The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 1922. FAITH AND FATHERLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 16 March 1922, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 1922. FAITH AND FATHERLAND

«T the - end of the fourth century Roman v ///ss& civilisation was threatened with extinction 'i/wiiW at the hands of barbarian invaders who were soon.-to sweep down over southern Europe. In these remote years the aim and the hope of the - Christian leaders was to defend religion against the foes that arose against ** the Roman Empire, and for long no man thought of carrying the standard of the Cross beyond the imperial frontiers. No call to distant conquest came for years, and the strife went on and champions like St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, and St, Augustine spent their lives defending the Church against Nestorians and Arians in the East and West. At length there came to St. Patrick that call which was to bear such miraculous fruit in the ages to come. He had escaped from slavery in Ireland, and had been ordained priest among his own friends when, direct from God, he received the command that was to mean so much for the whole Church from his day to our own. “In a vision of the nighty he tells us, “I saw a man coming as if from Ireland with many letters, and he gave one of them to me which purported to be ‘ the voice of the Irish ’; and while I read it, I thought I heard the voices of those who dwelt beside the wood of Focluth which is by the western sea, and thus they cried as if with one voice, * We pray thee, holy youth, to come and walk once more among us.’ Thanks be to God that after many years the Lord heard their appeal.” He told St. Germain of the voices, and was advised to go to the Pope. For a long time he received no encouragement, and years went by and he left behind his youth and passed to middle age, still waiting and still praying for the word to go forth and bring the Gospel of Christ to the people whose voices constantly pleaded with him to return among them. He was sixty years of age when at length Pope Celestine, in the year 432, spoke the word and sent him on his mission to the Irish. »

With Christ to protect him, Christ below- him, and Christ above him; with the Power of God to guide him, the Might of God to uphold him, the Wisdom of God to teach him, and the Eye of God to watch over him, he went through Ireland and converted the whole people who heard him with reverence and yielded to him without bloodshed, until, full of years and worn

out with labors, he was laid to rest by a sorrowing people in the hallowed grave at Downpatrick. His life was full of miracles, but the most wonderful of them all was his conquest of Ireland for Christ. His success was in itself a miracle, but greater still was the miracle by virtue of which his children and their descendants preserved, in spite of the Gates of Hell, the Faith he brought them. Other nations have had the Faith and lost it; other Churches have flourished and faded but the Church is in Ireland to-day living and beautiful, bound with unbroken links across the centuries with the preaching of Patrick, who came from Rome and taught our fathers the lesson which neither they nor we ever forgot: As ye are Christians, be ye also Roman*. We look back now and thank God for the fidelity with which Ireland kept that commandment. We see her drinking in eagerly not only the religion but also the learning and the culture of Rome; we see her 'sending forth missionaries and scholars who wandered as far afield as Iceland and Egypt, preaching the Gospel and founding schools in which torches kindled in far away Erin shone amid the darkness that brooded over the rest of the world ; we see holy and patient Irish missionaries saving for the world the older civilisations of Greece and Rome and placing Europe under a debt never acknowledged and by most forgotten. All this was in the glorious years during which Ireland won her proud title of "the Island of Saints and Scholars," when students from distant lands thronged her schools, and when she was an independent State, embodying a civilisation of great beauty, justlv famed and distinguished among the learned men of Europe. Providence allowed her to grow strong, to reach a splendid standard of perfection in those days when she was ranked as one of the four original constituent States of Europe, and worthy to take precedence even of Spain in the councils of the civilised world. And she wanted all her strength for the dark day that was soon to dawn for her, and all her sanctity for the suffering that was to be her food and drink for long centuries to come. We look back again and see the Danes- ravaging and plundering and massacring until Brian at last drove them from a devastated and wasted country; we see the Normans sailing into Bag-in-Bun Bay and landing on the steep cliffs from which they looked upon the green hills and woody glens and shining rivers amid which for seven hundred years to fellow their landing was to be waged a bloody and cruel war between them and the Irish people. War, famines, misery, treachery, sacrilege, murder were the gifts the English brought to the children of Patrick. Poor Ireland was crushed to the dust; her churches burned, her schools razed to the earth, her priesthood hunted like wolves, her Faith banned by legislation, her industries destroyed, not during one or two years but during seven hundred years. .Henry VIII.. Elizabeth, Cromwell, George, Victoria, no matter who reigned, the policy was the same: the same when the decree of Cromwell was "to hell or to Connacht," and the same when the soldiers of England murdered Canon Magner on a roadside in Cork two years ago. But it was all in vain. In their misery and anguish the people were alwavs able to gather round a hunted priest who gave them the Bread of Life; in their deepest degradation ' they kept alive the tradition of their splendid past and repeated with deathless hope the prophecies that told them of the dawning of a day when their nation should stand erect and & beautiful again. And it was a wonderful thing that amid squalor and poverty they, time and again, when unmolested, built as if by instinct some approximation to the polity that was developed by the scholars and statesmen of ancient Erin.

Who shall say that this deathless clinging to Faith and Fatherland was not a miracle? Who shall say now that Jvialachy's prophecy was in vain ? The seven centuries of oppression are over; Erin is arising from her captivity and shaking off her chains; already the minds of her gifted children have been busy among her ancient records, delving deep into the wise statecraft of the past for guidance in the task of rebuilding the Christian civilisation which shall be a model and a lesson to the degenerate and sordid States,of modern

times. The young men who have led her from captivity were supported all through their fight by the supernatural consolations of the Faith that came to them direct from Patrick, and the young men who died on the road to victory were attended to the last by sagarts whose Orders are a link in the unbroken chain which, began when Celestine sent Patrick to Ireland. From the fifth century to the twentieth Ireland has been true to Faith and Fatherland, miraculously and gloriously true, with a constancy under trials that no nation on earth has ever equalled. Now she arises and, with her face radiant with hope and courage, turns towards the dawn that has at last flushed the horizon. She has

conquered, and she has justified the sufferings and tears of the dead who died for her sake. Young in her hopes for the future, as she is old in her Faith and in her sufferings, Erin, green Erin, will, with God's blessing, be strong and noble and rich in beneficent inspiration among the nations of the old, weary world; but, above all, may she be, in the years ahead as she wa3 in the past, worthy of St. Patrick and of our fathers who handed down to us, pure and unsullied, the great gift of the Faith of Christ.