hurting the feelings of any good people, but I think I cannot
be blamed for taking two or three which are historic. You
cannot have helped remarking how parts of the English
population in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.
displayed great indifference upon the subject of what really
were fundamentals, but rose in rebellion over changes in
certain adjuncts which were of no comparative importance.
And I verily believe that if the parish churches among those
people's descendants were turned into Buddhist temples
to-morrow, they would regard you with perfect equanimity
while you held forth to them upon the Causal Nexus of
Being, or upon that Mrvana which Wagner has so beauti-
fully called " love's endless, dreamless sleep." What they
would not like would probably be the priest wearing a
yellow robe. It is, I believe, a certain fact that the statues
of Reason which were set up in the Erench Churches at the
time of the Great Revolution became in not infrequent cases
the objects of the same observances as had, a few years
before, surrounded in the same places statues representing
very different things. No one, again, can read the sugges-
tions for religious practices which Auguste Comte has made
to his disciples without being struck by their resemblance to
those which prevail among the majority of Erench Christians.
As to Scotland, I may recall to you the rather hyperbolical
saying, ascribed (on I forget what authority) to James VII.,



MARQUESS OF BUTE 371

to the effect that every Scotchman, to whatever Church he
may belong, and however sincerely, is always a Presbyterian.
I look, then, upon St. Andrews and her history as a
singularly pure type, presentment, and symbol of the dis-
tinctive genius of the Scottish race energising in the highest
field of thought, a chief witness to, and monument of, the
Scottish national history in its most ideal and elevated
aspects. In such a type, while the whole is, as I think, and
have said, controlled, through the very force of nature, by
physiological causes, the introduction of Christianity has
necessitated the existence of two elements. They are ele-
ments which here have harmonised as a patriotic State
supporting a patriotic Church. The secular or State
element is the Scottish nationality, of which the southern of
the two Roman walls in Britain was perhaps even originally
a witness, perhaps, after the invasion of Britain by the
English and Saxons, in one sense a partial cause, in any
case has been, and, as I think, is the great geographical
expression. The Christian element has been based upon
things which are contemporary not with the invasion of
Britain by the English, but with that by the Romans. I
mean the difference between the so-called Retrine and the
Joannine Liturgical families. I need not remind the
student of Christian Liturgiology that all the antient Litur-
gies contain in common a certain skeleton or groundwork,
and certain formulae, which for this reason can hardly fail to
be ascribed to the Apostolic era itself, most probably even
to a time before the dispersion of the Apostles, but that
after these features of a common origin to which all alike
bear witness, the early forms of Christian worship divide
themselves into five heads. It is true that in these cases
the difference of the lex orandi implied no difference in the
lex crcdendi, but they sometimes became identified with
discussions such as the Raschal controversy, which some,
such as the Canterbury school, did their very best to drag
into the sphere of doctrine. Indeed, the representatives of
that school at Whitby, in 664, strove, more or less honestly,
to represent Columba as being set up as a rival to the



372 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

Apostle Peter. If they had named the Apostle John, it
would not have been true, but it would have been nearer to
the mark. Perhaps they did not dare. As for the five
Liturgical families with the Egyptian, the Syrian, and the
Chaldean, we need not here concern ourselves. But the
Italian, commonly called Petrine, and the Ephesine or
Joannine have divided the Western world. The early
history of the Italian is turbid. Without going the lengths
of Kenan, I think it will be generally admitted that there
are some indications of a Pauline as well as of a Petrine
tradition, and the period at which what was originally, as
we all know, a Greek Church, became, under influences
which were possibly African, a Latin Church, is wrapped
in absolute mystery. On the other hand, the Joannine
Liturgy is recognised on all hands as springing from the
tradition of the beloved disciple, from the very home of her
whom all generations shall call blessed. It was brought to
Lyons by Irenseus, the disciple of Polycarp, the disciple of
John. The local traditions of the Churches probable
enough, I think bring it to Marseilles with the family of
Bethany, Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus. Under the cir-
cumstances, its history presents a curious phenomenon, and
it is almost startling to read the language applied to it, for
instance, by " T," the biographer of St. Margaret. It has
now practically no rest for the sole of its foot except in a
side-chapel of the Cathedral of Toledo, and even that it
owes only to the cultured patriotism of Cardinal Ximenes.

What were the forms of Christian worship prevalent in
Britain during the Poman occupation, it is unnecessary here
and now to discuss. I hazard the conjecture that they very
probably varied, according to the nationalities of the troops
quartered in the island, or of the other immigrants from
different parts of the Empire, in the same way that different
forms of worship are to be found at the present moment in
use among the British population of India. The author of
the Life of Brendan of Cluainferta (I speak of the Life, not
of the Romance) mentions a Greek Liturgy as in use in
Wales in the Vlth century. This, is at least, a proof that



MARQUESS OF BUTE 373

he believed such a thing to be possible ; if it be true, it may
throw some light upon the tradition of Eleutherius and
Lleurwg, as showing a possible survival from that epoch.
But before the Eomans had finally evacuated Britain, our
illustrious compatriot, Patrick M'Calphurn was born near
Dunbarton. What the form of Christianity was which he
introduced into Ireland can hardly be said to have admitted
of any question before, but the publication by the Bolland-
ists in 1882 of the Wurzburg Codex of the Life by Muirchu
Maccumachtheni, appears to me to clinch it by rendering no
longer reasonable any doubt that in the words of that Life,
" he went forth no farther" than Auxerre, but sat at the
feet of Germanus, " according to that which Paul was at the
feet of Gamaliel," and that his " brethren " (as he himself
expresses it) were " the Saints of the Lord ... in the
Gauls." This was undoubtedly the form of Christianity re-
imported into what is now called Scotland, by Columba, in
563. The mission of Columba has indeed perished as
regards its merely Liturgical practices, and their very monu-
ments are scant. But in its essence, as the abiding idea of
a national and nationalist church, it will be generally con-
fessed to have ultimately dominated hitherto anything which
it found before it, and anything which it has since been
sought to introduce into it. It lives mightily. Whatever
denomination people belong to in Scotland at this day, they
are all eager, with hardly a single if any exception, to claim
that they most truly represent the ideas of Columba. I do
not believe that his memory ever received so wide a venera-
tion as it does at this moment.

And it is with this birth of the distinctively patriotic
National Scottish Church, as opposed to what had hitherto
been rather the Churches of Roman Cantonments, that what
had been thitherto merely the Wild Boars' Headland, first,
but at once, becomes in the very light of Columba's own
day, if not actual presence, a sacred spot. There are two
names connected with the sowing of that grain of mustard-
seed which afterwards grew into such a tree, in whose
branches so many a mind of soaring thought and thrilling



374 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES



voice has found a congenial home. The first of these two
is Kenneth of Aghaboe, the intimate personal friend of
Columba, whom he accompanied when he first went to see
Brude, the King of the Picts, and whom he survived for
only three years, dying in the year 600. Of his historic
greatness in Ireland, it is needless to speak. His fame is
attested in Scotland by the continual popular use of his
name, as well as by the dedications of churches. I am,
however, inclined to think, with Dr. Skene, that when he is
named in connection with St. Andrews, the phrase is used
rather loosely, much as one might say that the Charing
Cross Eailway Station is in London, whereas it is really
west of Temple Bar, and that, familiar as he must have been
with the Promontorium Apri, the actual scene of his
temporary abode is more probably to be found outside its
swampy moat. The second name is that of Kegulus. With
him the question is different. A tower raised in his
memory when that memory was less than half as distant as
it now is, still rises above us, and his connection with the
actual spot is intimate. But very little is now known about
him. He belongs almost completely to that curious class of
whom it has been said, with a certain quaint beauty, that
" their memories are justly venerated among men, but their
acts are known only to God." I have not succeeded in
finding any date assigned as that of his death, but one of the
few statements regarding him associates him with a moment
more interesting than that which a barren entry of decease
would record. It was soon after the accession of Aidan
M'Gabhrain, that great Prince from whom not only is our
present Royal Family descended, and in right of whom they
may be said to reign, but who undoubtedly was the first
monarch who proclaimed the national independence of the
Scottish Kingdom, and who is regarded by Dr. Skene as the
founder of the Scottish monarchy more really than even
Fergus M'Erca ; while he also seems to have been the last
man who actually represented the Roman Emperors, as
commanding the united forces of all Christian Britain.
Only the year before Columba, in obedience, as he believed,



MARQUESS OF BUTE 375

to a direct revelation from Heaven which had substituted
the Divine Will for his own, had ordained him King in Iona
with such a tremor of patriotic and religious emotion, that
while his hand was resting upon the august head the very
words of Benediction which he was reciting had been broken
by an unpremeditated outburst of prophecy and warning. In
574 the hero and the saint went together to Drumceatt, to
claim the independence of the Scottish Kingdom. Before
he returned, Columba founded the Church of Drumcliffe, and
among those who met him upon the occasion to do him
honour was Eegulus.

From the few facts and the jumble of contradictory
fictions, I think we may at least gather that Eegulus was a
contemporary, and a friend, perhaps a disciple of Columba,
who retired at some time to the then solitude of the Boars'
Headland. There is certainly a curious coincidence between
this name of the Boars' Headland, with the Cursus Apri and
the rest of it, and that of the Boars' Isle in Lough Derg on
the Shannon, with which the name of Eegulus is elsewhere
associated. And I venture to hazard a conjecture. I
cannot identify the isle among the many which stud Lough
Derg, but I find that the Lough is fairly deep. Pigs notoriously
swim very badly, and I strongly doubt whether wild boars
would ever make an habitual resort of an island in deep
water. Whence then the name ? At St. Andrews it is
fitting enough, as this isolated headland is separated from
the mainland only by a swampy valley with a little stream,
where the boars would have wallowed and whence they
could have sought a drier refuge on the higher ground. Is
it possible that Eegulus went over into Scotland after
Columba, later than the Synod of Drumceatt, and then
founded the cell called thenceforward Cillrighmonaich, and
when he returned to Ireland and sought an hermitage in
Lough Derg, gave it the name of Boars' Isle in remembrance
of his foundation and probably his hermitage upon the
Boars' Headland ?

From the time of Eegulus till that when it became St.
Andrews, I notice nothing of the history of this place, but



376 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

events took place which mightily affected it. In 597 (the
very year of Columba's death) the Petrine Church of
Canterbury was founded by an Italian mission under
Augustine, and, although primarily meant for the conver-
sion of the heathen Angles and Saxons, soon assumed an
aggressive attitude not only towards English Churches such
as that of Deira, which owed their existence to the labours
of the members of the ancient Joannine Churches, but also
towards these churches themselves. In 664, the Canter-
bury party at the Synod of Whitby, by invoking the civil
power to decide a purely ecclesiastical question, succeeded
in conquering and capturing the Church of Northumbria.
In 710 a similar change was made by Nectan MacDerili,
King of the Picts. He threw himself body and soul into
the arms of the Canterbury party. In 7 1 7 he expelled the
Columban monks from his dominions. He proclaimed St.
Peter Patron of his country, and invited an architect to build
him a church in the Eoman style, a building of which I
need hardly remind you that the late Dr. Stuart believed
the lower part of the existing tower of Eestennet Priory to
be a part. It is interesting to observe how history repeats
itself, as though by those re-incarnations of which we have
heard a good deal of late years. Not many months ago a
ceremony with a similar object was performed in London in
honour of St. Peter, with exactly the same intention as that
of Nect'an MacDerili, and the place purposely selected for it
was a building erected on precisely the same principle, and
with the same motive as those which dictated his archi-
tectural choice.

This brings me to the time of the inbringing of the
reliques of St. Andrew, from which this city has its name,
and the national and sacred movement with which that
in -bringing is associated. First, as to the reliques.
Without discussing the varying amount of attraction
which is presented to various minds by the contempla-
tion of minute fragments of bone, it is a patent fact that
the reverence for the remains of the dead, of which
that attraction is only one manifestation, is a universal



MARQUESS OF BUTE 377

sentiment of mankind. The respectful or tender cere-
monial of every funeral is only another form of it. And
such respect varies in character with the character of the
dead. The emotion which centred round the bones of
Robert Bruce when they were found in their grave at
Dunfermline in 1818, and reinterred the next year, was
patriotism. But it is the love of our Fatherland which is
in heaven which rouses emotion at the sight of remains
which, as we know them to have been sown in corruption,
we are also sure will be raised in incorruption, but
especially of a body which had enabled him who wore it
to walk with Christ in the flesh, which had enabled him
to imitate his Master to such an extent as to manifest by
suffering martyrdom the love than which no man hath
greater, which had enabled him alone with Peter, among
the Apostles, to share with their Master the death of the
Cross.

But it is needless to remark that a superstructure of
such feeling as that with which we should gaze upon the
mortal remains of the Saint, of the Apostle, of Andrew,
must be based upon at least a reasonable belief in the
authenticity of the object, and such belief can only be
justified by a purely archaeological investigation. It is
necessary to hold clear, on the one hand, from the exces-
sive credulity which has enriched collectors with so many
autographs of Burns, not to mention those of Montrose or
Charles Edward, articles made by or belonging to Mary,
Queen of Scots, or furniture, especially writing-tables,
once used by Marie Antoinette, and, on the other, from
an irrational and unscientific scepticism which I fancy
really owes a good deal to jests made by Erasmus, of
which I venture to think that the honesty is sometimes
nearly as shady as the taste. I follow the late Dr. Skene,
so far as he goes, as to the history of the reliques of the
Apostle Andrew which were brought here and gave this
place its name, while I admit with him that some of the
evidence is only circumstantial, and I supplement his
researches with one or two additional observations.



378 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

In the time of Constantine the Great the grave of the
Apostle Andrew at Patrai, in the Peloponnesos, must have
been as well known as that of John Bunyan is to us. The
comparison is very exact, because both belonged to the
mechanic class, both were itinerant preachers of detested
dissenting sects, and both for that reason found themselves
in collision with the law. The body of Andrew was
removed by Constantine to Constantinople in the twentieth
year of his reign, and by him or Constantius buried
in the Church of the Apostles. Eoundly speaking, as I
need hardly remind you, it was thence removed by Cardinal
Peter Capuano, after the sack of Constantinople in 1204,
and reinterred in 1208 in the Cathedral of Amalfi, where
it now is. I have seen the top of the skull. It was
during the sojourn of the remains of the Apostle at
Constantinople that they underwent a mutilation which,
according to the plausible conjecture of Dr. Skene, was
the remote cause of the national position which the
Galilean Fisherman now occupies among us. When
Gregory the Great returned in 584 from discharging the
duty of Apocrisiarius at the Court of Tiberius II., he
brought with him to Rome an arm of St. Andrew, which
the Emperor had given him, and placed it in the monastery
of St. Andrew (now called, from its founder, San Gregorio),
which he erected upon the site of his ancestral home
and where most of it seems still to be. But from this it
may be conjectured were taken the reliques brought to
England by Augustine, a monk of the same monastery,
and in honour of which his royal convert, Ethelbert,
erected the Church of St. Andrew at Piochester. Hence
again were most probably derived the reliques which
Bishop Acca placed in the church which he raised in
honour of St. Andrew in his See at Hexham. In 731
lie was expelled from his See for what cause we know
not, but it can have been none to endear the Northumbrian
Government to his sympathies. He is said to have taken
refuge among the Picts. It is certain that Angus, King
of the Picts, received reliques of the Apostle, which he



, MARQUESS OF BUTE 379

placed here, and immolated this place, the antient
Muckross, the more modern Cillrighmonaich, to the
Apostle from whom it is now named. That the late
Historiographer Royal was right in this derivation of the
reliques here from the arm brought by Gregory from
Constantinople, appears to me to be greatly supported by
the fact that these reliques are stated to have consisted of
three fingers (probably finger-bones) and a fragment of
an arm. A knee-pan and a tooth, which are also men-
tioned, I am inclined to guess to have been the additions
of subsequent and less critical times. But whatever the
history of these bits of bone, and whether they were or
were not part of the body of the first-called Apostle of
Christ, they were undoubtedly believed at the time to
be genuine, and they were the immediate cause of the
creation of St. Andrews as the great national church of
Scotland.

The historic expulsion of Acca followed at no long
interval after the occupation of the throne of the Picts by
Angus, son of Fergus, and while that Prince must have
been still warm from the struggle in which he had deposed
Nectan MacDerili. Angus is distinguished for three sets of
wars in particular. The first of these is the struggle against
Nectan MacDerili, the last scene of which was enacted
at Loch Inch in 729, although the civil war did not close
till 731, and Nectan did not die till the following year.
It was a struggle which argues in Angus no love for
Xectan and his Canterbury sympathies, or any enthusiasm
for his peculiar Petrine devotion. The second group
consists of his wars against the Scots of Dalriada, which
argue no special love for Iona, the sacred capital of their
race, and its Columban monks. The third class are his
wars against Northumbria, which argue no love for the
Cantuarian Churches and the English Benedictines, but
do render certain at least one bond of sympathy with
Acca, the possessor of the reliques of the Apostle Andrew,
the Bishop whom the English had driven out of his See
of Hexham.



380 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

I think that the presentation of the reliques to him by
Acca, which gave him an advantage over Nectan MacDerili,
who is not known to have possessed any of St. Peter,
enabled him to indulge all these feelings at once by
starting a thoroughly national church of his own and pro-
claiming St. Andrew Patron of Scotland.

He selected the antient Boars' Headland for the place
which should be given to the Apostle. This may have
been partly for some topographico-historical reason, such
as meeting Acca near there, as hinted in the later and
mythological legends, but I should fancy mainly for two
reasons. The first of these is that so beautifully expressed
by Sir Walter Scott, when he puts in the mouth of one of
his characters the words, " If there is anything utterly
uneatable, let it be given to the poor," and in accordance
with which you will observe that the sites bestowed for
monasteries are in most cases either howling wildernesses
like the Grande Chartreuse, or bogs and swamps such as
the site of Fountains must have been till it was reclaimed
by labour which it was not worth the lay proprietor's
while to expend ; while the endowments of these establish-
ments, as recorded in their Chartularies, consist with almost
monotonous regularity, of the bestowal by lay Patrons of
the Patronages of parishes of which they were unable to
draw the teinds for themselves. This wild and rocky
headland, separated by a swamp from the cultivable main-
land, must have been singularly well adapted for the
purpose of pious munificence. The second reason was
that there was an appeal to national ecclesiastical history
and sentiment in the memories of Kenneth and Kegulus,
the friends of Columba : indeed, the name Cillrighmonaich,
as a variant of Ceannrighmonaich, leads me to conjecture
that there may have been actually some place of worship
dating from the time of liegulus.

Then Angus wanted some staff to look after the place,
to do something to keep the services going decently, and
to provide lodging for anybody who came (doubtless in-
cluding himself), and, as he did not want to have Dalriadic



' MARQUESS OF BUTE 381

monks from Iona, and still less English Benedictines from
Northumbria, or to have to endow any one else, he put in
a community of Culdees. I think that the first mention
of Culdees at St. Andrews is the entry in the Annals of
the Four Masters under 742, and, I believe, in Tighernac
under 747, Mors Tuathalain Abbas Cindrighmonair/h, and
that this is one of the very few places, either on account
of its royal or sacred character, or because they ruled
there alone, or for all these or some other reason or
reasons, where their superior was styled Abbat. This
peculiarity seems to be preserved down to this day by
the use of the word Abbey in connection with some places
in this city, although I have not found the title itself used
later than 1178-88, when the constitution of the Culdees
was being shaken by the action of the Bishop and his new
so-called Augustinian Chapter. Perhaps the then holder
was the last who bore it.

I feel a good deal of shrinking from that old subject of
fiction, the Culdees, but I suppose something must be
said, if not for very shame's sake, at least for history's
sake. As in many other points concerning Celtic ecclesi-
astical history on which I have not been able myself to
make original research, I feel great confidence in accept-
ing on this subject the opinion of my late dear and
venerated friend, Bishop Grant of Aberdeen, who was
able to deal with such things with singular learning and
acumen. There are either historical notices or more or
less trustworthy allusions to 25 establishments of persons
called Culdees. Of these establishments, 13 were in Scot-