CHRISTIAN LEGENDS OF THE HEBRIDES.

THE Sir tells a

HE biographer of Sir Samuel Baker, Mr. Douglas Murray, tells a

story which, in these days of used-up emotion and exploited interests, has a fascination which is almost weird. An Egyptian Pasha, to do honour to the traveller, arranged that he should visit an unopened tomb, one which had not been robbed for any European museum, nor refurnished from Birmingham for the advantage of Cook's tourists. The door was unsealed, and Baker entered alone into the silence and solitude of 4000 years. There, with the surroundings of a civilisation which ours can barely comprehend, slept the mighty dead, already forgotten, it may be, when Greece and Rome were yet unborn. But the past called with an appeal even more imperative than this. In the sand at his feet were the footsteps of the last man who went out, and the marks of his broom as he swept his way to the door.

Somehow, the slave who, doing his common task, went out into the sunshine, has a stronger human interest than the great who slumbered in the dark, and one regrets the obliteration of his footsteps more than the decay of lawgivers and priests.

The world has but little space now for sand that holds the footsteps of the past, but for those who know how and where to seek, there are, even for us, some such fields of silence still remaining. In the grey islands of the Outer Hebrides, even in the last few years, I have found some traces of the outgoing footsteps of men who have already turned towards the glare and sunshine of to-day. Proprietors of an alien blood and an alien faith, the School Board, the steamboat, the telegraph, have shut the door upon a past which speaks with other tongues than theirs.

In a bare island, a mere gull's nest on a rock, still unknown to

MacBrayne, separated by a dangerous minch from even a weekly post, the following stories were mainly collected. It is impossible to present them in anything like their original form, and they lose infinitely in translation. The English of the Western Islands is by no means that of Mr. Black's stories, still less that of other novelists. It has been learnt from books, and is the English of the eighteenth century, almost pedantic in its accuracy and literary uses. But such legends as these are told in the intimacy of private life, and therefore mainly in the native Gaelic. They were a part of the faith and the life of the people, and have no affinity with the long winter evening stories, the lineal descendants of the Saga of Viking times, or the Sgeultachd of the Celtic bard. These, too, we may find even now, with much else of the poetry of life, as did Monro in the sixteenth century, and Martin a century and a half later. MacCulloch, however, the correspondent of Sir Walter Scott (how the genial Sir Walter must have been bored by so superior a person !), found nothing of what Buchanan, fifty years later, found in abundance. Then, as now, one needed something more than a thirst for information, to be taken to the heart of these most simple, most courteous of Nature's children.

From a great quantity of folk-lore collected in these islands I have selected a few stories bearing on the life, especially the childhood, of Our Lord, not, as might at first appear, to illustrate the ignorance, but rather the reverence, the natural piety of the islanders, who, though left for generations without books, without teachers, have so taken the pictures of the holy life into their hearts and lives that, while the outline remains in its original purity, the painting has been touched with local colour, and the eastern setting of 2000 years ago has been translated into terms of the daily life of the simple dwellers of the Outer Hebrides.

To realise this, one must recall the main facts of the history of their faith. The ravages of the Norsemen can have left little material trace of the mission of St. Columba, the St. Columkille of whom they speak to-day, with a friendliness which is something more personal than their reverence for Saints. Nevertheless, the work of the Church seems to have been revived within three centuries of the destruction of the settlement on Iona, and a See of the Isles existed from 1113 to 1550 (revived only in 1878). Monro, visiting the islands in 1549, found five parish churches in Uist alone, and Martin speaks of these as still existing in 1695, also of the remains of a monastery and nunnery, and even of one remaining lay Capuchin brother dressed like his Order, but with a tartan plaid about his shoulders. The proprietors were then, of course, of the same blood and faith with their people, and traditions still clinging around sacred spots, ruins, now mere heaps of stones, and even the nomenclature of the islands are living evidence of the piety of the earlier people.

A very few years of relation with England put an end to the prosperity and patriarchal life of the Hebrides. The works of the earlier Cromwell took a long time to arrive in the Highlands (though Dr. Johnson found something to say as to the reformers when he visited certain ecclesiastical remains),* and indeed the old Church still holds her own in at least four of the islands. The later Cromwell, however, had a strong arm of the flesh, and the story of the persecutions in Scotland is too well known to be repeated.

In 1653 provision was made by the Congregation of Propaganda for the establishment of missionaries in the islands, under one William Ballantyne or Bellenden, who was, however, seized by the English, and died after two years' imprisonment. MacNeil, the chief of Barra, went into exile with his king. Bishop Nicolson, Vicar Apostolic for Scotland, visiting the islands in 1700, says he travelled for days without meeting a single inhabitant. His first station was the island of Eigg, where he found that a number of the inhabitants had been lately martyred by an English pirate, who gave them the choice of death or apostasy. Even Chalmers, not likely to be prejudiced on behalf of Catholicism, says that "men, in trying to make each other Episcopalians and Protestants, had almost ceased to be Christians"; even in Edinburgh there was no hospital till 1731.

Neglected in one century, persecuted in the next, the people nevertheless were true to the main outlines of their faith. Cardinal Rospigliosi wrote, in 1669, what probably remained true for nearly another century and a half:

"The natives of the islands. . . can, as a general rule, be properly called neither Catholics nor heretics. They abhor heresy by nature, but they listen to the preachers by necessity. They go wrong in matters of faith through ignorance, caused by the want of priests to instruct them in religion. If a Catholic priest comes to their island they call him by the name of the tonsured one,' and show much greater veneration and affection for him than for the preachers. They sign their foreheads with the sign of the Holy Cross, they invoke the Saints, recite Litanies, and use holy water. They themselves baptize their own children when the ministers make any difficulty as to administering the Sacrament on the pretence that it is not essential for eternal salvation."

Martin's evidence is practically to the same effect. Discussing certain superstitions, he writes (in 1695):

* E.g., "The malignant influence of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency together, and if the remembrance of Papal superstition is obliterated, the monuments of Papal piety are likewise effaced."

"It has been for many years popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches we may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall."-" Journal to the Western Islands."

This story bears some resemblance to the earlier one of the Macleod raid, but Nicolson, himself a Scotchman, is hardly likely to confuse the two.

2

"Arch. Propag. Acta," 1669, fol. 462.

"I enquired if their priest had preached or argued against this superstitious custom. They told me he knew better things, and would not be guilty of dissuading them from doing their duty, which they doubted not he judged this to be. . . . The Protestant minister hath often endeavoured to undeceive them, but in vain, because of an implicit faith they have in their priest, and when the topics of persuasion, though never so urgent, come from one they believe to be a heretic, there is little hope of success."

The causes of this influence may be a matter of opinion, but observers seem to have agreed as to its extent. Even the superior MacCulloch writes as to his experience:

"The appointments of the priests are very scanty, but they are remarkable for their good conduct and attention to their charges, not only in matters of religion but in the ordinary concerns of life.”

These words might have been written yesterday instead of close on a century ago, so literally true is each statement, as is also his further evidence as to the entire harmony of the Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, no proselytism being attempted on either side.

Even the establishment of Presbyterianism seems, however, to have brought but limited advantages, for in the Agricultural Survey of 1811 we learn that in 1808 not a single school existed south of Baileloch in North Uist, a district of 200 square miles and 7000 inhabitants. "Barray and Uist contain, indeed, a large proportion of Roman Catholic inhabitants," says the historian, "but that is no reason why they should not have churches and schools. The Catholic inhabitants are as good citizens and as much inclined to give their children the advantages of education as Protestants, but both are at present unhappily excluded." This was the period when the islands passed into the hands of new proprietors, and the shameful history began of forced evictions, and of people hunted with dogs among the hills, carried, bound hand and foot, to ships, and exiled to America.

Such being the history of their religious life, one wonders, not that their sacred traditions should be changed into apocrypha, but that religious traditions should have been kept alive at all. One must remember, moreover, that they had practically no written language; that to this day, owing to unaccountable neglect in the schools, in which one constantly finds only English-speaking teachers, a large proportion are unable to read or write in Gaelic.*

That stories transmitted orally for generations, corrected neither by teachers nor books, should nevertheless maintain the life of the original, though adapted as to the vehicle of instruction, says much for the people's grasp of the Gospel spirit. To love God and one's neighbour,

A most honourable exception exists in the case of the island of Tiree, where, as I know from considerable personal experience and inquiry, the Gaelic teaching in some of the schools is admirable and effective.

to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world; not only to give, but to share; to entertain strangers and show respect to man and reverence to God— this is the uniform teaching of all the legends.

That for the country "over whose acres walked those blessed feet they should substitute their own island home, grey and treeless, hung about with mists of the Atlantic and exposed to storms of wind and water, shows mainly, I venture to think, how much they had realised the presence of the Master in their midst. With all their Celtic faculty of visualisation, they had realised His life on earth as a Man of Sorrows; like themselves, poor and cold and storm-beaten and hungry, and the background of that sacred life had been their own poor homes. For Him, too, had been the turf-thatched cottage, built of unhewn stone, the hearth in the middle of the floor, the iron potthe only cooking utensil-suspended over it by a chain, a cottage of a but and a ben, the family beds at one end, the cattle and strangers at the other. He had been homeless, and the poor had given Him of their store; a little meal, a drink of milk, a shelter from the driving storm. It is only by realising their point of view that one perceives what there is of beautiful in such stories as the following, which I give, as far as possible, in the words of the narrators, who used mainly the colloquial Gaelic, but sometimes quoted fragments of old rhythmical versions, and now and then one or two of them, sailors for the most part, translating into their quaint, imperfect English.

Our Lord and His Mother were one day going through the country when a storm of snow and wind set in. They came to a little house and entered it for shelter. The goodwife was alone, and she hastily prepared a meal and set it before the travellers, afraid of being blamed if her husband should come in and find her giving away food. When he appeared, he just ate his supper, never speaking to the strangers, and then slunk off to bed, without making any provision for them for the night. The goodwife followed him, and asked if she should make them up a bed, the night being so wild. "Tell them to lie down on a bundle of lint (flax) straw," he said, and they did so. During the night, Our Lady was awakened by cries from the other end of the house, and she awakened her Son. The cries came from the churl, who was suffering intense internal pain, while his wife was getting ready hot plates and hot boards to relieve him. Our Lady asked her Son to help him. "Not yet, not yet," He replied, but on her further intercession, He took a handful of the prickly lint straw, which had been their bed, and rubbed it three times with the grain and against the grain, and said certain words which are still, it is said, used as a charm for colic, but I have not been able to recover them.

A variant of the story is that it was the goodwife that was taken