A pity it is that history has not photographed the dramatic scene when the great monk, forty-two years old, tall and powerful, lands from his curach the “Liath Bhalaidh,” with twelve followers on the island of Hy, now the famous Iona. It was in 563 that he took possession of this future home, of which he had received a grant from the King of Dalriada, which was afterwards confirmed by King Brude. Modern Scotland had not yet emerged, being in early fragments. And it is important to note, for it has been very confusing to historians, that in Columba’s day Ireland was Scotia, from whence in earlier days the Scots had come, who then occupied Dalriada, or, as it is known to-day, Argyllshire. North and east were the Picts, possessing the body of Alba, as modern Scotland was then called; and in Strathclyde the Britons. Not till centuries after was the name of Scotia or Scotland finally transferred from Erin to Alba. The Dalriadic Scots, though not destitute of a primitive civilisation, were rude and barbarous. Slavery and polygamy were common, blood feuds incessant. Women fought side by side with the men in battle, until first Columba and afterwards Adamnan obtained exemption for them. The heathen Picts were even more degraded, under the tyranny of a Druid regime, full of sorcery and superstition. No ray of Christianity seemed as yet to have penetrated their darkness. Such were the wild and waste lands into which the devoted Columba threw himself as a deliverer. For two years he remained in Hy, organising his base, and, it is thought, learning the Pictish language, before setting out on his visit to “the powerful king of the Pictish nation.” His missionary labours for the next thirty-two years, in collaboration with the devoted band of men who imbibed his spirit and adopted his methods, have caught the eye of the world. But there is another aspect of his enterprise, far-reaching and magnificent, which has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by our one-sided veneration for his religious genius. And that is the significance of his literary work. It is not so generally known that the Apostle of Scotland was a patron of letters, intensely interested in literature, an ardent writer and disseminator of knowledge—one in fact who has left his literary mark on the ages, and who was the first to help to raise Scotland to the proud eminence in education which she occupies to-day. As in the great awakening in Europe in the sixteenth century there were two movements, independent of each other and yet going on side by side—a revival of religion and a revival of learning, known as the Reformation and the Renaissance; so, in St. Columba’s enterprise two similar movements were fostered, not as separate and hostile to each other, but as mutually helpful and conjoined.