terrible manifestation of Divine power, for the person whose life he
commemorates is only conventionally and nominally to be spoken of as a
mortal; he is in reality superhuman, wielding, whenever he pleases, the
thunderbolts of the Deity, annihilating dissent and disobedience to
himself, as if it were blasphemy in the Deity's own presence, and
crushing by an immediate miracle any effort to oppose his will, were it
even about the proper hour of setting off on a journey, or the dinner to
be ordered for the day.

The rank which those primitive clergy of Ireland and the Highlands
occupy is almost invariably that of the saint, a rank as far separated
from that which can be conferred by any human hierarchy as heaven is
from earth. They were, as we have seen, independent of Rome from the
beginning, and this great host of saints had lived and left their
biographies to the world long before the system of judicial
canonisation. How a boundary is professed to be drawn between the
genuine and the false among these saints of the North, cannot be easily
understood. No one seems to object to any of them as spurious. Many of
them are so very obscure that only faint and fragmentary traces of them
can be found, yet it seems never to be questioned that they occupied the
transcendent spiritual rank usually attributed to them. Of others
nothing is known but the bare name, yet it is never doubted that the
owner was entitled to his attribute of saint.

The brethren at Iona seem sometimes to have lived well, for we hear of
the killing of heifers and oxen. A pragmatical fellow declines to
participate in the meal permitted on the occasion of a relaxation of
discipline--the saint tells him that since he refuses good meat at a
time when he is permitted to have it, it is to be his doom to be one of
a band of robbers who will be glad to appease their hunger on putrid
horse-flesh. The ruling spirit, however, of this first Christian
mission, as we find it recorded, is undoubtedly asceticism. The
mortification of the flesh is the temporal source of spiritual power.
Some incidents occur which put this spirit in a shape bordering on the
ludicrous. A saint is at a loss to know how his power is waning. There
is some mysterious countervailing influence acting against him, which
manifests itself in the continued success of an irreverent king or
chief, whom he thought he had taken the proper spiritual methods to
humble. He at last discovers the mystery; the