If there is one thing that people who are not Catholic have gone wrong
upon more than another in the intellectual things of life, it is the
conception of a Personality. They are muddled about it where their own
little selves are concerned, they misappreciate it when they deal with
the problems of society, and they have a very weak hold of it when they
consider (if they do consider) the nature of Almighty God.
Now, personality is everything. It was a Personal Will that made all
things, visible and invisible. Our hope of immortality resides in this,
that we are persons, and half our frailties proceed from a
misapprehension of the awful responsibilities which personality
involves or a cowardly ignorance of its powers of self-government.
The hundred and one errors which this main error leads to include a bad
error on the nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or
anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or
muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual
Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function
of legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and
has no grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from
some personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be
a rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret
Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, because in their
origin they so exactly serve to explain or illustrate some personal
character in a man which no cold statement could give.
Now St. Patrick, the whole story and effect of him, is a matter of
Personality. There was once—twenty or thirty years ago—a whole school
of dunderheads who wondered whether St. Patrick ever existed, because
the mass of legends surrounding his name troubled them. How on earth
(one wonders) do such scholars consider their fellow-beings! Have they
ever seen a crowd cheering a popular hero, or noticed the expression
upon men’s faces when they spoke of some friend of striking power
recently dead? A great growth of legends around a man is the very best
proof you could have not only of his existence but of the fact that he
was an origin and a beginning, and that things sprang from his will or
his vision. There were some who seemed to think it a kind of favour
done to the indestructible body of Irish Catholicism when Mr. Bury
wrote his learned Protestant book upon St. Patrick. It was a critical
and very careful bit of work, and was deservedly praised; but the
favour done us I could not see! It is all to the advantage of
non-Catholic history that it should be sane, and that a great
Protestant historian should make true history out of a great historical
figure was a very good sign. It was a long step back towards common
sense compared with the German absurdities which had left their victims
doubting almost all the solid foundation of the European story; but as
for us Catholics, we had no need to be told it. Not only was there a
St. Patrick in history, but there is a St. Patrick on the shores of his
eastern sea and throughout all Ireland to-day. It is a presence that
stares you in the face, and physically almost haunts you. Let a man
sail along the Leinster coast on such a day as renders the Wicklow
Mountains clear up-weather behind him, and the Mourne Mountains perhaps
in storm, lifted clearly above the sea down the wind. He is taking some
such course as that on which St. Patrick sailed, and if he will land
from time to time from his little boat at the end of each day’s
sailing, and hear Mass in the morning before he sails further
northward, he will know in what way St. Patrick inhabits the soil which
he rendered sacred.
We know that among the marks of holiness is the working of miracles.
Ireland is the greatest miracle any saint ever worked. It is a miracle
and a nexus of miracles. Among other miracles it is a nation raised
from the dead.
The preservation of the Faith by the Irish is an historical miracle
comparable to nothing else in Europe. There never was, and please God
never can be, so prolonged and insanely violent a persecution of men by
their fellow-men as was undertaken for centuries against the Faith in
Ireland: and it has completely failed. I know of no example in history
of failure following upon such effort. It had behind it in combination
the two most powerful of the evil passions of men, terror and greed.
And so amazing is it that they did not attain their end, that
perpetually as one reads one finds the authors of the dreadful business
now at one period, now at another, assuming with certitude that their
success is achieved. Then, after centuries, it is almost suddenly
perceived—and in our own time—that it has not been achieved and never
will be.
What a complexity of strange coincidences combined, coming out of
nothing as it were, advancing like spirits summoned on to the stage,
all to effect this end! Think of the American Colonies; with one little
exception they were perhaps the most completely non-Catholic society of
their time. Their successful rebellion against the mother country meant
many things, and led to many prophecies. Who could have guessed that
one of its chief results would be the furnishing of a free refuge for
the Irish?
The famine, all human opinion imagined, and all human judgment was
bound to conclude, was a mortal wound, coming in as the ally of the
vile persecution I have named. It has turned out the very contrary.
From it there springs indirectly the dispersion, and that power which
comes from unity in dispersion, of Irish Catholicism.
Who, looking at the huge financial power that dominated Europe, and
England in particular, during the youth of our own generation, could
have dreamt that in any corner of Europe, least of all in the poorest
and most ruined corner of Christendom, an effective resistance could be
raised?
Behind the enemies of Ireland, furnishing them with all their modern
strength, was that base and secret master of modern things, the usurer.
He it was far more than the gentry of the island who demanded toll,
and, through the mortgages on the Irish estates, had determined to
drain Ireland as he has drained and rendered desert so much else. Is it
not a miracle that he has failed?
Ireland is a nation risen from the dead; and to raise one man from the
dead is surely miraculous enough to convince one of the power of a
great spirit. This miracle, as I am prepared to believe, is the last
and the greatest of St. Patrick’s.
When I was last in Ireland, I bought in the town of Wexford a coloured
picture of St. Patrick which greatly pleased me. Most of it was green
in colour, and St. Patrick wore a mitre and had a crosier in his hand.
He was turning into the sea a number of nasty reptiles: snakes and
toads and the rest. I bought this picture because it seemed to me as
modern a piece of symbolism as ever I had seen: and that was why I
bought it for my children and for my home.
There was a few pence change, but I did not want it. The person who
sold me the picture said they would spend the change in candles for St.
Patrick’s altar. So St. Patrick is still alive.