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.
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