CHAPTER III.

THE CHURCH OF ST. PATRICK.

THE numerous ancient Lives of St. Patrick are admitted to be full of fables. After a great deal of revising and sifting, the most probable accounts are given by Archbishop Ussher and Sir James Ware. But even by them a considerable quantity of the marvellous has been preserved. We are told that Patrick was probably born in 373, at Kirkpatrick, near the Scottish border, his father being a deacon, and his grandfather a priest: that when sixteen years old he was taken prisoner, and carried into Ireland, where he remained a slave for six years, herding cattle, and performing other menial service. Having escaped from bondage, he returned to his parents; then travelled over the Continent, spending several years at Rome, after which he was ordained deacon by his uncle St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, and priest by St. German, Bishop of Auxerre; he next went to Rome, where he was consecrated Bishop, and got a commission from the Pope to convert the Irish. In pursuance of this commission he arrived in that country in the year 432. There he is said to have travelled about for years, founding churches in many places. He came to Armagh in 445, and then we are told he laid out the city, built a church, and assembled around him a multitude of religious persons.' All these marvels he seems to have accomplished in two years; for in 447 we find him in the Isle of Man, building a church there. Nothing is said about the well-established fact that Armagh was one of the greatest of the high places' of the ancient heathen. The primitive meaning of the name is the 'high place of Macha,' a divinity worshipped by the Tuath-daDanaans. In the immediate neighbourhood of the city was the famous palace of Emania, said to have been built by Macha of the Golden Hair,' 300 years before the Christian era. However, St. Patrick, on his return to Ireland, visited Dublin, where he

forthwith converted the King, and laid the foundation of Patrick's Cathedral. He then hurried off to Munster, visited Cashel, baptized its King, and settled the ecclesiastical authority in the southern parts.' Having employed the next six years in fixing the Church of Ireland on a solid foundation, and having ordained bishops and priests through the whole island, according to the patterns he had seen in other countries, he went to Rome again, where he was received joyfully by the Pope, and sent back to Ireland with increased honours and powers. He at length died in his Abbey of Saul.

Of his successors at Armagh little or nothing is known for centuries. Some of them bore the double title of abbot and bishop, the cause of which is fully explained in The Life of St. Patrick,' by Dr. Todd. It has been in recent times contended by the established clergy that the Church of St. Patrick was truly and essentially an Episcopal church of the Anglican type. The identity is assumed as a fact clearly demonstrated, and on the strength of this assumption the Roman Catholic Church is regarded as an alien institution imposed upon the country, and possessing no right, human or divine, for persisting in its offensive intrusion. This theory was first fully expounded by the Rev. Robert King, in his Primer of the Church History of Ireland,' which has been made a class-book for divinity students in Trinity College, Dublin. This delusion should be at once dissipated by reading the most trustworthy Life of St. Patrick ever published.' The church of the native Irish,' writes Dr. Todd, was discountenanced and ignored by Rome as well as by England. It consisted of the old Irish clergy and inmates of the monasteries beyond the limits of the English Pale, who had not adopted the English manners or language, and were therefore dealt with as rebels. Many of these took refuge in foreign countries, or connected themselves with foreign emissaries, hostile to England at home; but at a subsequent period, when the Anglo-Irish Church had accepted the Reformation, the "mere Irish" clergy were found to have become practically extinct.'

'S. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland: A Memoir of the Life and Mission,' &c. By James Henthorn Todd, D.D., S.F.T.C.D., Regius Professor of Hebrew in University, &c,

In the twelfth century, when St. Bernard wrote the 'Life of St. Malachi, Archbishop of Armagh,' he complained in that work that up to his own times there had been in Ireland a 'dissolution of ecclesiastical discipline, a relaxation of censure, a making void of religion, and that a cruel barbarism—nay, a sort of Paganism -was substituted under the Christian name.' In proof of this, he said that bishops were changed and multiplied at the pleasure of the "Metropolitan" (Abbot) without order, without reason, so that one bishopric was not content with a single bishop, but almost every congregation had its own separate bishop.' From this it is quite evident that St. Bernard was ignorant of the constitution of the Irish churches, and equally ignorant of the ecclesiastical polity which prevailed throughout the Continental nations in the earliest and purest ages of Christianity. If every congregation in Erin had its bishop, instead of proving that the Irish Christians were corrupt, disorderly, and heathenish, it would prove only that they had adhered with fidelity to the primitive system of church polity, modified by the peculiar circumstances of the country, and by the genius of the Celtic institutions. The word bishop, in the sense in which it is used by Churchmen, and generally understood, means a prelate who rules over a number of parochial clergy, be the same more or less. There was nothing of the kind known in Ireland till it was imported by the Normans, and imposed by the Pope. During six or seven centuries after the mission of St. Patrick the word 'parish,' or its equivalent, does not once occur in the history of the Irish Church. But the parish, we know, is the basis of the ecclesiastical system in England and Ireland. The old Irish church was built without this foundation-stone of Episcopacy; and the first thing that Dr. Todd can find which at all resembles a diocese is indicated in the following words: The district which owed allegiance to the chieftain, and was inhabited by his followers, became the proper field of labour to his bishops and clergy, and this was the first approach to a diocese, or territorial jurisdiction, in the Church of Ireland.'

It is quite true, as St. Bernard remarked, that almost every religious community worshipping in one place had a bishop of its own. Not only so-it had sometimes several bishops, the favourite

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number being seven.' These bishops were ordained per saltum, that is, without passing through any intervening orders;' and the consecration was effected often by a single bishop or abbot with a simple formality of prayer and the imposition of hands. Nothing more therefore was implied by the title of bishop than that the bearer was in Holy Orders,' and enjoyed the status of a clergyman, being in fact equivalent to our professional distinction of 'Reverend.' The title conferred no jurisdiction whatever. After passing in review the chief Catholic authorities on the subject, and quoting from Lanigan, Colgan, and others, Dr. Todd gives the result of his inquiries in the following words: From the foregoing facts and anecdotes no doubt can remain in the mind of any unprejudiced reader that the normal state of Episcopacy in Ireland was, as we have described, non-diocesan, each bishop acting independently without any archiepiscopal jurisdiction, and either entirely independent or subject to the abbot of his monastery; or in the spiritual clanship, to his chieftain. The consequence of this was a great multiplication of bishops; there was no restraint upon their being consecrated. Every man of eminence for piety or learning was advanced to the order of a bishop as a sort of degree or mark of distinction. Many of these lived as solitaries or in monasteries. Many of them established schools for religious life and the cultivation of sacred learning, having no diocese or fixed episcopal duties; and many of them, influenced by missionary zeal, went forth to the Continent, to Great Britain, or to other heathen lands, to preach the Gospel of Christ to the Gentiles.' Again, he says:- On the continent of Europe the Christian empire both in the East and the West was divided into Episcopal provinces and dioceses, based upon the ancient civil divisions, and the canonical regulations were closely connected with the institution of metropolitan and diocesan jurisdiction. In Ireland, where there were no metropolitans, no dioceses, and no fixed or legally recognised civil divisions of the country, these canonical rules were inapplicable, and therefore were disregarded.' The word archbishop' occurs in Irish Church history, but it was used in a sense totally different from its present meaning. The Irish word ard-episcop is not equivalent to archbishop: the word 'Ard' meaning 'high,' the compound denotes

simply an eminent or celebrated bishop; and there might be several of such archbishops in the same town or district.

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The number seven being one to which the ancient Irish evidently attached a sacred import, we frequently read also of seven bishops dwelling in one place. Thus the Martyrology of Donegal' mentions no less than six groups of bishops, seven in each group, and in three of them the seven bishops were brothers, sons of one father! But this list, says Dr. Todd, is completely eclipsed by the 140 groups of "seven bishops," of various churches and places in Ireland, who were invoked in the Irish Litany attributed to Aengus Cele De, or the Culdee, and probably composed in the ninth century.' We can easily imagine that owing to the virtue ascribed to the mystic number seven, there would be a desire to have that number of churches in every religious centre, each dedicated to some favourite saint, or erected for some popular missionary. We cannot otherwise account for such a plurality in a place like Glendalough, where the stationary population could hardly fill more than one, although the Cathedral' here was but a small building. It is said that there was once a city' in this place, but that term is applied to nearly all places that were monastic seats. It does not seem possible that there ever could have been anything like a populous town in this valley, surrounded by barren mountains, and glens covered with timber and jungle. It was undoubtedly the residence of the chief of the O'Tooles, who were a pastoral people, having boundless space for their flocks and herds, but caring little for tillage, and knowing nothing of the industrial arts. On Sundays and holydays, however, and on grand festivals, which were numerous, we can understand that if the seven churches were all open, they would not hold a tenth of the people assembled, and that they would be obliged to have some of their religious services in the open air, or in tents pitched for the occasion.

The early Christian missionaries always applied in the first instance to the local chieftain, whose conversion was usually followed by the submission of the sept. At or near his headquarters in the straggling village, or township, they obtained permission to erect a wooden church, a school, and a dwelling-house, in which their principal converts lived in community, cultivating