ghteousness. And the nations
pursuing peace have forgotten that pilgrimages to Washington or The
Hague may be good, but the supreme need of humanity is to go on
pilgrimage to the fountains that will cleanse the heart. The
deliverance of the world is not by way of renewed or remodelled
treaties, but by the old, old way of renewed and converted souls.

II

How has peace ever come to men? It has come in one way only--the way
of the renewed spirit. I have been reading again the wonderful story
of this Scotland of ours, and that old, simple truth has come home to
me afresh. The problem that confronted Scotland in the dawn of its
history was how to unify and pacify warring tribes that were
ceaselessly drenching the land with blood. And the way the problem was
solved here is the way in which alone it can be solved on the greater
stage of the whole world. Fourteen hundred years ago there was no
Scotland anywhere on the map. There were four kingdoms in North
Britain--the Picts north of the Grampians, the Britons in Strathclyde,
the Angles in the Lothians and southward to the Tweed, and in Kintyre a
small and feeble colony of Scots who had crossed from Ireland. (In
those days a Scot was invariably an Irishman.) In those distressful
days wars in North Britain were as common as strikes are now, and women
went forth to battle along with the men. And they were wars of
extermination--without mercy. Out of that welter how did unity and
peace come? The uniter and pacifier came out of Ireland. The Scots in
Kintyre were Christians, and the pagan Picts under King Brude inflicted
on them a shattering defeat. It looked as if Christianity were on the
eve of being stamped out in Kintyre. To Columba in Ireland there came
the cry of his kinsmen's woe--'Come over and help us.' To a man
burning with ardour and longing for new fields to conquer for his
Master, that cry was like a bugle summoning to battle. He came to
their help, but not with spears and arrows. He came with the might of
the Cross. The greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that
instead of material weapons he went straight to the fountain-head of
the misery. He realised that there was only one way of salvation for
the Christian Scots in Kintyre, and that was by converting to Christ
the wild people in the North that had braved the Roman arms and were
still in their primitive savagery. In those days to convert a clan one
had first to convert the chief; t