lities
which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening his political
position, and plotting for a fragment of the disintegrating empire. An
admiral of the Roman fleet had at one time established his power in
Britain, where he set up as Caesar, and sought to create a new imperial
centre. Thus the southern part of Britain was a province of the true
Roman empire awaiting the coming of the wild hordes who were gathering
for the general overthrow, and was not the place where either the
Christian Church or Italian civilisation could find permanent refuge.
The destined destroyer was indeed close at hand. Though the Romans had
their walls, their roads, their forts, and even a few villas in
Scotland, yet one going northward at that time through the territories
of the Gadeni and the Otadeni, would observe the Romanised character of
the country gradually decreasing, until he found himself among those
rough independent northern tribes, who, under the name of Picts and
Scots, drove the Romanised Britons into the sea, and did for the insular
portion of the empire what the hordes who were called Goths, Franks, and
Alemanni, were doing in the Roman provinces of the Continent.

Behind the scene of this destructive contest, Christianity, having been
planted, flourished in peaceful poverty. It grew here and there over
Ireland, and in a small portion of the remote part of Scotland; and the
distance from the scene of warfare necessary for its safety is shown by
the fate of St Ninian's little church in the Mull of Galloway. It was
too near the field of strife to live. The isolation in which the western
Christians thus arose, was productive of ecclesiastical conditions very
remarkable in themselves, but perfectly natural as the effects of their
peculiar causes. The admirable organisation for carrying out the civil
government of the Roman empire, was a ready-made hierarchy for carrying
out the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. It was far from
the object of those who seized on the power of the Caesars to abolish
that power. On the contrary, they desired to work it on their own
account, and thus the machinery of the empire lived, exercising more or
less vitality and power, down to the first French Revolution.

No part of its civil organisation, however, retained the comprehensive
vitality which the learning and subtlety of the priesthood enabled them
to preserve, or rather restore, to its spiritual branch. Hence, whereve