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Columba, In writing the early history of Ireland, one of the greatest difficulties which the historian great or small has to encounter is to be found in that curious unreality, that tantalizing sense of illusiveness and indefiniteness which seems to envelope every figure whose name crops up on his pages.
Columbus sailed from G noa; but Columba sailed from Noah, and when the gods saw her with the olive-branch, they said "blessed be the dove, for whosoever shall receive her by faith into his heart, the same shall be free from unrest and from war forevermore." Faith can remove mountains, and faith is all there is to "Christian Science," so far as we have been able to ascertain.
"Why eagle? The eagle is a strenuous old fowl," commented Ethel Brown. "The name doesn't seem appropriate." "It's because of the spurs they suggest an eagle's talons." "That's too far-fetched to suit me," confessed Ethel Brown. "It is called 'columbine' because the spurs look a little like doves around a drinking fountain, and the Latin word for dove is 'columba," said Dorothy.
In Polynesia the central pillar of a temple was placed on the body of a human victim. In Scotland there is the legend that St. Columba buried the body of St. Oran under his monastery to make the building secure. Any country will supply stories of a similar kind. Finally, we have the amusing story of the manner in which Sir Richard Burton narrowly escaped deification.
Count Daniel O'Donnell, brigadier-general in the Irish Brigade of Louis XIV., never went into battle without carrying with him an amulet in the shape of the jewelled casket "Cathach of Columbcille," containing a Latin psalter said to have been written by St Columba.
The Anglians taught by Paulinus very soon relapsed into paganism, and the second conversion of the North was due to the missionaries of the school of St. Columba. The power of Rome was established at the Council of Whitby; but in the days when Aidan preached at Lindisfarne the Northumbrians were still in obedience to an Irish rule, and were instructed and edified by the acts and lives of St.
One day as he walked in meditation to the furthest point of a tranquil beach, for which rocks jutting out into the sea formed a rugged dam, he saw a trough of stone which floated like a boat upon the waters. It was in a vessel similar to this that St. Guirec, the great St. Columba, and so many holy men from Scotland and from Ireland had gone forth to evangelize Armorica. More recently still, St.
Columba in Ireland founded a house with the intention of multiplying books, so that in the sixth century, in both the extreme North and in the South, the religious orders had commenced the great work of preserving for future ages the literature of the past and of their own times.
Poseidon and Aphrodite, Odin and Freya, vanish into the indefinite and undiscoverable at the approach of historical criticism. But separately altogether from their miracles, Cuthbert and Ninian, Columba and Kentigern, had actual existences. We know when they lived and when they died.
Within a short distance of the Bay of Cells there is a cave very remarkable in its appearance, and still more so from the purposes to which it has been appropriated. Saint Columba, on one of his many voyages among the Hebrides, was benighted on this rocky coast, and the mariners were alarmed for their own safety. The Saint assured them that neither he nor his crew would ever be drowned.