Scotland, more rapidly than England, is drifting into a confused but not yet convinced paganism. Calvin and Knox are fading into the background as religious heroes. Christ Himself may soon be a mere name to the multitudes unless there is a movement of re-conversion in our midst. About ten years ago the Church of Scotland published a Report which had the courage to admit that no more than 36 per cent, of the total population of this country was affiliated to organised religious bodies. It also revealed that about 150,000 children of school age were not connected with any church or Sunday school. At the present time it would probably be more correct to state that less than 25 per cent, of the people of Scotland are even nominal members of any Christian denomination. This is how Dr. George F. MacLeod, the Leader of the Presbyterian Iona Community sums up the religious situation in Scotland: “We have rejected an earlier discipline and discarded its Reformation alternative, and have left our youth with nothing.”

The Kirk, as a whole, has lost its authority over the people, although Scotland is still a Presbyterian nation so far as its established Church. Its membership is declining, while, on the other hand, the Catholic population tends to increase—through natural rather than by supernatural reasons. The statistics of birth-rate among Scoto-Irish families in the industrial Lowlands prove this fact. To-day about 13 per cent, of the total population of Scotland is Catholic. No statistics of conversions are allowed to he published as in England.

The great difficulty in discussing a Scottish type of sanctity is the exiguous character of the evidence. In the period of the Celtic Church saints are as thick as blackberries. But at this distance of time one cannot distinguish the incoming Irish Gaels from the native Piets and Britons. We cannot show that the communities deriving from SS Ninian, Drostan and Mungo fostered a type of holiness in any way different from that of Iona. The general impression is of similarity.

And when the great age of the Celts is over, how few names remain even for consideration! Saint Margaret, half-Hungarian, half-Saxon, belong to Scotland only by the geographical accident of her marriage and the warmth with which the people took her to their hearts. Then come two names from the Scottish calendar, unrecognised elsewhere. The first is King David I., Margaret’s son, founder of Holyrood and other abbeys, cannily strung along the Border in the hopes that an invader might respect church property; he was also a defender of the poor. The other, Blessed Gilbert of Moray, was a Bishop of Caithness (d. 1245) who did a valuable piece of civilising work in the North. The people were in a panic before ill-understood royal efforts to unify and consolidate the kingdom. Both his predecessors had been assassinated, and Blessed Gilbert led off by pleading for the lives of the last set of assassins. He won such confidence that he was allowed, io die in his bed after twenty years of devoted work—no mean feat on the outer confines of Christendom at that time.

The men of the Hebrides smile tolerantly when the stranger from the south, after a week’s visit, decides that the only possible life to-day is one of retirement, the eremitical life lived alone on a croft among these sea-bound strips of land. The natives are used to this type of enthusiasm; it “takes” many people in this way. But when the stranger has returned to his own place on the mainland, he soon decides that electric light and heat, railways and twice-daily posts, are his happy portion and that the life on the isles is a romantic dream. And so the natives out there, battling with their gales, scraping a hard livelihood from the rocky ground or netting it from the petulant sea, are led to laugh at these effervescent dreams.

And yet the “call of the isles” is real enough, and even though it has resulted only in a few sophisticated settlers bringing their complacent materialism in their industrially-fed cheque books to a well apportioned cottage here and there, why should this call be ridiculed? It may cover a genuine vocation only superficially allied to a romantic taste for islands and sea. At least we must admit the modern need for the eremitical vocation as such and if there are certain places where that vocation manifests itself rather than in others, that is no more than the desert was to the early fathers. Modern industrial city life is as corrupt now as was the decaying urban society of the third century, though it is painted in less lurid colours.