From the earliest ages of Christianity _pseudo-Christoi_, or false Christs, existed. Simon Magus, Dositheus, and the famous Barcochab were among the first of them, and they were followed by Moses, in Crete, in the fifth century; Julian, in Palestine, _circa_ A.D. 530; and Serenus, in Spain, _circa_ A.D. 714. There were, in the twelfth century, some seven or eight in France, Spain, and Persia; and, coming to more modern times, there was Sabbatai Zewi, a native of Aleppo, or Smyrna, who proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, in Jerusalem, _circa_ 1666. The list of religious fanatics is a long one. Mahomet, Munzer, John of Leyden, Brothers, Matthews, Joanna Southcott, ‘Courtenay,’ or Thomas, and Joe Smith are among them, and are well-known; but there are hundreds of others whose work has not been on so grand a scale, or whose influence has not been of the national importance of the above; and it is of one of these forgotten fanatics that I now treat.
Well out in the Atlantic Ocean, far west, indeed, even of the Western Isles, stands the lonely island of St. Kilda, or Hirta, as it used to be called, from _h-Iar-tir_, the Gaelic for West land, or West country. Its rocky sides are inaccessible, except at one landing-place, at a bay on the south-east, and it is the home and breeding-place of millions of sea-birds, whose flesh and eggs form the main supply of food for the inhabitants, and whose feathers, together with a few sheep and cattle, and what little barley can be grown, or butter can be made, pay the trifling rent required, and help to provide the bare necessaries of civilized existence.
The inhabitants are not healthy, so many dying, as young children, of a disease locally known as the ‘eight day sickness,’ a disease which generally attacks them on the eighth or ninth day after birth, and mostly proves fatal in the course of a day or two. From this and other causes, including falls from cliffs, the population has remained nearly stationary, as is evidenced by the fact that for the last hundred years the inhabitants have averaged under a hundred. Indeed, at one time, in 1724, small-pox attacked the islanders, being imported by one of them on his return from a visit to Harris, and all the adults died except four, who were left to take care of twenty-six orphans, all that were left of twenty-four families.