Before the days of the Reformation, Scotland received three great impulses in succession from the Christian countries of the south. The persecutions which at the close of the second century, during the course of the third, and at the beginning of the fourth, fell on the disciples of the Gospel who dwelt in the southern part of Great Britain, drove a great number of them to take refuge in the country of the Scots. These pious men built for themselves humble and solitary hermitages, in green meadows or on steep mountains, and in narrow valleys of the glens; and there, devoting themselves to the service of God, they shed a soft gleam of light in the midst of the fogs of every kind which encompassed them, teaching the ignorant and strengthening the weak. They were called in the Gaelic tongue _gille De_, servants of God, in Latin _cultores Dei_; and in these phrases we find the origin of the name by which they are still known--_Culdees_. Such was the respect which they inspired that, after their death, their cells were often transformed into churches.[1] From them came the first impulse. [Sidenote: THE CULDEES.] Several centuries passed away; the feudal system was established in Scotland. The mountainous nature of the country, which made of every domain a sort of fortress, the fewness of the large towns, the absence of any influential body of citizens, the institution of clans, the limited number of the nobles,--all these circumstances combined to make the power of the feudal lords greater than in any other European country; and this power at a later period protected the Reformation from the despotism of the kings. But the influence of the Culdees, though really perceptible in the Middle Ages, was very feeble. It may be said of the things of grace in Scotland as of the works of Creation, that the sun did not come to scatter the mists which brooded over a nature melancholy and monotonous, and that the influence of the winds which, rushing forth from the neighboring seas, roared and raged over the barren heaths or over the fertile plains of Caledonia, was not softened by the breath divine which comes from heaven. But in the days of the revival a sweet and subtile sound was heard, and the surface of the lochs seemed to become animated. Wickliffe, having given to England the Word of God, some of his followers, and particularly John Resby, came into Scotland. ‘The pope is nothing,’ said Resby in 1407,[2] and he taught at the same time that Christ is everything. He was burnt at Perth.... Thus it was from the disciples of Wickliffe, the _Lollards_, that the second impulse came.