“The Scottish church, when it first meets the eye of civilization, is not Romish, nor even prelatical. When the monk Augustine, with his forty missionaries, in the time of the Saxon Heptarchy, came over to Britain under the auspices of Gregory, the bishop of Rome, to convert the barbarian Saxons, he found the northern part of the island already well-nigh filled with Christians and Christian institutions. These Christians were the Culdees, whose chief seat was the little island of Hi or Iona, on the western coast of Scotland. An Irish presbyter, Columba, feeling himself stirred with missionary zeal, and doubtless knowing the wretched condition of the savage Scots and Picts, in the year 565, took with him twelve other missionaries, and passed over to Scotland. They fixed their settlement on the little island just named, and from that point became the missionaries of all Scotland, and even penetrated into England.[870] “The people in the south of England converted by Augustine and his assistants, and those in the north who had been won by Culdee labor, soon met, as Christian conquest advanced from both sides; and when they came together, it was soon seen that Roman and Culdee Christianity very decidedly differed in a great many respects. The Culdees, for the most part, had a simple and primitive form of Christianity, while Rome presented a vast accumulation of superstitions, and was arrayed in her well-known pomp.[871] “The Culdee went to Iona that in quiet, with meditation, study, and prayer, he might fit himself for going out into the world as a missionary. Indeed, Iona was a great mission institute, where preachers were trained who evangelized the rude tribes of Scotland in a very short time. To have done such a work as this in less than half a century implies apostolic activity, purity, and success.[872] “After the success of Agustine and his monks in England, the Culdees had shut themselves up within the limits of Scotland, and had resisted for centuries all the efforts of Rome to win them over. At last, however, they were overthrown by their own rulers.”[873] There is strong incidental evidence that Columba, the leading minister of his time among the Culdees, was an observer of the ancient Sabbath of the Bible. On this point I quote two standard authors of the Roman Catholics. They certainly have no motive to put such words as I here quote, fraudulently into the mouth of Columba, for they claim him as a saint, and they are no friends of the Bible Sabbath. Nor can we see how Columba could have used these words with satisfaction, as he evidently did, when dying, had he all his life long been a violator of the ancient rest-day of the Lord. Here are the words of Dr. Alvan Butler:—