How has peace ever come to men? It has come in one way only--the way of the renewed spirit. I have been reading again the wonderful story of this Scotland of ours, and that old, simple truth has come home to me afresh. The problem that confronted Scotland in the dawn of its history was how to unify and pacify warring tribes that were ceaselessly drenching the land with blood. And the way the problem was solved here is the way in which alone it can be solved on the greater stage of the whole world. Fourteen hundred years ago there was no Scotland anywhere on the map. There were four kingdoms in North Britain--the Picts north of the Grampians, the Britons in Strathclyde, the Angles in the Lothians and southward to the Tweed, and in Kintyre a small and feeble colony of Scots who had crossed from Ireland. (In those days a Scot was invariably an Irishman.) In those distressful days wars in North Britain were as common as strikes are now, and women went forth to battle along with the men. And they were wars of extermination--without mercy. Out of that welter how did unity and peace come? The uniter and pacifier came out of Ireland. The Scots in Kintyre were Christians, and the pagan Picts under King Brude inflicted on them a shattering defeat. It looked as if Christianity were on the eve of being stamped out in Kintyre. To Columba in Ireland there came the cry of his kinsmen's woe--'Come over and help us.' To a man burning with ardour and longing for new fields to conquer for his Master, that cry was like a bugle summoning to battle. He came to their help, but not with spears and arrows. He came with the might of the Cross. The greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that instead of material weapons he went straight to the fountain-head of the misery. He realised that there was only one way of salvation for the Christian Scots in Kintyre, and that was by converting to Christ the wild people in the North that had braved the Roman arms and were still in their primitive savagery. In those days to convert a clan one had first to convert the chief; to convert a nation one had first to convert the king. The goal towards which St. Columba set his face was the castle of King Brude at Inverness. Iona was but the base for the great campaign that was to make North Britain safe for Christians. If to-day the problem be how to make the world safe for democracy (though the problem is really greater--how to produce a democracy worth the sacrifice of making the world safe for it), in the sixth century the problem was how to make Scotland safe for Christ. III