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He still has his daughter Anisya in the country.... And he wants to talk about her too.... Yes, he has plenty to talk about now. His listener ought to sigh and exclaim and lament.... It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are silly creatures, they blubber at the first word. "Let's go out and have a look at the mare," Iona thinks.
Campbell, in his poem of Reullura, alludes to the married monks of Iona: " -The pure Culdees Were Albyn's earliest priests of God, Ere yet an island of her seas By foot of Saxon monk was trod, Long ere her churchmen by bigotry Were barred from holy wedlock's tie. 'Twas then that Aodh, famed afar, In Iona preached the word with power. And Reullura, beauty's star, Was the partner of his bower."
Cummian, about the middle of the seventh century, wrote his famous epistle to Segenius, Abbot of Iona, of the ability and learning of which all modern writers from Archbishop Usher to Thomas Moore, speak in terms of the highest praise. It is one of the few remaining documents of that controversy. A less vital question of discipline arose about the tonsure.
He spared only "the holy Island," as Iona was now called, even by the Northmen, and there, in after years, his own bones were buried.
"And if you are not wishing to go up the Sound of Iona in the daylight, Sir Keith," Hamish said, still clinging to the point, "we could bear a little to the south, and go round the outside of Iona."
A vehement controversy as to the proper form of the tonsure, another as to the correct day for Easter, raged for more than a century with much heat on either side; those churches which owed their allegiance to Iona clinging to the Irish methods, those who adhered to Rome vindicating its supreme and paramount authority.
Then Iona, 'the sacred place which as long as I can remember, I had thought on with veneration. The two friends, as they landed on the island, 'cordially embraced, as they had done in the White Horse at Edinburgh, and the mark of feeling is a note that we are yet with them in the eighteenth century.
I shouted out, and then fell on my knees on the rock and reached up my hands and prayed to them. They were near enough to hear I could even see the colour of their hair; and there was no doubt but they observed me, for they cried out in the Gaelic tongue, and laughed. But the boat never turned aside, and flew on, right before my eyes, for Iona.
While the liberated exiles rejoiced on the plain of Meath, the tent of the Abbot of Iona was pitched on the rath of Tara a fact which would seem to indicate that already, in little more than a century since the interdict had fallen on it, the edifices which made so fine a show in the days of Patrick were ruined and uninhabitable.
St Columba himself was of the royal line in Ulster, was learned, as learning was then reckoned, and, if he had previously been turbulent, he now desired to spread the Gospel. With twelve companions he settled in Iona, established his cloister of cells, and journeyed to Inverness, the capital of Pictland.
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