Speculation has been rife as to the real motive that drove this intensely patriotic Irishman over the wave. Many would fain believe, in view of its epoch-making significance, that this momentous step was purely voluntary “for the love of Christ,” as the “Old Irish Life” puts it. Adamnan, while connecting it with the battle, also puts this construction upon it. “In the second year after the battle of Culdreimhne,” he says, “and in the 42nd year of his age, St. Columba resolving to emigrate for Christ sailed from Scotia (that is Ireland) to Britain.” Many other saints had wandered elsewhere on similar missions. But there is a persistent tradition that this unique missionary was banished by the Synod of the Saints in Ireland for the bloodshed he had caused; and that this sentence was confirmed by St. Molaise, whom the unhappy Columba consulted, and who advised him to seek as many souls in conversion among the heathen as there fell of men in battle. Some, on the other hand, construe his action as a voluntary penance, self-inflicted. Others find mainly a political motive in his removal to Dalriada, where he might be of immense service to his kinsmen in helping to avert the ever increasing and harassing incursions of the Picts. Certainly he became a bulwark to them. Imbued with a high missionary zeal, there is no doubt that ultimately he went forth to the new spiritual campaign voluntarily, but, as in the case of most fateful careers, it is evident that circumstances wound him up to the task, the most conspicuous and compelling of which was Cooldrevna. That the parting from Erin was bitter, a very tearing of the heart, is matter of history. The verses, the records attributed to himself on this occasion, reveal the depths of his feelings. “How rapid the speed of my coracle and its stern turned toward Derry. I grieve at the errand over the proud seas, travelling to Alba of the Ravens. There is a grey eye that looks back upon Erin, it shall not see during life the men of Erin nor their wives. My vision over the brine I stretch from the ample oaken planks; large is the tear from my soft grey eye when I look back upon Erin. Upon Erin is my attention fixed, upon Loch Leven, upon Linè, upon the land the Ultonians own; upon smooth Munster, upon Meath.” As Dr. Douglas Hyde has sympathetically observed, “Columcille is the first example in the saddened page of Irish history of the exiled Gael grieving for his native land and refusing to be comforted, and as such he has become the very type and embodiment of Irish fate and Irish character.”