Altogether a strange character to contemplate was this father and founder of monasteries, especially when viewed from our scientific age—the intellectual standpoint of his time was so wholly different from ours. He continually moved in a halo of miracles, prophecies, and angels, as real to him as physical laws and nerves and germs are to us. So credulous was he that he never seemed even to question the magical impostures of his opponents, the Druids. He is not represented as trying to expose their marvels, but rather as endeavouring to outrival them by greater miracles of his own. The one set he believed to be from the evil one, the other of God. For him the seen always merged in the unseen; the natural is construed in terms of the supernatural. Science, of course, had not then formulated laws or facts as we know them, and St. Columba was a child of his age, imbued with the same credulity as the contemporary heathen around him, and very much the same superstitions. He believed he could bless men or blight them by his intercessions, and sometimes in the exercise of this power he did not even hesitate to curse irreconcilables and consign them to future destruction. On one occasion, exasperated with a thief of noble birth who had twice plundered the house of a man of humble condition, and mocked and laughed at the rebukes of the saint himself, the irate Columba—and this is a picture for an artist—followed him to the water’s edge, and wading up to the knees in the clear green sea-water, raised both his hands to heaven and solemnly invoked a curse on the man. Returning to the dry ground he sat down, and forthwith told his companions what the fate of the scamp would be. No maudlin saint was the imperious Columcille. Gentle, affectionate, and kind, yet a man to impress the wild Pictish tribes with awe and reverence. Born at Gartan, Donegal, in the north of Ireland in 521, and brought up from youth in Christian principles, he was trained under the best masters, and apparently caught up in the wave of evangelisation that swept over Ireland from St. Patrick’s time. At any rate, when twenty-five years of age he founded the Church of Derry, and seven years later the Monastery of Durrow. Other establishments soon followed, springing up here and there under his initiative and fostering care, until when full forty years old an event occurred which in a manner changed the whole aspect of his career, and gave a new direction to his energies. This was the battle of Cooldrevna, of far-reaching import.