History Of The Scottish Nation
Vol 2, Chapter 2 - The Services of the Scots to Christianity in the Middle Ages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The work of bringing in the new age consisted of two parts. The Old had to be broken up and removed, and over the field thus cleared had to be scattered the seeds from which the New was to spring. This work was partitioned among the newly arrived nations. To certain of them was assigned the work of demolition. To others the nobler part of reconstruction. The fiercer of these tribes were to slay and burn. But when the Hun, the Vandal, and the Goth had done their work, the Scots were to come forward, and to lay, not by the force of arms, but by the mightier power of principles, the foundation of a new and better order of things. But they must, first, themselves be enlightened, before they could be light-bearers to a world now plunged into the darkness of a two-fold night. They had to stand apart, outside the immediate theatre on which the tempests of barbarian war were overturning thrones and scourging nations, till the sword had done its work, and then their mission of reconstruction would begin. It may startle the reader to be told that it is to this little pioneer band of northmen, the Scots to wit, that the modern world owes its evangelical Christianity. This may appear a too bold assertion, and one for which it is impossible to find authority or countenance in history. Let the reader, however, withhold his surprise till he has examined the trains of proof we have to lay before him, and we venture to anticipate that before he has closed the volume he will find himself shut up to the same conclusion, or at least he will find himself much nearer agreement with us than he now deems possible. The honour of preserving Christianity, and transmitting it to modern times, is commonly awarded to Rome. She herself claims to have performed this great office to the nations of Europe. The claim has been so often advanced, and so generally concurred in, that now it passes as true, and is held a fact that admits neither of challenge nor of denial. It is nevertheless a vulgar fallacy. The history of all the ages since the era of the Gothic invasion refuses to endorse this claim, and assigns the honour to another and far humbler society. An error of so long standing, and which has come to be so generally entertained, can be met only by the clear, full, and continuous testimony of history; and this we shall produce as, stage by stage, and century by century, we unfold the transactions of churches and nations. But it may not be amiss to glance generally at the subject here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the Christianity which the Church of Rome propagated east and west, and which she transmitted to modern times. This was the Christianity which she sent Boniface to preach to the Germans; and this, too, was the Christianity which she missioned Augustine and his monks to proclaim to the Saxons. This is the only Christianity which we find in the Church of Leo X., at the close of the dark ages, when the new times were about to open in the Christianity which Luther found partly in the Old Bible of the Erfurt Library, and partly in the proscribed doctrines of Wycliffe and Huss. The Christianity of the age of Leo X. was Paganism. The demoniac worship and hideous vices of the age of the Caesars would have been rampant in Europe at this day, but for the great missionary enterprise of the seventh and following centuries which had its first inception in the school and church of Icolmkill. An utter arid desert would the middle ages have been but for the hidden waters, which, issuing from their fountain-head in the Rock of Iona—smitten like the ancient rock that the nations might drink—flowed in a thousand secret channels throughout Europe.

True, there were individual souls who knew the truth and fed upon it in secret, and who lived holy lives. But they were the exceptions, and their light is all the sweeter and lovelier from the dark sky in which they are seen. We speak of the general drift and current of the Roman Church. The set of that current, as attested by the policy of her Popes, and the edicts and teaching of her councils, was away from Apostolic Christianity, and steadily and with ever increasing velocity and force towards the paganism of old Rome. The laudations which the monkish chroniclers have pronounced on the Roman Church can avail but little in the face of the public monuments of the times which are overwhelmingly condemnatory of that church. These chroniclers naturally wished to glorify their own organisation, and their knowledge of Christianity being on a par with that of their church, they wrote as they believed. But we cannot make the same excuse for later historians, who have been content to repeat, one after the other, the fables of the monkish writers. They ought to have looked with their own eyes, instead of using the eyes of the "holy fathers," and they ought to have interpreted more truthfully the monuments of history, which are neither few nor difficult to read; and if they had done so they would have been compelled to acknowledge, that if Christianity has been preserved and transmitted to us, it has been preserved and transmitted in spite of the efforts of Rome, continued through successive centuries, and perseveringly put forth to disguise, to corrupt, and to destroy the Christian faith.

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

The truth is that we owe the revival of letters to the Turk; but the sense of obligation need not oppress us, seeing the service was done unwittingly. It was no part of the Turks' plan to make it day in the West, when his arms plunged the East into night: yet this was what happened. When Constantinople fell in the fifteenth century the scholars of the Greek empire sought refuge in Europe, carrying with them the treasures of antiquity. These they scattered over the West. A new world was unfolded to the eyes of men in Europe. The original tongues of the Scriptures, Hebrew and Greek, were recovered. The immortal works of ancient Greece and Rome were again accessible. These were eagerly read and studied: thought was stimulated, mind strengthened, the age was illuminated by a new splendour, and modern genius, kindling its torch at the lamp of ancient learning, aspired to rival the great masters of former days. The Reformation arriving in the following century the movement was deepened, and its current directed towards a higher goal than it otherwise would ever have attained. But it must be noted that the Renaissance broke on no Europe bathed, as the result of the genial patronage of Popes, in the splendour of letters and arts; it rose on a Europe shrouded in intellectual and spiritual darkness. We must except Celtic literature and art, of which many monuments still remain scattered up and down in the museums and libraries of Europe,—the attesting proofs of the refinement that accompanied the great missionary enterprise of which we have spoken. This Celtic art was indigenous to Scotland, and in simple beauty was excelled by no art of any country or age.

But the new learning which the Renaissance brought with it found only a limited number of patrons and disciples among the hierarchy of Rome. We must go to the camp of the Reformation to find the scholars of the age. At Wittenberg, not at Rome, was the true seat of the Renaissance. The Grecians and Hebraists, the jurists, historians, and poets of the time are found among the reformers. The court of Leo X. was rich in dancers, musicians, players, jugglers, painters, courtesans, but it had little besides to boast of. When the Pope sought among his theologians for some one to proceed to Germany and extinguish the rising flame of the Reformation, he could find only Dr. Eck and Cardinal Cajetan, and the armour of these champions was shivered at the first onset of Luther, and they fain to shelter themselves from the piercing shafts of his logic behind the ægis of the papal authority. The Pope can hardly claim Raphael and Michael Angelo. True, they worked for him, and took his wages—as they were entitled to do—but they declined submission to his creed. The same may be said of the two earlier and mightier names, Dante and Petrarch: they were Protestants at the core. Rome meted out persecution to them when alive, and appropriated their glory when dead. To do the Popes justice, however, they have enriched the world with one work of prodigious magnitude, the Bullarium, to wit. It is a monument of their labour; we wish we could add, of their charity.

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