ve been among the Romanised British Christians
little zeal and a good deal of controversy and dissent, and we hear a
great deal more of the influence of the Pelagian heresy among them than
of the influence of Christianity itself.

The scantiness of our acquaintance with Roman Christianity in Britain is
the more to be regretted, because it would have been very interesting to
compare its manifestations with those of the Church which found refuge
in the West during the dark days of Rome--the days when the temporal
empire was crushed, and the spiritual empire had not arisen. As we might
expect from the ecclesiastical conditions already noticed, the persons
who first exercise ecclesiastical authority in the two islands did not
derive their strength from any foreign hierarchy, and had no connection
with Rome. Any reference, indeed, to the influence of a Roman pontiff,
either actual or prospective, in the life of any of our early saints,
will prepare the critic for finding that the life has been written
centuries after the era of the saint, or has been tampered with. In
Adamnan's Life of Columba, Rome is mentioned once or twice as a very
great city, but there is no allusion throughout that remarkable
biography to any spiritual central authority exercised by the bishop
there over the presbyters in Scotland and Ireland. This is, of course,
nothing more than the statement of what the reader of a book has not
found in it. Any other reader may find allusions to the supremacy of the
popedom over these early Christian communities, if he can. But I think
he is likely to find none; and any one who desires to study the real
history of the rise and progress of the spiritual dominion of Rome
would, with more profit, take up the books and records referring to
events three or four hundred years after the age of Columba.

Self-sustained as they were, these isolated communities had a very
strong vitality. The picture exhibited in the hagiographies is truly the
reign of the saints. Their power was of an immediate, abrupt, and purely
despotic kind, which would have been neutralised or weakened by anything
like a central control. Prompt and blind obedience to the commands of
the saint-superior was the rule of Hy or Iona, and of all the other
religious communities of the West. Perhaps there were even here feuds,
disputes, and mutinies of which no record has been preserved. The
hagiographer can only commemorate those which were suppressed by some