Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/160

clii PEEFACE. Two sources, The Christianity of Scotland was thus derived from whence t n^ iriTi- derived. from two diflerent sources : that oi the Britons, the Angles, and the Southern Picts came from south Britain ; and that of the Scots and the northern Picts from Ireland ; and the Churches derived from each were very different in spii'it and in character. The Church of the Britons of Strathclyde and of the Southern Picts was more immediately founded by St. Ninian, who derived his teaching from Eome ; the Church of the Ancjles was an offshoot of that founded by Augustine, a direct missionary from Rome. The Church of the Northern Picts and of the Scots was derived from that founded by St. Patrick in Ireland. The former seem not to have differed in their constitution from the churches of other coun- tries. They possessed an episcopate in the full exercise of its ordinary jurisdiction and functions, and a secular clergy ; and, although monasticism existed in them to a great extent, it entered into the system as a distinct element attached to, but not coincident with, the clergy. On the other hand, monasticism had attained to a much more influential position in the Columban Church when it emerged from Ireland. It was a monastic church, in the fullest sense of the term, not merely that it pos- sessed monastic institutions, and that these institu- tions occupied a wide and prominent position in the Church, but that the entire Church was monastic, and her whole clergy embraced within the fold of the monastic rule. As Bede expresses it, in talking