This brief sketch, in connection with the lives of Patrick and Kentigern, of the Gaelic Christianity of Scotland in the fifth and sixth centuries, will help to show forth in clearer outlines the work of Columba. The spiritual forces that waved forth from Iona were certainly not the first that brought religious light to the land of the Gael. Nor were they so exclusively of Irish origin as they are represented to be. In eastern Gaeldom in Scotland Christianity had been already known. But in the course of the century which elapsed from the time of Patrick it had greatly decayed. Columba came to the west of Scotland to revive and to proclaim the faith afresh. He came back among his ancestral people from the midst of whom the gospel had been sent a century previously to Ireland. In Iona the religious centre of the land of the Gaels was simply removed further west and north. The Gaelic-speaking people themselves were drifting in the same direction towards the Atlantic. As they themselves were largely absorbed by the Brythons behind them, so they absorbed in their north-west progress those brave non-Aryan clans to whom they became the missionaries of the cross and the channels of letters. They extended the area of Gaeldom, and imposed their Christian and literary tongue on the conquered just as the Christian and more literary Latin had been previously imposed on many of their own ancestors. In the fourth century we mark gospel light in Strathclyde; in the fifth we see it kindling on the shores of Ireland; in the sixth it begins to burn from Iona. It was among these South Albin Gaels at an early period that we mark the appearance of Brigit: the Mary of the Gael. There is no standard of Gaelic maintained in the orthography of this proper name. _Brigit_ is used here as one of the most ancient forms; as also to preserve a chronological harmony with the secondary significant title of “Mary of the Gael.” As we all know the present form of the name is _Bridget_ in English; but it has been so little talked of in later ages by Gaelic Highlanders that it becomes almost a serious matter for the majority of them even to spell it in Gaelic. It is only in the compound “_La-Fheill-Brighde_”—[Brìde] or _The Day of the Feast of Bridget_, and surname MacBride, that we are familiar with this female saintly name. This by necessary phonological laws recalls _Brigid_, which in its turn reminds us of the more ancient orthography _Brigit_, which is adopted by Dr Stokes in his “Three Middle-Irish Homilies.” Other Irish scholars have spelt it _Brigid_, even when they are quoting from productions such as the poem ascribed to Brigit, found in the Burgundian Library, Brussels, headed thus: _Brighitt_ (CCT.) [Brigid (Cecinet)].