ST. PATRICK'S TIMES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 150, 17 March 1876, Page 7

ST. PATRICK'S TIMES.

The thought has occurred to me that it will be instructive and interesting to you to pause and reflectively remember what werethetimes, and who were the men that immediately preceded St. Patrick's" career and who flourished while he labored. It is startling to recall the fact howfar off from us those days view— fourteen hundred years ago ! How near to the death of our Blessed Lord were they ! how near to the very disciples and Apostles that He sent forth, and who, amid the flames of the Pentecostal feast, received the divine gifts to fit them for their supernatural and evangelizing mission?. The Council of Nice was held in 325. At it Constantine the Great was present : and greater than he. Emperor as he was — the great Athanasius led and assisted, and this tms but fifty-four gears before the birth of St. Patrick .'!! and Athanasius died hut two years before his birth. Four years aft< r his birth, in 375, Ambrose himself was made Bishop of Milan, and Gregory of Nyssa glorified the Eastern Church with his works of piety — and even then paganism was tolerated in Rome, for it was not till 382 that the Altar of Victory was removed from the Senate House. I must tell you before I have ended, what was the real religious condition of the people who were thus the objects of his apostolic care. He came to them inspired by teachers who were the master spirits of Christian theology, and who were the only men whose labors have re - cued Europe fromfperpetual barbai*isra. St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Ambrose and St. Jerome, who preceded the great St. Benedict and St. Gregory, together with St. Martin of Tours and St. Hilary and ft. Germain were his masters. They were Ihe bright lights in this dark and stormy night of human suffering and human degradation. Let me tell you, then, what was the condition of these Irish people and what their religion. They were barbarians — they were pagans. Their faith, if faith it could be called, was the Druiuical belief of Gaul, a religion borrowed, no doubt, from Oriental paganism, but laking its color from the wild nature of the region in which they lived. High up in the North, in the land of clouds and storms, surrounded by the ocean and hearing the wailing of the wind and the beating of the sea, amid the solitude of their rocks and forests and morasses, they practised the orgies of their almost furious belief. The Druids taught that matter and spirit aro eternal. They I aught the doctrine of metempsychosis, the tiansmigration of human souls into animals as a punishment. They taught the doctrine of another world in which the boul preserved its identity, its passions, and its habits. They foretold the future by the flight of birds and the inspection of the entrails of animals. An order of priestesses was devoted to perpetual virginity. Some of them dwelt in the wild reefs of the ocean, where they predicted and ra : sed tempests, and relieved human suffering by pretended supernatural power. Human sacrifices were practiced ; at times they crucified their victims on stakes within their temples, or shot them to death with darts and arrows. Often they made -i colossus, of wickerwork or hay, and filled it with living beings and lighted it with the torch, destroying their victims in clouds of fire and smoke. Their hierarchy was composed of three distinct Orders — the Druids, men of the oaks, were the first; their knowledge it required twenty years to acquire; it was all traditional, not written. Next came the priests, who performed the sacrifices nnd ceremonies of worship, and then (he bards, who were the genealogists of the clans, and sang the achievements of the chiefs, This, in brief, was the condition of the people, and from the mass of detestable wickedness and horrible superstitution did St. Patrick relieve them. But he did moie. He gave them a faith — a faith that enlightened them with a knowledge of the life eternal, and a faith thai made them the repositoiy of heavenly holiness and wisdom — with which they too were m turn to aid in evangelizing the Continent of Europe. During the fifth and sixth and to the eighth century, there was no country in the world that equalled Ireland in purity of doctrine, in number of religious communities, or in extent of learning. Free from invasion, she gave to the lovci-s of learning aud piety an asylum and a hospitable reception. From her shores there went such men as St. Columba to the Northern Picts, St. Fridolin to France and the Rhine, and the far-famed and great Columbanus, with his twelve followers, to France, Burgundy, Switzerland and Lombardy. And at this time the Anglo-Saxon race was unconverted. Irishmen established Bishoprics in England. In clouds, as numerous as bees, they went to England, and Englishmen went to Ireland to study, and Irishmen gave to the world such names as Erigona, Duns Scotus and St. Virgil. The Iris.li Clement was the second Rector of VM3 Studium of Paris, The Irish John founded the school of Pavia. PThe Emperor Frederick the Second, when he would establish a University at Naples, sent all the way to Ireland for the learned Peter to be its Rector. The whole of Ireland, with its family of philosophers, despising the dangers of the sea, migrated to the South. Those days never can return ; for the plain reason that then men were learned and taught by the living word, but now they teach nnd learn by the dead paper. It was to Ireland that England partly owed her own redemption from paganism, for Ireland supplied the whole western world with missionaries. — Hon. B. 11. Bbewsteb.