In the eyes of those to whom the past furnishes a perspective more fascinating even than the promise of the future, the little isle adjacent, which is itself a finely marked basaltic cone, rising over a thousand feet high and well called “Holy Island,” is even more worthy of the visits of the reflecting scholar. It holds an attraction even greater, in human interest, at least, than the wonders of geology, or the numerous witnesses to antiquity in the form of upreared stones. Here St. Molios, a disciple of St. Columba, founded a church. In the Saint’s Cave, on the shore, may still be seen the rocky shelf on which he made his bed. Like the outraying sparkles of light from a gem, the lines of influence from this saint’s memory have flashed down the ages. To-day from sections of the Christian Church, “high” or “low,” and from Christian “bodies” with sectarian names, as many as the letters of the alphabet, come visiting pilgrims or happy tourists to pay their debt of admiration, or to refresh for a moment their traditional faith. In that wonderful sixth Christian century--as remarkable in Asian and Buddhist, as in European and Christian history--Ireland (not then known by that name, but the old “Land of the Scots”) was a shining centre of gospel light and truth. Moreover, it was a hive of missionary activities, sending off swarms of “apostles.” Happily, this word means missionaries and nothing else, connoting spiritual activities and not questions of authority, over which paid ecclesiastics will ever and in all lands wrangle lustily. In modern days, the whole island is peaceful. So far has the old Gaelic speech passed into “innocuous desuetude,” that at the opening of this century only nine persons were left who could use but this one speech, though over a thousand natives could speak both English and Gaelic. Instead of the tranquil calm of to-day, however, few islands have been oftener stained with the blood of warriors and quarrelling clansmen. We who imagine that only the dark-skinned nations were savages must remember how recently both Englishmen and Scotsmen emerged from barbarism. It was but in the yesterday of historic time that Christians burned one another alive, in the same spirit that worshippers of Moloch cast their children into the red-hot stomach of their brazen idol, or Hindu mothers fed their babies to the crocodiles. How numerous were the Scottish assassins and victors who carried the heads of their enemies as trophies on the top of pikes, like the Indians and Pilgrims of colonial days! Yet no literature excels that of the Scots, in the perfect frankness with which the sons of the soil confess their recent emergence from barbarism into the admired civilization of to-day.