About a hundred years after the blessed Saint Patrick converted Ireland, in which time many had fallen from grace, Saint Columba appeared on the scene, made a second conversion of that region and founded the old Scotch Kirk (very indirectly). When Saint Columba appealed to the canny Scots and the thrifty northern Irishmen for a situation for his monastery, they hospitably turned over to his use the rocky Island of Iona. Though agriculturally it was not much, through long ages it had borne the fruits of the spirit until even its stones did duty as amulets. In its bosom slept the Scottish kings, King Macbeth being the last of the royal line to lie there. Iona was hallowed ground to the Druid, and is, to this day, a haven of superstition. There Saint Columba, the scribe, located his lonely monastery wherein books were made, wondrous in their day and generation, and there or at some Columbian monastery in the neighborhood, perhaps at Kells, the Book of Kells was executed. One of its big pages, which is covered by a great cross wherein eight circles are incorporated in a network of infinitely involved interlacements, especially illustrates one phase of early art—its reverent patience. Study that cross as you may you will find no false line, no irregular interlacement, for all this was done in the olden time when the ways of holy men were made so clear unto them. That none might disturb the holy calm of the silent scribes as they multiplied the precious “Word” Saint Jerome had taken down from the direct dictation of the angels, a code of signs was in use in the scriptoriums of the monasteries. The sign of the cross indicated a missal, the sign of the crown, King David’s psalms, while a contemptuous scratching of the ear, in the manner of a dog, was an order for a mere pagan volume; for then “the world was very wicked,” as the good monks droned; or at least very rude, cruel, lazy and barbarous, as history affirms, and gentle spirits were only too prone to recoil from it. The early Christians in general were filled with contempt for this life and proud certainty of reward in the next: those whose practice was no higher than their theory withdrew from the world to secure to themselves particularly high seats in heaven. The composite story of their lives emphasizes the barrenness of the scoffer, the futility of the contemptuous. But the story of the scribe, though he may have seen through the glass just as darkly as the anchorite did, is the living story of Christian brotherhood.