COLUMBA'S LAST YEARS-HIS DEATH-HIS

CHARACTER.

"WHEN King Aïdan brought his children to him, and spoke of his anxiety about their future lives, he did not content himself with seeing the eldest. 'Have you none younger?' said the abbot; bring them all-let me hold them in my arms and on my heart!' And when the younger children were brought, one fair-haired boy, Hector (Eochaidh Buidhe), came forward running, and threw himself upon the saint's knees. Columba held him long pressed to his heart, then kissed his forehead, blessed him, and prophesied for him a long life, a prosperous reign, and a great posterity.

"Let us listen while his biographer tells how he came to the aid of a woman in extremity, and how he made peace in a divided household. One day at Iona he suddenly stopped short while reading, and said with a smile to his monks, 'I must now go and pray for a poor little woman who is in the pains of childbirth, and suffers like a true daughter of Eve. She is down yonder in Ireland, and reckons upon my prayers, for she is my kinswoman, and of my mother's family.' Upon this he hastened to the church, and when his prayer was ended returned to his brethren, saying, 'She is delivered. The Lord Jesus, who deigned to be born of a woman, has come to her aid; this time she will not die.'

"Another day, while he was visiting an island on the Irish coast, a pilot came to him to complain of his wife, who had taken an aversion to him. The abbot called her and reminded her of the duties imposed upon her by the law

of the Lord. 'I am ready to do everything,' said the woman-'I will obey you in the hardest things you can command. I do not draw back from any of the cares of the house. I will go even, if it is desired, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or I will shut myself up in a nunnery-in short, I will do everything except live with him.'

"The abbot answered that there could be no question of pilgrimage or of a convent so long as her husband lived; 'but,' he added, 'let us try to pray God, all three, fastingyou, your husband, and myself.'

'Ah,' said the woman, 'I know that you can obtain even what is impossible from God.' However, his proposal was carried out-the three fasted, and Columba passed the whole night in prayer without ever closing his eyes. Next morning he said to the woman, with the gentle irony which he so often employed, 'Tell me to what convent are you bound after your yesterday's projects? To none,' said the woman; 'my heart has been changed to-night. I know not how I have passed from hate to love.' And from that day until the hour of her death she lived in a tender and faithful union with her husband.

"But Columba fortunately was connected with other households more united, where he could admire the happiness of his friends without feeling himself compelled to make peace. From his sanctuary at Iona his habitual solicitude and watchful sympathy followed them to their last hour. One day he was alone with one of the Saxons whom he had converted and attached to his community, and who was the baker of the monks. While this stranger prepared his bread, he heard the abbot say, looking up to heaven, 'Oh! happy, happy woman! She goes into heaven with a guard of angels.' Exactly a year after, the abbot and the Saxon baker were again together. 'I see the woman,' said Columba, of whom I spoke to thee last year coming down from heaven to meet the soul of her husband, who has just died. She contends with powerful enemies for that dear soul, by the help of the holy angels: she gains the day, she triumphs, because her goodman has been a just man—and

the two are united again in the home of everlasting consolation.'

"This vision was preceded and followed by many others of the same description, in which the blessed death of many bishops and monks, his friends and contemporaries, were announced to him. They seem to have been intended to give him a glimpse of that heaven into which God was shortly to call him. Nor was it only at Iona that these supernatural graces were accorded to him, for he did not limit his unwearied activity to the narrow enclosure of that island, any more in the decline of his life than in the earlier period of his emigration. Up to old age he continued to have sufficient strength and courage to return to the most northern regions where he had preached the faith to the Picts; and it was in one of his last missionary journeys, when upon the banks of Loch Ness, to the north of the great line of waters which cuts Caledonia in two, at a distance of fifty leagues from Iona, that he was permitted to see the angels come to meet the soul of the old Pict, who, faithful during all his life to the law of nature, received baptism, and with it eternal salvation, from the great missionary's hands.

"At this period the angels, whom he saw carrying to heaven the soul of the just and penitent, and aiding the believing wife to make an entrance there for her husband, continually appeared to him and hovered about him. Making all possible allowance for the exaggerations and fables which the proverbial credulity of Celtic nations has added to the legends of their saints, no Christian will be tempted to deny the verified narratives which bear witness, in Columba's case as well as in that of the other saints, to supernatural appearances which enriched his life, and especially his old age. Those wonderful soldiers of virtue and Christian truth needed such miracles to help them to support the toils and live through the trials of their dangerous mission. They required to ascend from time to time into celestial regions to find strength there for their continual struggle against all obstacles and perils and con

tinually renewed temptations-and to learn to brave the enmities, the savage manners, and blind hatreds of the nations whom it was the aim of their lives to set free.

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'Let no one follow me to-day,' Columba said one morning with unusual severity to the assembled community: 'I would be alone in the little plain to the west of the isle.' He was obeyed; but a brother, more curious and less obedient than the rest, followed him far off, and saw him, erect and motionless, with his hands and his eyes raised to heaven, standing on a sandy hillock, where he was soon surrounded by a crowd of angels, who came to bear him. company and to talk with him. The hillock has to this day retained the name of Cnocan Aingel-the Angels' Hill. And the citizens of the celestial country, as they were called at Iona, came often to console and strengthen their future companion during the long winter nights which he passed in prayer in some retired corner, voluntarily exposed to all the torments of sleeplessness and cold.

"For as he approached the end of his career this great servant of God consumed his strength in vigils, fasts, and rigorous macerations. His life, which had been so full of generous struggles, hard trial, and toil in the service of God and his neighbour, seemed to him neither full enough nor pure enough. In proportion as the end drew near he redoubled his austerities and mortifications. Every night, according to one of his biographers, he plunged into cold water and remained there for the time necessary to recite an entire psalter. One day, when, bent by age, he sought, perhaps in a neighbouring island, a retirement, still more profound than usual, in which to pray, he saw a poor woman gathering wild herbs and even nettles, who told him that her poverty was such as to forbid her all other food. Upon which the old abbot reproached himself bitterly that he had not yet come to that point. 'See,' he said, 'this poor woman, who finds her miserable life worth the trouble of being thus prolonged; and we, who profess to deserve heaven by our austerities, we live in luxury!' When he went back to his monastery he gave orders that

he should be served with no other food than the wild and bitter herbs with which the beggar supported her existence; and he severely reproved his procurator, Diarmid, who had come from Ireland with him, when he, out of compassion. for his master's old age and weakness, threw a little butter into the caldron in which this miserable fare was cooked.

“The celestial light which was soon to receive him began already to surround him like a garment or a shroud. His monks told each other that the solitary cell in the Isle of Himba, near Iona, which he had built for himself, was lighted up every night by a great light, which could be seen through the chinks of the door and keyhole, while the abbot chanted unknown canticles till daybreak. After having remained there three days and nights without food, he came out, full of joy at having discovered the mysterious meaning of several texts of Holy Scripture, which up to that time he had not understood. When he returned to Iona to die, continuing faithful to his custom of spending a great part of the night in prayer, he bore about with him everywhere the miraculous light which already surrounded him like the nimbus of his holiness. The entire community was involuntarily agitated by the enjoyment of that foretaste of paradise. One winter's night, a young man who was destined to succeed Columba as fourth abbot of Iona remained in the church while the others slept; all at once he saw the abbot come in, preceded by a golden light which fell from the heights of the vaulted roof, and lighted all the corners of the building, even including the little lateral oratory where the young monk hid himself in alarm. All who passed during the night before the church, while their old abbot prayed, were startled by this light, which dazzled them like lightning. Another of the young monks, whose education was specially directed by the abbot himself, resolved to ascertain whether the same illumination existed in Columba's cell; and notwithstanding that he had been expressly forbidden to do so, he got up in the night and went groping to the door of the cell to look in, but fled immediately, blinded by the light that filled it.