Legends of St. Patrick.
March 16, 1889Some of the Marvelous Deeds Ascribed Him by Ancient Scribes.
The reader unfamiliar with Catholic, especially Irish Catholic, literature is apt to fall into the error that the legends and stories of St. Patrick are essential parts of the Catholic faith. They are no more so—by much less so—than the popular jokes credited to Abraham Lincoln and the popular stories about him are essential parts of American history. Aside from her authentic lives of the saints, neither affirms or denies. The legends are to be read and admired for their beauty or humor—the amount of truth in them is simply a matter of historic criticism. A few instances are here given:
One legend relates that before the boy Patrick arrived in Ireland as a slave the Druid priests inscribed on a rock in the domain of Miliue a quatrain that it was unbecoming to believe one who had been his servant. Then, adds the old legend, as complacently as if it were the most natural thing in the world,
“A demon cam in counsel to him, he went into his royal house with his gold and silver; and he set the house on fire and was burned with all the treasures, and his soul went to hell.”
The same author gives us a long history of miracles performed by St. Patrick, and concludes his collection with this.
“The annals of the Lord Jesus Christ, the year of this Life of St. Patrick was written, 1477, and to-morrow will be Lammas night. And in the Baile-in-Miouin, in the House of Troightigh, this was written by Dohmnall Albanuch O’Troightigh: et Deo gratias Jesu.”
“And to-morrow will be Lammas night!” Would anyone be an Irishman have thought of fixing the date:
Two hundred years later another collected the legends of St. Patrick, but in his preface one can easily see proof that they were not so generally believed, for he says: “Wherefore, in reading the lives and acts of the saints composed in a rude manner or barbarous dialect, disgust is often excited and not seldom tardiness of belief. And hence it is that the life of the most glorious priest, Patrick, the patron and apostle of Ireland, so illustrious in signs and miracles, being frequently written by illiterate persons, is by most people neither liked nor understood.
“But if any snake in the way or serpent in the path shall easily accuse us herein of presumption, and attack our hand with the viper tooth, yet we with the blessed Paul, collect the vine twigs for the fire and cast the vaper into the flame.”
And after this rather serious waning he goes on to relate a series of most extraordinary miracles, how St. Patrick restored a boy who had been torn to pieces by wild hogs; how he caused fountains to spring up in dry places and bogs to dry; how he raised the dead, cured disease, overthrew the Druid magicians, confounded assassins and neutralized poisons, and how, finally, when he saw that the demon continually made use of the serpents and dragons, he collected all the vile crawlers into one place and drove them into the sea, never again to have a place in Ireland.
source: The Lowell Sun
location: Lowell, Massachusetts
