History of the Catholic Church of Scotland (v. 1) Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APOSTASY AMONG THE PICTS. 31 away all that could renew the memory of the religion in which they had been baptised. At St Andrews, the metropolitan church, besides the archives where all the records and rights of the Church, such as bulls of popes, charters of the kings, all ecclesiastical Acts, such as those of national councils, of diocesan synods, of processes in the ecclesiastical courts, . . . consecration of bishops, all ordinations, dispensations, andc., were preserved. Since the time of the Reformation all these original records have no less entirely and universally disappeared (excepting some of the chartularies) than if they had never been."l Towards the middle of the sixth century, the Relapse of Church had obtained a footing among the Scots Church. of Dalriada in the present county of Argyle, the southern Picts living north of the Firth of Forth as far as the Grampians, and the mixed tribes of Britons, Picts, and Saxons south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. The light of the Gospel had not yet reached the northern Picts. Nor indeed, even in the districts just mentioned, does Christianity appear to have everywhere taken deep root, for evidence is extant which points to a relapse into paganism. In the letter of St Patrick to the subjects of the tyrant Coroticus, the ancestor of the princes of Strathclyde (written, according to Haddan and Stubbs, about the year 492), the 1 Innes's Critical Essay (ed. Grub), p. 312. Similar testimony is borne by the (Protestant) Archbishop Spottiswood (History, vol. i. p. 372). saint in feeling and vivid language deplores the vices of the Picts, whom he openly charges with apostasy ;l and he is not more indulgent to the evil deeds of Coroticus himself, on whom he calls down the severest judgments of God. Jocelyn, the biographe...Read More