And when the firelight melted into the dawn, the white-robed catechumens were awake and moving in festive processions from place to place, and all the land was full of songs of joy—new songs. Patrick throughout his mission to Ireland from the beginning had aimed straight at the hearts of her people, at the consciences of her chiefs, at the hearts of her poets.
Among his first converts was the chief poet, Dubthach, the Laureate of the nation. And now new songs were pouring forth from their lips. Their harps were strung to the heavenly music, so that from the beginning, for Ireland, the harp became the symbol at once of patriotism and faith.
From the first all that was best and noblest and wisest in the land—all the artistic skill, all the wisdom and knowledge Ireland had—were laid at the feet of Christ. Druids and bards became priests and singers of the Christian Church. Not as an iconoclast of all the beauty and wisdom already existing did Christianity win Ireland; but consecrating all that was already wise, perfecting all that was already beautiful. As far as possible the existing organization was accepted. Bishops were the bishops, not of a territory, but of a clan, or kindred group of men. The old laws were not destroyed, but expanded and raised into the new. Patrick, though himself a Gallo-Roman, learnt in every sense the language of the people, the language of their hearts. There is scarcely another European nation that has, breathing through the first moments of its Christian life, a hymn in its own mother-tongue. But Patrick’s hymn was the Hymnus Scoticus, the Irish hymn in which every peasant mother could teach her little children “the Practice of the Presence of God,” binding daily round them as a constant “lorica” or breastplate in the daily battle the invocation—
“Christ within us,
Christ around us;
Christ beneath us,
Christ above us,”
always and for ever.
And, moreover, in every place where he came and founded a colony of Christians, Patrick left, if possible, a copy of the Gospels, or both “the Testaments of God.” These were indeed in Latin, but then, necessarily, Latin was the key to the treasuries of all the ages. And Patrick in bringing Ireland into the kingdom of God brought her also into the inheritance of all the civilized past, lifting in a sacred ark above the floods of Danish barbarism and Moslem fanaticism, so soon to sweep over the nations, not only the revelation of God, but the wisdom of Greece and Rome.