come. Everything they found with us they seized, and bound myself with fetters ; but on the fourteenth day the Lord delivered me, and what was ours they returned." In Conf. 18, he "thanks God who had given grace to his servants to persevere, and that although they were threatened with terrors, they stood the firmer." Other instances of persecution might be presented. The Irish saint was very taciturn, scarce- ly ever alluding to his trials, unless to thank God for his deliverance from them. In the establishment of his Church, St. Patrick in no instance ever appealed to any foreign Church, pope, or bishop. In his Epistle to Coi-Qtims (sect. 1), he simply announces himself as bishop: " Ego Patricus, indoctus, scilicet, Hibernione, constitutum episcopum me esse reor : k Deo accepi, id quod sum" (" I, Patrick, an unlearned man, to wit, a bishop constituted in Ireland : what I am I have re- ceived from God"). Here is no appeal to any foreign authority ; and solely on this authority he superin- tended the Irish Church for thirty -four years, and while in office he excommunicated the British pirate who had carried off some of his recent converts into slavery. These well-authenticated statements of St. Patrick concerning himself are wholly at variance with those of Probus and Joscelyn, who, for the first time, put forth their fabrications full five hundred years after his death. In regard to his studying with St. Germain at Tours, and of his going to Rome for ordination, all these stories were invented in the 10th or 12th century. Joscelyn, who wrote the fullest life of the saint, about A.D. 1130, has, in one sense, really the praise or dispraise of bringing the Irish Church into that of Rome. The abbe, not being embarrassed with facts, dates, or contemporary histor}', wrote easily and readily, and presented a life of the Irish saint that exactly suited his times, in the beginning of the 12th century. He represented St. Patrick and the early Church of Ireland in the 5th century as exact models of his own in the 12th. This life of the saint was readily received and adopted as tlie only true one by the Roman Catholic Churchy and it has been ever since the "storehouse" from which his numerous and papal biographers have drawn their materials. After the publication, and the general reception of this book, ! there was no hesitation in the full acknowledgment ' of all the Irish Christians, and of St. Patrick among them. Archbishop Usher, on the Religion of the Early Irish, asks (iv, 320): "Who among them [the early Irish] was ever canonized before St. Malachias, or Malach}', was?" (A.D. 1150). St. Patrick himself seems never to have been sainted till all Ireland was sainted or canonized. From this mere papal acknowl- edgment the old evangelical Church of St. Patrick rapidly passed through several transformations. St. Malachy went all the way to Rome, and obtained for it the palliums, or papal investures. Lanfranc, arch- bishop of Canterbury, disregarding the old Irish min- isterial line of seven hundred yeai's, ordained several Dano-Irish bishops for the new hierarchy just set up, and in 1167 Henry II of England, by commission from pope Adrian, landed five thousand steel-clad soldiers in Ireland, and, after several sanguinary battles, called, in 1172, a synod at Cashel, to bring the Irish Church to papal conformity. But the old Irish Church was not yet extinct, for in 1170 they held a synod in Ar- magh, in which tliey confessed their sins, deprecated the "scourge of God," as they called the English pa- pal soldiers, and liberated all English slaves then held in Ireland. Yet conformity to "papal practices" was very tardy; "Celtic tenacity" predominated in re- ligious as it had in civil matters. The same Brehon laws which St. Patrick heard proclaimed on the hills in the 5th century were again, despite the most bar- barous penalties of the English, proclaimed on the same hills and in the same language one thousand years afterwards.
It has been asked, " Did St. Patrick give the Irish,
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776 PATRICK, KNIGHTS OF ST.
in whole or in part, a translation of the Scriptures in their own language?" To this we reply, there is no positive proof that he did ; but ('* pnori arguments ought not to be despised. 1. St. Patrick was a great Bible reader ; in his two short compositions he quotes the Scriptures fort}' - three times. 2. In his day the Irish had a written language ; their annals were then written in it. 3. In his Epistle to Coroticus he "calls upon every family to read it to the people." 4. Can we suppose that St. Patrick and his immediate follow- ers, who founded lona, "the star of the west," and who were enlightening Central Europe with religion and letters, could have left their own Church and countrj' without at least some portion of God's AVord in Irish. Towards the close of his life, about A.D. 455, St. Pat- rick in Ireland wrote his Confession in what some call " homely Latin." He directed it (Conf. 6j to his " Gal- ilean brethren, and the many thousand spiritual chil- dren whom God had given him." Most probably some copy of this and of his Ejnst'e found their way to the Continent, and finallj' to some of the monasteries, then almost the only repositories of letters, where it seems to have remained unnoticed for a thousand j'ears. When the Bollandists, in A.D. 1660, began their collections of the writings of the fathers, those of St. Patrick were collected, and thus preserved from extinction. In 1848-60 they were copied into abbe M\gn&'s Patrology, and are in vol. liii of that great work.