He to- 
 day, I to-morrow' {ille hodie, ego eras) is the maxim 
 of the saint in face of everj^ sort of evil-doer. It 
 was the compas.sion which pardons because it under- 
 stands, that made St Bernardine of Siena visit a 
 murderer in his cell and spend the night before his 
 execution with his head resting on her breast. Act 
 as though you loved your neighbour, and the love 
 will come — that was the saint's impelling idea, now 
 being recovered by contemporary psychology as a 
 theory of the emotions, though like many of the 
 other recent discoveries of psychology, it is in Kant, 
 who, in the Metaphysic of Ethic, says we must do 
 good to our fellows not because we love them, but 
 in order that we may love them. The correspond- 
 ing sociology was summed in St Catherine's phrase, 
 'Our neighbours are given us to prove our love of 
 God.' 
 
 Love, like the blacksmith's arm, is made by 
 practice. But it differs from all other exercise, in 
 that it is of the whole body and soul. The will to 
 love is the will to grow holy, i.e., to integrate into 
 sanctity and stand righteous towards every human 
 and divine relation. Hence the practice of love is 
 without the defects of the specialisms, whose virtue 
 implies a forgetting and a neglect. It has its own 
 
70 
 
 qualities, and these are extraordinary. It knows 
 not fatigue. 'We tire of thinking, and we tire of 
 acting, but we never tire of loving,' said a modern 
 saint unrecognised by Rome. Xove feeleth no 
 burden, thinking nothing of labours, would will- 
 ingly do more than it can, complaineth not of im- 
 possibility^, because it conceiveth that it may and 
 can do all things.' St Thomas a Kempis, in saying 
 this, was uttering neither platitude nor poetry. 
 He was sim^ply generalising the concrete, common 
 experience of the saintly life. 
 
 The association of sanctity with sadness, is an 
 illusion fostered by an age which confuses happi- 
 ness with pleasure, and suffering with pain. On 
 the contrary, the saints of history and of fact have 
 been masters of a serene happiness. Their thau- 
 maturgy of the soul, while it turned base suffering 
 into shame, yet transmuted noble suffering into 
 joy.* It is laid down in the papal ordinance on 
 beatification that joy is an essential condition of 
 sanctity. *I fear,' wrote Teresa, 'nothing so much 
 as to see my daughters lose this joy of the soul.' 
 
 The love of the saints is a creative force. It 
 creates an idealised image of the self not in one 
 other person (as does the profane lover), but in all 
 other persons. A certain impulse and desire to live 
 up to this ideal is, by the high contagious hypnot- 
 
 * The saints at times sought suffering, not, as many 
 hagiographers seem to think, for its own sake, but be- 
 cause its intolerable torment drives a sensitive and un- 
 selfish nature to find the cause in a personal imperfec- 
 tion. Joy comes with the discovery of defect, the resolve 
 to amend it, and the movement into a more exalted 
 activity. The elan of a growing perfection is a by- 
 product of suffering. It suggests an optimism of psycho- 
 pathology. 
 
71 
 
 ism of sanctity, imposed both on the saint and on 
 all his circle. To many of the circle the desire is 
 a burden to be evaded ; to others it is a standard 
 to strive after intermittently; to the saint it is a 
 means of repeated rapturous ascents in the scale of 
 being, and at each new-reached height he thrills 
 to a vision of more evolved perfection coming into 
 view. The explosive joy of attainment is but the 
 liberation of energy to create a more exalted ideal. 
 In the intervening period of rest, more material is 
 absorbed from the ideals of the past by study, 
 observation, meditation, and gentle exercise in good 
 works. Progress in sanctity is thus by a series of 
 ecstasies alternating with quiescent states. The 
 state of 'mental prayer' which characterises the 
 subjective life of the saint is of two kinds. There 
 is the prayer of quiet, which in calm unconscious- 
 ness integrates memories and impressions of per- 
 fection into an ideal; and there is the prayer of 
 rapturous mystical incorporation of the ideal. The 
 state of mental prayer increasingly monopolises the 
 dream-life of the saint. Suarez, who tried nobly 
 but in vain to be a mediaeval saint in the seven- 
 teenth century, divided his day into • three equal 
 parts. He took eight hours for work and study, 
 eight hours for mental prayer, and eight hours for 
 sleep, meals, and recreation. 
 
 The mental prayer so prized by all the saints 
 meant passive communion or active intercourse with 
 the God who symbolised their own stock of ideals, 
 inherited and personal. There is a pungent saying 
 of Teresa that 'he who abandons mental prayer does 
 not need devils to goad him to hell ! He goes there 
 of himself.' In other words, if you do not habitu- 
 ally dream of ideals you may be sure you are 
 dreaming of vice. 
 
72 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 Of Teresa herself, the essential miracle was that 
 she cultivated the subjective life of dreams and 
 prayer to a high degree of perfection, and was at 
 the same time a laborious and conscientious house- 
 keeper; a tender, solicitous, and cheerful mother 
 of many daughters ; the skilful administrator of a 
 great endowment; the author of several remarkable 
 books ; the regenerator of not a few cities by estab- 
 lishing therein the requisite culture institutes; and, 
 finally, in the midst of all these activities, she did 
 not forget that statesmen and high ecclesiastics had 
 periodic need of a woman's admonition and exhorta- 
 tion. The secret of her productivity lay, to some 
 extent, in the multitude of priestly confessors she, 
 to the scandal of the orthodox, summoned one after 
 another to her confessional. Bach confessor was, 
 for her, a short cut to the inheritance of a new stock 
 of ideals. That incorporation of the Past, which 
 our philistine in the guise of practical reformer 
 scouts as an encumbrance, but which the student 
 laboriously seeks with midnight lamp — this the 
 woman of intellect achieves through spiritual in- 
 timacy with picked men, in whose varying educa- 
 tion and personality the ideals of the past survive. 
 The magnitude and variety of Teresa's action were 
 thus the fruit of a rich, noble and regulated dream- 
 life, enriched by an exceptional incorporation of 
 historic ideals, and unified by an exceptional per- 
 sonality. Her life is to be interpreted as a con- 
 tinuous progress in planning and constructing her 
 own future, by more abundantly appropriating and 
 turning to account the past of her order and her 
 
73 
 
 race. All genuine Teresians of to-day, and they 
 are many, scattered through Spain — still the most 
 chivalrous of nations — and the Spanish Americas, 
 inherit a noble equipment of ideals from the ador- 
 able woman whose worship they continue. 
 
 St Augustine is a good example of deliberate 
 choice in the selection of an inheritance of ideals. 
 After sampling most of the pagan philosophies 
 which competed for the youthful minds of his day, 
 he turned to a study of the apostles and martyrs 
 who had developed and continued Christianity. 
 These awoke in his heart a response of love, which 
 re-created them as companions of his soul. He 
 began audaciously, yet modestly, by asking him- 
 self : 'Why can I not imitate these V With this 
 impetus his life became an organized endeavour to 
 inherit, to unify and develop, to transmit to pos- 
 terity, that particular stock of ideals. His own 
 experience qualified him to make the generalization, 
 Tarere Deo libertas est' — to choose your ideals 
 from a study of the past is true freedom. The 
 origin of the Jesuit order affords another example 
 of a deliberate choice of ideals, exercising a great 
 historical influence. The order owed its establish- 
 ment to a volume of *The Lives of the Saints' which 
 fell into the hands of a young Spanish knight, 
 wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, and languish- 
 ing on a bed of sickness. As he read of them, St 
 Dominic and St Francis lived again in the love 
 their deeds evoked in the young convalescent. On 
 the vigil of the Feast of the Anunciation, the 
 knight Loyola hung up his sword and his armour, 
 and put on the cassock. The uncertain quest was 
 ended, the definite mission had begun ; he had found 
 his ideal and his work. The next ten years of his 
 E 
 
74 
 
 life were devoted to preparing himself for what 
 eventuated in what has proved the greatest world- 
 mission since the flight of Mahomet. The needed 
 group of adolescents to help him initiate and 
 organize the new order, Loyola found, naturally 
 enough, in the University of Paris, ever the cosmo-^ 
 polis of bright adolescence. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 Love, when it looks to the past, is re-creative; 
 when it looks to the future, is creative. By the 
 first miracle the ideals of the past live again; by 
 the second they are unified in a new personality, 
 implanted in the hearts of contemporaries, and 
 transmitted to posterity. The body of the idealist 
 is born; his soul is made. The world of matter is 
 energic, the world of life is demiurgic, but the saint 
 creates for himself a world which is theurgic. The 
 ideals of his personality, the heaven of his religion, 
 become his real world. He laughs at decay, and 
 almost triumphs over death. The saints die, 
 loving, working, praying to the last moment. 
 Columba is quite the typical saint in the manner 
 of his death. He was in his cell making a tran- 
 scription of the Psalter. He had got to Psalm 
 xxxiii, and after writing the verse, 'Those who ask 
 of the Lord shall want no good thing,* he laid down 
 his pen and said, *Let Baithen' (his nominated suc- 
 cessor in the abbacy) 'finish the rest.' This was 
 on a Saturday evening. He attended the vigil ser- 
 vice of the church on Saturday night. Returning 
 to his cell, he dictated to the brethren a last message 
 of love and exhortation to peace and charity. When 
 
75 
 
 the midnight bell called the monks to the matins 
 of the Sunday festival, Columba rose, and, strug- 
 gling into the church, got as far as the altar. 
 There he sank, and raising his hand in blessing and 
 'turning his eyes to his children on either side with 
 a look full of serene and radiant joy,* he expired. 
 'His hand dropped, the last sigh came from his 
 lips, and his face remained calm and sweet like 
 that of a man who in his sleep has seen a vision 
 of heaven.' 
 
 There is no need to doubt the facts. Innumer- 
 able other saints of more authentic record have 
 achieved similar deaths. As the greatest of 
 emperors died standing, so the saint dies kneeling. 
 But, whether we accept the facts or not, let us agree 
 in attributing the highest significance not to the 
 historicity of the record, but to the imagination 
 which pictures such a departure as an ideal. For 
 such an image impelled by love can, in a particular 
 milieu, create its own realisation and ensure its 
 transmission to posterity. *It is the property of 
 love to change the soul into the thing which it loves* 
 is one of the master axioms of hagiography. 
 
 XXXV 
 
 Whence comes the original impulse to the saintly 
 love? That is a question for mothers. But 
 meantime the sociologist has a start-point in seeing, 
 in the poetic surge of adolescence, the urge of all 
 the lovers, all the mothers, of the race. It was just 
 here that the old religions took hold. It is just 
 here that modern education lets go. 
 
 Aware that man is an altruist, just in so far as 
 
76 
 
 he is a lover, the founders of the old religions 
 utilised the exultation of love, as the very spring- 
 board for religious idealism. Now the character- 
 istics that mark off religious ideals are two. In the 
 first place, the imagined and desiderated state of 
 perfection is located in the remote future; i.e., it 
 is something not to have or to do, but to arrive at. 
 And in the second place, a prolonged discipline of 
 self-sacrifice is exacted as the price of achievement ; 
 it is the daily toll that must be paid by the traveller 
 towards perfection. Whence were derived the 
 ideas and the images which went to constitute the 
 state of religious perfection ? Where was found the 
 emotional intensity that could unify these ideas and 
 images into an ideal of irresistible compulsion? 
 
 Dante's Paradise was derived from many sources, 
 only some of which we can distinctly trace. One 
 of the known sources was the 'Vision' of that same 
 St Brendan* who contributed to the inspiration of 
 Columbus. But in its main elements and outlines 
 it was taken from the 'vSumma' of the great 
 Dominican monk, whose synthesis again was built 
 from innumerable visions of perfection, accumu- 
 lated from countless generations of Christian and 
 pre-Christian dreamers. In short, the heaven of 
 the Christian as of other religions was the means 
 by which the Future, as imagined by idealists of 
 the past, determined the life of each passing genera- 
 tion of believers at the moment of awakening youth, 
 and continued in many cases — supremely so in 
 
 * vSt Brendan was thus present not only at the dis- 
 covery of America in the fifteenth, but also at the 
 liberation of Italy in the nineteenth century; for the 
 flooding of Italy with cheap editions of Dante was one 
 of the spiritual factors in the Italian 'Resorgimento.' 
 
n 
 
 Dante — to guide and condition their career. And 
 whether it be the White Rose of Isis and the wis- 
 dom of Hermes, or the smile of Beatrice and the 
 insight of St Bernard, that lift and guide the 
 aspirant through the stages of the utopic world, 
 it is always, in the great culture religions, the pure 
 and beautiful woman and the venerable seer, who- 
 evoke and direct the latent idealism of youth. The 
 hypnotism of sex is the moral agent of the cosmos 
 for the transmission either of ideals or of sin. 
 Whether it be efficient for the one or the other 
 depends mainly on the previous education of the 
 lovers ; and hence the ritual of religion has been so- 
 largely directed to implanting in the minds of both 
 sexes the image of an ideal lover. But here the 
 educational problem had to be faced, that while it 
 was not difficult to fall in love with this image, it 
 was very difficult to continue in love with it. The 
 solution attempted was to envelop the secular life 
 with a religious life, which by a ritual synchronis- 
 ing with and symbolising the cosmic rhythm of 
 night and day, month, season, year and cycle, com- 
 mitted the worshipper to a recurrent elan not dis- 
 similar in its psychic values, to an almost unceas- 
 ing falling in love. Therefore, with their success 
 or their failure in harmonising their cosmic symbols 
 and their human ideals, are associated the historic 
 triumphs and downfalls of the culture religions. 
 The greater their success the more complete was 
 the social transmission of ideals, and therefore the 
 more self-determining the society; the greater the 
 freedom of the individual because the more com- 
 plete his action in transmuting dream into deed. 
 
 The grand generalisation of St Bernard, Xove »& 
 the lever of the Soul,' means, in the language here 
 
 F2 
 
78 
 
 used, that the evolution of idealism in the race is 
 paralleled in the individual by the cultivation of love 
 as a means of transmitting and developing the racial 
 ideals. 
 
 Through the adoration of an idealised woman, the 
 youth of one generation may have their lives ad- 
 justed to the requirements of the next in succession. 
 But, transmitted through the venerable seer, ideals 
 may shape a generation towards adjustment to a 
 remote future. The prestige of the prophet at once 
 loved and venerated gives him a power of suggestion 
 capable of realising, in the conduct of his disciples 
 and their successors, certain ideals by the mere pre- 
 diction of them as coming events. 
 
 The love which the saint evokes is thus creative 
 of souls in the pattern of his ideal. The designation 
 of the aged Columba as 'Commander of Souls' {ani- 
 maruni dux) describes his type with literal accur- 
 acy. There was a normal use of prophecy by the 
 saints, which was not merely to foresee but also to 
 ■create the conditions of its own fulfilment. By his 
 visions the saint foresaw, by his prophecies he 
 performed his miracles. Thus the day before his 
 death Columba used the remnants of his strength 
 to climb to the top of the Hill of Angels. And 
 from there, looking out over the whole island, he 
 lifted up his hands to pronounce this prophetic 
 benediction : 'This little spot so small and low shall 
 he greatly honoured, not only by the Scots kings 
 and people, but also by foreign chiefs and barbarous 
 nations ; and it shall be venerated even by the saints 
 of other Churches.' This was no boastful pre- 
 diction ; but an expression of Columba' s proper 
 determination to ensure the transmission of his 
 ideals to posterity, as well as a consciousness of 
 
79 
 
 their significance, a serene assurance of their 
 success. 
 
 For long centuries after Columba's death, lona 
 was the most venerated sanctuary of North- Western 
 Europe. The pilgrimages to lona, which ceased 
 with the Reformation, were resumed by Dr John- 
 son, whose saying has been so often quoted : 'That 
 man is little to be envied whose patriotism would 
 not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose 
 piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of 
 lona.' Dr Johnson paid the memory of Columba 
 the compliment of sailing those seas in a fishing- 
 boat, and encountering storms, of which one nearly 
 killed Boswell with fright and sickness. The con- 
 temporary pilgrim takes the steamer from Oban xf 
 the day happens to be fine. Otherwise he sacrifices, 
 not unwillingly, that particular coupon and resumes 
 his circular tour on the mainland. 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 There never perhaps has been in Europe, in the 
 past two thousand years, so much travel of the man 
 of leisure, so little by the man who works with his 
 hands — so few pilgrimages, so many futile missions. 
 But what if all this movement, so largely aimless, 
 misdirected, and misguided, be itself a groping for 
 ideals! The uplooking love of youth does still 
 idealise the maiden of its choice, and so continues 
 the ideal of the Holy Family ; the outlooking love of 
 the adult does here and there prolong the romance 
 of life into public service, and so continues the ideal 
 of the Holy Record ; the far-looking love of old age 
 does sometimes still achieve the complete detach- 
 
8o 
 
 ment of sanctity, and continues the ideal of the 
 Holy Place by interment in Westminster Abbey, 
 What then is the matter? Why does the National 
 Portrait Gallery grow so slowly? Why have the 
 walls and windows of the village church, once the 
 regional portrait gallery, all but ceased to add to 
 their roll of saints and heroes? Why are the 
 asylums and the prisons so numerous and so con- 
 tinuously filled with those who have determined 
 their lives not by their ideals, but by their tempta- 
 tions ? Why are the cities so crowded with soulless 
 beings, whose lives are determined neither by their 
 ideals nor their temptations, but by the inconsider- 
 ate tasks thrust upon them by the god Mammon, 
 masquerading as Economic Necessity? 
 
 For the cause of the malady we must look to the 
 prevailing incompleteness in the transmission of 
 ideals. Is it not symptomatic of our time, that 
 Montalembert's appreciation of the romance of 
 Columba's life should have offended the historical 
 specialist who wrote the chapter on Columba, in 
 that Bible of Contemporary Science, the Encyclo- 
 pcedia Britannica? The encyclopaedic biographer, 
 in the warmth of his resentment, departs from the 
 colourless correctitude of the encyclopaedic style 
 in order to opine of Montalembert's picture, *it 
 has every merit, except that of likeness to the 
 original.' Probably this encyclopaedic Historian 
 had no Geography, as presumably the encyclopaedic 
 Geographer, whom we have seen writing on lona in 
 the same sacred book, had no History. How in- 
 deed can science expect to understand religion, so 
 long as geography and history are divorced, since 
 geography is the synthesis of the natural sciences 
 
and history the synthesis of the human sciences? 
 Religion deals with phenomena as holy, i.e., in their 
 totality, and scientific study of it can therefore 
 only be approached by the converging paths of 
 History and Geography. History proper recounts 
 the origin and development, the decay and the re- 
 birth of ideals, and in the measure that it does this 
 for all peoples at all times it becomes a Synthetic 
 {i.e., a Holy) Record. Geography may hope to 
 become synthetic also when it gets to the mapping 
 of Holy Places. A great historian has said that 
 'Geography is the other eye of History.' When 
 History and Geography,* the two synthetic sciences 
 are reunited in our seats of learning, our seers will 
 again acquire the binocular vision. And not until 
 then can we expect them to foresee and provide new 
 Quests for our young men, new Missions for our 
 adults, and old Pilgrimages for themselves. 
 
 xxxvn 
 
 What is the treatment for the social malady thus 
 diagnosed? That is a different problem, but one 
 not so impossible perhaps as it seems. The hopeful 
 factor is that there is always an oncoming crop of 
 uncontaminated adolescents ready to be awakened to 
 the inheritance of ideals. Postulate in every normal 
 adolescent a potentiality of altruistic growth con- 
 tinuous throughout the life cycle. Postulate the 
 
 *To prevent misunderstanding of these much-abused 
 words— History and Geography— let it be noted in illus- 
 tration of the sense in which they are here to be con- 
 strued, that Ruskin's 'Modern Painters' is one of the 
 inspired Books of Geography, and that Shelley's Dra- 
 matic Poems were but the preparation for a Book of 
 Systematic History which he designed but did not live 
 to execute. 
 
82 
 
 saint as no fossil, but a type evolving towards such 
 perfected altruism. The question then arises, Can 
 we cultivate varieties of this type which shall have 
 the qualities and not the defects of the mediaeval 
 saints ? Of the conditions of such cultivation, some, 
 we have endeavoured to show, are known. They 
 are these. The awakening of love for known types 
 of personality; labour under known and worthy 
 conditions ; discipline by known spiritual exercises ; 
 incorporation of known ideals. Let us then apply 
 these principles in educational practice if we 
 would evoke, develop, and utilise the latent idealism 
 of adolescence. Let us send our youths to tend 
 sheep on the hill pastures; let them sow and reap 
 with the peasant in the valley; let them plough 
 the seas with the captains courageous of the fish- 
 ing fleet; let them range the forest with Artemis 
 (who was the woodman's daughter) ; let them cut 
 stones with the quarryman; let them build with 
 the masons in the city; let them cultivate flowers 
 with Persephone (herself the corn-mother's child). 
 Throughout this novitiate, let them also be exer- 
 cised with all the available uplifts of science and 
 history, of learning and thought, of art and religion, 
 of love and fellowship. Thus for each place and 
 people, and at their deepest and highest, their own 
 regional heritage may again be combined with that 
 of the world. 
 
 For in the meeting of the Heritage of the Past 
 with the Ideal of the Future, there ever arises the 
 glow and light of a truly vital Present. 
 
 As this union and incorporation of ideals becomes 
 more complete, their expression will also be re- 
 newed — through the Quests of Youth, the Missions 
 of Maturity, the Pilgrimages of Age; and even to 
 the renewal of Saintship. 
 
83 
 
 ^Mithich do7nh triall gu Ugh Pharais/ 
 {It is time for vie to go up unto the House of Paradise.) 
 
 *An I mo chridhe, I mo graidh 
 An ait* guth manaich bidh geum ha; 
 Ach mu'n tig an Saoghal gu crich 
 Bithidh I mar a hha/ 
 
 {'In lona of my heart, lona of my love 
 
 Instead of monks* voices shall be lozving of cattle 
 
 But ere the world shall come to an end 
 
 lona shall be as it was.') 
 
BDINBURGH : J. C. THOMSON 
 AT THE MERCAT PRESS 
 
I 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
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