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The martyrs lost with joy their worldly honors, dignity, estates, friends, liberty, and lives, rather than forfeit for one moment their fidelity to God. They courageously bade defiance to pleasures and torments, to prosperity and adversity, to life and death, saying, with the apostle: Who shall separate us from the love of Jesus Christ? Crowns, sceptres, worldly riches, and pleasures, you have no charms which shall ever tempt me to depart in the least tittle from the allegiance which I owe to God. Alarming fears of the most dreadful evils, prisons, racks, fire, and death, in every shape of cruelty, you shall never shake my constancy. Nothing shall ever separate me from the love of Christ. This must be the sincere disposition of every Christian. Lying protestations of fidelity to God cost us nothing: but he sounds the heart. Is our constancy such as to bear evidence to our sincerity, that rather than to fail in the least duty to God, we are ready to resist to blood? and that we are always upon our guard to keep our ears shut to the voices of those syrens which never cease to lay snares to our senses?
ST. FINIAN, SURNAMED LOBHAR, OR THE LEPER,
WAS son of Conail, descended from Kian, the son of Alild, king of Munster. He was a disciple of St. Brendan, and flourished about the middle of the sixth century. He imitated the patience of Job, under a loathsome and tedious distemper, from which his surname was given him. The famous abbey of Innis-fallen, which stood in an island of that name, in the great and beautiful lake of Lough-Lane in the county of Kerry, was found ed by our saint.[1] A second, called from him Ardfinnan, he built in Tipperary; and a third at Cluainmore Madoc, in Leinster, where he was buried. He died on the 2d of February; but, says Colgan, his festival is kept on the 16th of March at all the above-mentioned places. Sir James Ware {599} speaks of two MS. histories of his life. See also Usher, (Antiq. c. 17,) Colgan, 17 Martii. Mr. Smith, in his natural and civil history of the county of Kerry, in 1755, p. 127.
Footnotes:
1. In the monastery of Innis-fallen was formerly kept a chronicle
called the Annals of Innis-fallen. They contain a sketch of
universal history, from the creation to the year 430. From that time
the annalist amply enough prosecutes the affairs of Ireland down to
the year 1215, when he wrote. They were continued by another hand to
1320. They are often quoted by Bishop Usher and Sir James Ware. An
imperfect transcript is kept among the MSS. of the library of
Trinity college, Dublin. Bishop Nicholson, in his {}ian Historical
Library, informs us, that the late duke of Chandos had a complete
copy of them.
MARCH XVII.
SAINT PATRICK, B.C.
APOSTLE OF IRELAND.
The Irish have many lives of their great apostle, whereof the two principal are, that compiled by Jocelin, a Cistercian monk, in the twelfth century, who quotes four lives written by disciples of the saint; and that by Probus, who, according to Bollandus, lived in the seventh century. But in both are intermixed several injudicious popular reports. We, with Tillemont, chiefly confine ourselves to the saint's own writings, his Confession, and his letter to Corotic, which that judicious critic doubts not to be genuine. The style in both is the same; he is expressed in them to be the author; the Confession is quoted by all the authors of his life, and the letter was written before the conversion of the Franks under king Clovis, in 496. See Tillemont, t. 16, p. 455, and Brininnia Sancta.