look anywhere but thitherward. He who would not trust his best friend to set forth his views of life, accepts the random judgments of unknown others for a sufficing disposal of what the highest of the race have regarded as a veritable revelation from the Father of men. He sees in it therefore nothing but folly; for what he takes for the thing nowhere meets his nature. Our searcher at least holds open the door for the hearing of what voice may come to him from the region invisible if there be truth there, he is where it will find him.

As he continues to read and reflect, the perception gradually grows clear in him, that, if there be truth in the matter, he must, first of all, and beyond all things else, give his best heed. to the reported words of the man himself-to what he says, not what is said about him, valuable as that may afterwards prove to be. And he finds that concerning these words of his, the man says, or at least plainly implies, that only the obedient, childlike soul can understand them. It follows that the judgment of no man who does not obey can be received concerning them or the speaker of them--that, for instance, a man who hates his enemy, who tells lies, who thinks to serve God and Mammon, whether he call himself a Christian or no, has not the right of an opinion concerning the Master or bis words-at least in the eyes of the Master, however it may be in his own. This is in the very nature of things: obedience alone places a man in the position in which he can see so as to judge that which is above him. In respect of great truths investigation goes for little, speculation for nothing; if a man would know them, he must obey them. Their nature is such that the only door into them is obedience. And the truthseeker perceives-which allows him no loophole of escape from life-that what things the Son of Man requires of him, are either such as his conscience backs for just, or such as seem too great, too high for any man. But if there be help for him, it must be a help that recognizes the highest in him, and urges him to its use. Help cannot come to one made in the image of God, save in the obedient effort of what life and power are in him, for God is action. In such effort alone is it possible for need to encounter help. It is the upstretched that meets the downstretched hand. He alone who obeys can with confidence pray-to him alone does an answer seem a thing that may come. And should anything spoken by the Son of Man seem to the seeker unreasonable, he feels in the rest such a majesty of duty as compels him to judge with regard to the other, that he has not yet perceived its true nature, or its true relation to life.

And now comes the crisis: if here the man sets himself honestly to do the thing the Son of Man tells him, he so, and so first, sets out positively upon the path which, if there be truth in these things, will conduct him to a knowledge of the whole matter; not until then is he a disciple. If the message be a true one, the condition of the knowledge of its truth is not only reasonable but an unavoidable necessity. If there be help for him, how otherways should it draw nigh? He has to be assured of the highest truth of his being: there can be no other assurance than that to be gained thus, and thus alone; for only by obedience does a man come into such contact with truth as to know what it is, and in regard to truth knowledge and belief are one. That things which cannot appear save to the eye capable of seeing them, that things which cannot be recognized save by the mind of a certain development, should be examined by eye incapable, and pronounced upon by mind undeveloped, is absurd. The deliverance the message offers is a change such that the man shall be the rightness of which he talked: while his soul is not a hungered, athirst, aglow, a groaning after righteousnessthat is, longing to be himself honest and upright, it is an absurdity that he should judge concerning the way to this rightness, seeing that, while he walks not in it, he is and shall be a dishonest man: he knows not whither it leads and how can he know the way! What he can judge of is, his duty at a given moment-and that not in the abstract, but as something to be by him done, neither more, nor less, nor other than done. Thus judging and doing, he makes the only possible step nearer to righteousness and righteous judgment; doing otherwise, he becomes the more unrighteous, the more blind. For the man who knows not God, whether he believes there is a God or not, there can be, I repeat, no judgment of things pertaining to God. To our supposed searcher, then, the crowning word of the Son of Man is this, 'If any man is willing to do the will of the Father, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.'

Having thus accompanied my type to the borders of liberty, my task for the present is over. The rest let him who reads prove for himself. Obedience alone can convince. To convince without obedience I would take no bootless labour; it would be but a gain for hell. If any man call these things foolishness, his judgment is to me insignificant. If any man say he is open to conviction, I answer him he can have none but on the condition, by the means of obedience. If a

man say,

The thing is not interesting to me,' I ask him, 'Are you following your conscience? By that, and not by the interest you take or do not take in a thing, shall you be judged. Nor will anything be said to you, or of you, in that day, whatever that day mean, of which your conscience will not echo every syllable.'

Oneness with God is the sole truth of humanity. Life parted from its causative life would be no life; it would at best be but a barrack of corruption, an outpost of annihilation. In proportion as the union is incomplete, the derived life is imperfect. And no man can be one with neighbour, child, dearest, except as he is one with his origin; and he fails of his perfection so long as there is one being in the universe he could not love.

Of all men he is bound to hold his face like a flint in witness of this truth who owes everything that makes for eternal good, to the belief that at the heart of things and causing them to be, at the centre of monad, of world, of protoplastic mass, of loving dog, and of man most cruel, is an absolute, perfect love; and that in the man Christ Jesus this love is with us men to take us home. To nothing else do I for one owe any grasp upon life. In this I see the setting right of all things. To the man who believes in the Son of God, poetry returns in a mighty wave; history unrolls itself in harmony; science shows crowned with its own aureole of holiness. There is no enlivener of the imagination, no enabler of the judgment, no strengthener of the intellect, to compare with the belief in a live Ideal, at the heart of all personality, as of every law. If there be no such live Ideal, then a falsehood can do more for the race than the facts of its being; then an unreality is needful for the development of the man in all that is real, in all that is in the highest sense true; then falsehood is greater than fact, and an idol necessary for lack of a God. They who deny cannot, in the nature of things, know what they deny. When one sees a chaos begin to put on the shape of an ordered world, he will hardly be persuaded it is by the power of a foolish notion bred in a diseased fancy.

Let the man then who would rise to the height of his being, be persuaded to test the Truth by the deed-the highest and only test that can be applied to the loftiest of all assertions. To every man I say, 'Do the truth you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.'

GEORGE MAC DONALD.

49

ART. III.—The Culdees, and their Later History. OWING to the researches which have been conducted extensively by Dr. Reeves among our domestic records, and by Dr. Ebrard in Continental libraries and monasteries, the position and circumstances of the old Celtic Church are much better understood now than they were some years ago. No scholar at present would go so far as to assert that a large body of pastors and people in the isles and mountains of Scotland, like the Waldenses among the Alps, maintained the worship of God in its simplicity, and the gospel in its purity, for many generations; that they owned no rule but the Word of God,' and that they had no bishops or prelates, and their only church-officers were ministers and elders.' All now admit that these statements, though resting on a certain basis of truth, can be accepted only with some very important modifications. So far all may be said to agree; but still there is a wide difference of opinion as to the Culdees, the origin of the name, the persons to whom it is properly applied, the principles which they held, and their relationship to the general Church of the time, while the later history of the persons so designated is still very obscurely known.

No man has dealt with these matters more successfully than Dr. Reeves, of Armagh, who is the highest living authority among Irish antiquaries. He first started the subject in his learned edition of Adamnan's Life of St. Columbkille,' and returned to a more thorough investigation of it in two papers, which he read before the Royal Irish Academy in 1860, and which he subsequently issued as a separate dissertation in 1864, with the title The Culdees of the British Islands as they appear in history.' His object, as he states, is to gather together in a compact and methodical form all the scattered evidence upon the subject which he could discover in external as well as domestic records.' He has traced out every foundation in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales, with which the name has been associated in any medieval record, and by producing his evidences in the form of an appendix of original authorities, he enables his readers to form an independent opinion of their own upon the subject. The essay, owing to its dealing so much in minute, obscure details, and discussing the exact import of original authorities, is, as might be expected, rather hard, dry, and unattractive to the general reader; but it has the great merit of going to the root of the matter, and, within the sphere that he has marked out for his

investigations, it presents, so far as known to the writer at the time, the whole facts of the case, without passion and without prejudice. We gladly avail ourselves of the opportunity thus afforded, to give our view of the testimonies he has so industriously gathered, and to present our readers with the results that after a careful examination of them we have reached.

First, as to the derivation of the word Culdee. Scholars are still much divided as to whether it is of Celtic or of Latin origin.

Those who assign it a Celtic original are now nearly all of opinion that it is a compound of the words cele, and De, 'God;' but they are not exactly agreed whether cele should be understood in its primary sense of husband' or 'companion,' or in its secondary sense of servant.' John Toland, a native of Donegal and an excellent Irish scholar, understood the word in its primary sense, and, undismayed by the rhetorical incongruity of his translation, interpreted it to mean one espoused to God. But Reeves and others take it in its secondary signification, and regard cele-De as the Celtic equivalent of servus Dei, an epithet used by Augustine and other Fathers as the special designation of a monk or ecclesiastic. Ebrard and Zeuss assign the very same derivation, but understand the compound word to signify man of God. Dr. M'Lauchlan, whose Early Scottish Church' was published since Dr. Reeves' essay, finds its original in Cuildich, and understands it to denote men of seclusion. Other Celtic roots. have been assigned by various writers, but it can scarcely be said of these that there is much probability in favour of any of them.

On the other side, writers such as Gerald Barry, Hector Boece, George Buchanan, and John Colgan in his Trias Thaumaturga,' agree in assigning to the term a Latin derivation. According to these authorities, it is merely an abbreviated form of coli-dei, from the Latin colo; they understand it as the equivalent of the words Deicole or calicole, and take it to mean worshippers of God.' Bishop Spottiswoode finds its root in the Latin cella-a cell. But Bishop Bramhall gives the most amusing derivation of all. He says it is a compound of gallus and Deus. The words cele-de and coli-dci, as they occur in Scottish and Irish records, are, in his opinion, merely a corrupt form of spelling galli-dei-that is, 'God's cocks.'

The oldest writer who used the modern form Culdees, so far as is now known, is Hector Boece, who was Principal of the