this means the scholar is so scared and frighted that he cannot now do as he would and could have done; yea, by this means he hateth both his book and his master, and would be glad to be rid of both, not caring how far his master be from him, or how long he be out of the way. But Christ in the gospel is a most mild and gentle teacher, who by sweet promises and good rewards invites his scholars to their learning, and he guides them and helps them to do what they cannot do. He is more like a loving father than a cruel taskmaster unto them; and by his kind and gentle usage the scholar is soon made in love with his learning, that he groweth and increaseth every day out of love to his book and his master both, being glad when his master is nearest to him to direct him in his studies. This is Christ's kindness to us, in the administration and dispensation of the gospel, which far exceeds the old economy of the law of Moses. Gal. iv. 1-4; Eph. v. 1; Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. v. 19, 20.

III. SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS IS CONTRARY TO CHRIST. "Not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law."-Philip. iii. 9. IN the Greek, Thy Ex vópov, that which is out of the law, is opposed to that righteousness which is in Christ for us. And μὴ ἔχων, not having, may be rendered not holding, as it is used, Matt. xxi. 46. A Christian must not hold a righteousness for his justification which floweth forth out of a legal principle from himself, and is not derived from Christ by faith in his name alone. No righteousness is available with God, but that which is through the faith of Christ, "even the righteousness of God which is by faith." Rom. iii. 21, 22. There is an irreconcilable antipathy between the righteousness of Christ and the righteousness of man, which man hath in his own cistern, which is of his own hammering and hewing out, bread of his own baking, and drink of his own brewing. Christ alone is the fountain and well-spring of righteousness, from whence we must draw all our water of life. Our purest holiness is not pure enough for the pure eyes of the most pure God. Why should we make that a bottom for our assurance, wherein we can find no rest for the soles of our feet to rest upon, no more than Noah's dove found out of Noah's ark? Why should we gaze upon our good works, seeing they are full of rottenness, and the best of them are stark stinking naught, if Christ do not perfume them with his sweet frankincense? Yea, by our corruptions we pollute the very graces that Christ infuseth into us at our conversion. Let us learn carefully to steer the course of our souls, that when we turn from our own wickedness, we turn by no means to our own righteousness, but to the only righteousness of God in Christ. A man may as soon go to hell with a bundle of self-righteousness in his bosom as with a burden of sin or self-rottenness upon his back. Some, thinking to escape the whirlpool of their sins and lusts, run into the gulf of self-created, selfperformed, and self-conceited holiness, which is every way as damnable; they avoid the rocks on the left hand, and cast themselves on the quicksands on the right hand Incidit in Scyllam qui vull vitare Charybdim. But Paul is as shy of his former righteousness as of his former wickedness. There is more hopes of that man that daily breaks the

law of God, than of that man who thinks he can and doth perfectly keep the law of God. The former may more easily be convinced of his sinfulness and brought to Christ for salvation; whereas the latter trusts to his own goodness and sees no great need of Christ's merit or of God's mercy, and so goes blindfold to hell, whilst he thinks he is climbing up to heaven upon the ladder of his own false, imaginary self-sufficiency. Rev. iii. 17, 18; Luke xviii. 9.

IV. THE DEGREES OF FAITH.

"I believe; help thou mine unbelief."-Mark ix. 24.

HERE is belief and unbelief, two contrary inmates in one house. This man is a true believer in the midst of his unbelief; others are unbelievers in the midst of their belief, as Simon Magus, and all of his religion. Acts viii. 13. One man thinks he doth not truly believe, and yet believeth truly, notwithstanding all his doubtings. Another man thinks he doth truly believe, and yet doth not believe truly, notwithstanding all his confidence. That faith for my money which complains most of the want of faith; which can weep with one eye and laugh with the other. Better is a true faith amongst many doubtings, than a false faith in carnal security and proud presumption. Jeremiah vii. 4, 8; Isaiah xlviii. 2. Christ's faith and a Christian's faith shines most in the dark. Isaiah 1. 10; Psalm xxii. 1. O pure, good, and brave Faith, that comes all bloody out of battle with despair, and yet alive! I find Sarah enlisted amongst perfect believers (Hebrews xi. 11), and yet she believed not perfectly, laughing at the very things which God told her, counting it a ridiculous absurdity that she should have a child, being passed all possibility of conception in the common course of nature, though the Lord promised it to her. Genesis xviii. 11, 12. 1. Fides in partu. Sometimes Faith travails in birth, as at the beginnings of conversion. Acts ii. 37; viii. 37; ix. 6. 2. Fides in prælio. Sometimes Faith fights in battle, being assaulted with doubts and temptations, as here in this text (compare 1 Tim. vi. 12; 2 Corinthians i. 8, 9). 3. Fides in deliquio. Sometimes Faith is in a swoon, when it seems to be dead, but sleepeth only. Psalm lxxvii. 8,9, 10; Isaiah xlix 14. 4. Fides in fortitudine. Sometimes Faith is in full power, conquering all oppositions. 1 John v. 4, 5; 2 Timothy iv. 7, 5. 5. Fides in triumpho. Sometimes Faith is in triumph, and boasteth gloriously in the Lord, against all enemics whatsoever. Psalm xlvi. 1, 2, 3; Romans viii. 33, 34, 39. 6. Fides in abortu. Sometimes Faith miscarries in the womb, and this proves but a bastard faith, a spurious, illegitimate brood, that never comes to any perfection. This hath nothing of true faith besides the name and some outward shape or form, being destitute of holy sense, heat, spirit, life, power, and motion. James ii. 16. Of this there are also many degrees, according as hypocrites do more or less counterfeit faith. For some excel others in the art of hypocrisy, and there are hypocrites of several sorts and several sizes.

The Primitive Church of the Highlands.

10 trace the footprints of religion in a world like ours, a world whose records are dismal with recitals of wrong-doing and of bloodshed, is to look on the bright side of history. It is not unprofitable to withdraw the mind from these times of keen competition and of hastening to be rich, by transporting our thoughts to ages when British wealth lay undeveloped, and when wood and moor occupied the sites of many towns, which, in their grim majesty, are now the recognised offspring of modern industry. We shall take the reader to days when Christianity had not contracted the corruptions which provoked the Reformation; when the discipline of institutions set apart for learning and piety had not degenerated into the mock austerities of a later monachism; when, in fine, the missionaries of Iona, as preachers of Christ, and as agents of civilization, were the glory of the church, and were earning for themselves a fame as lasting as time, in "that illustrious isle, which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion."

A worthy interest in the resting-places of religion very widely differs from the relic-worship of popery. Cowards, it is true, are not transformed by walking over ground where heroes have fought; nor are the worldly-minded likely to grow religious by indulging sentimental emotions, and gratifying an archæological curiosity among the ashes of the saints. Nevertheless, such as prize the faith may sometimes gather comfort, instruction and encouragement from reviewing the labours. of those who have ended the toilsome day.

Iona, as only our youngest readers need be told, is one of the Hebrides or western islands of Scotland, situated thirty-six miles from the main land in 56° 59′ north latitude. The area of the islet is two thousand acres, the length being about three miles, and the breadth little more than one mile. To this speck in the Atlantic hundreds of tourists are attracted annually; for from its shores the Highlands of Scotland first received the light of the gospel.

The celebrated evangelist whom we know by his Latinized name of Columba-the star of the sixth century-was born in the year 521, and reckoned among his ancestors several kings of Ireland. In those days the Emerald Isle was the chief asylum of Christianity, its population being the most faithful of any among European nations. Being thus blessed in the country of his birth, the future missionary received such a pious and learned training as well qualified him for his future onerous undertakings, while a docile and becoming bearing in youth caused him to be called a little saint by the grave presbyters who conducted his education. On returning to Ireland after a Continental tour, he might have been excused as a youth had his brilliant prospects occasioned pride and elation. He could have commanded an enviable

I. Iona. By the Duke of Argyll. London: 1870.

II. Saint Columba, Apostle of Caledonia. By the Count De Montalembert. Edinburgh and London: 1868.

station in his own beloved Erin, or have shone in ease and idleness at the Court of France; but he conquered his passionate love of country, relinquished alluring worldly prospects, and even surrendered his estate for love of the gospel.

Romanists class Columba among their monks and apostles with as little reason as can be found to justify their beginning their catalogue of popes with the name of Peter. It would have been a good service to the cause of Protestantism, had the Duke of Argyll cleared the memory of this primitive pastor from the lies and legends with which Rome has burdened it; for even Montalembert, with his genial humour and unmistakable powers of graphic delineation, has contributed almost more than his share towards transforming the grand old Christian hero of the Hebrides into a mere saint of the Romish calendar.

Our present purpose is to invite attention to the life of a man, whom all admit to have been a great evangelist; who laboured before Rome, put forth her iniquitous pretensions, and defiled itself with virginworship. Columba recognised no Pope of Rome, and invoked no saints; yet Romanists, who never lack boldness when the honour of their hierarchy is at stake, claim him as a father, and Iona as one of their sacred places. By invention and exaggeration, monkish writers have marred the missionary's beautiful life; besides so interweaving the facts of his life with absurdities, that only with care and difficulty can the truth be recovered from an entangled web of falsehood. The pastor or abbot-either term will suit him-lived in an age not only far remote from ours, but when many waves of trouble rolled over the face of society. It is hard for modern students to realise his position, and the more so because legend-makers and miracle-mongers have made free with his history and times. His life supplied materials well suited to the requirements of superstitious biographers. As a Christian hero in the broadest sense, he gave his strength to the best of causes, and spent his life in combating the dominion of sin in the uninviting empire of the Picts and Scots. It should also be remembered, that the chroniclers of the dark ages wrote for an unlettered audience upon whom the recital of legends and miracles was supposed to exercise an influence favourable to the church. Indeed, "inventing" seems to be a common-place infirmity of man; for on whom has he practised his petty art more than on Christ and his apostles? In the case of Columba, after brushing aside the cobwebs of tradition with which superstition has obscured his memory, we behold a man whose enthusiasm in propagating the faith surpassed the strongest yearnings of nature, and whose chosen constituents were the most needy, because the least civilized tribes of the British Isles.

Notwithstanding the changes usually effected on the surface of countries by the action of time, there are places where the lapse of thirteen hundred years has only slightly altered the aspect of nature. Iona is a striking example of this durability. The island is supposed never to have grown any trees, and this deficiency continues to impart to its shores that sombre appearance which sufficed not to repel the Columban band in the sixth century. But what may be said of the island's "everlasting hills" will not be true of its architectural remains. The present ruins are no link between the times of Columba, his

simple gospel itinerants, and our own days; and what interest attaches to these is only such as belongs to ordinary relics of the Roman ascendancy. No vestige of any building in which the first missionaries worshipped or slept is now found; for church and college were both of wood.

Of the circumstances that conduced to Columba's undertaking a mission to the Picts, and to his selecting Iona for a station, we are almost entirely ignorant. There is a tradition that his leaving Ireland was an involuntary flight on account of civil squabbles; but it is far more likely that the life-exile of the missionary and his disciples resulted from the love of Christ and a desire to spread his kingdom. The manner of their selecting Iona is affectionately-almost poetically -explained. While seeking a settlement with the fragile barque wherein he left the shores of Erin, he is said to have landed both at Islay and Oransa, and to have re-embarked because from their hills Ireland could be descried. On going ashore at Iona, its most lofty eminences were put to the same test, and because no faint trace of the beloved country stretched across the horizon, the isle became their adopted home, while its most celebrated eminence received the lasting name of The Cairn of Farewell to Ireland.

Till the middle of the sixth century, Iona was the last refuge of Druidism in the North; and therefore to Columba belongs the credit of having supplanted a deep-rooted superstition by the gospel. The accounts which have descended of this man and his fellow-workers, who henceforth sowed broadcast among the barbarians the unsearchable riches of Christ, are welcome glimpses into the simple customs of those days. They solicited no tithes from neighbouring kings. The same hands which administered medicine to the sick and copied the Scriptures for distribution, cultivated the island slopes for personal wants. The missionaries sowed, sheared, and milked for their own living, while they toiled hard in proclaiming the gospel. The art of draining being then imperfectly understood, they were obliged to select for cropping such tracts as were drained by nature, and thus only cultivated the Western side of the island.

Columba, whom Romanism has canonized that she may appropriate the honour attached to his spotless life and illustrious labours, cannot reasonably be claimed by the Romish church at all. Saint though he was, a more descriptive name than "saint" would be Primitive Apostle of the Highlands. When, in the forty-second year of his age, he settled at Iona, the rule of Rome had not risen in ascendancy, nor did the Bishop of Rome exercise authority over the British church. Columba had no sympathy for the Western order of ecclesiastical polity, for after returning from his European wanderings in his younger days, he is supposed to have been a Reformer in principle. If this was so, and if Ireland became imbued with the leaven of false doctrine earlier than the other parts of our empire, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Columba and his associates may have resigned home and country to preserve their purity of faith.

Here, then, Columba founded his monastery, if monastery it may be called; for the monachism of Iona, as exemplified by the Culdees thirteen hundred years ago, essentially differed from the discipline of