which both Daniel and Neale praise for its noble simplicity. An old Irish legend, to which we need not pin our faith, represents Patrick and his nephew Sechnall as hearing the angels sing it first, during the offertory before the communion, and adds, “So from that time to the present that hymn is chanted in Erinn when the body of Christ is received.” Singing at the communion was not unusual in the early Church, and Gregory of Tours has preserved an antiphon used at that sacrament which closely resembles the Irish hymn. But it is now disused.
The hymn is found in the Bangor Antiphonary, an old Irish manuscript of the seventh century, first published by Muratori in his Anecdota (1697-98). From Bangor it had been carried to Bobbio, the famous monastery founded on Italian soil by the Irish missionary Columbanus after he had been driven out of Burgundy by the reigning powers. From Bobbio it made its way to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where Muratori found it. It is one of the most interesting monuments of the early Irish Church, and its hymns are given or indicated by Daniel in his fourth volume. The first is a series of quintains, each for one of the canonical hours. Then the Hymnum dicat turba fratrum, which already Beda described as hymnus ille pulcherrimus, is found in a mutilated form in the Antiphonary, and ascribed to Hilary. It is a terse rehearsal of the facts of our Lord’s birth, life, passion, and resurrection. Daniel suggests that it is one of the primitive hymns of the martyr-ages of the Church to which Pliny refers, and brought into Latin from the original Greek by some scholarly Briton or Irish man. Then a hymn in commemoration of the Apostles (Precamur Patrem), of which also Daniel thinks that Irish scholarship may have rendered from the Greek. Then a morning hymn based on the Constantinopolitan creed (Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae); and another in honor of the martyrs (Sacratissimi Martyres summi Dei); the Lorica of Lathacan; and two hymns in honor of St. Patrick, one by Sechnall and the other by Fiacc. Daniel gives only the former, which is an abecedary hymn. Both are full of the marvellous—an element not wanting even in the contemporary documents of Patrick’s life, and quite abundant in those of later date.
Besides these there are four other hymns which Mone has shown to be of Irish authorship. The first is the Jesus refulsit omnium, which has been ascribed to Hilary, but is shown not to be his not only by the rhyme, but by the alliteration which marks it as originating in the North of Europe. It is found in manuscripts, German and English, of the eleventh century; but Mone ascribes it to an Irish author both because of the strophe employed and because of the mixture of Greek words with the Latin, the Irish being the best Greek scholars of the West, and being not disinclined to show off their erudition in this way. Another is an abecedary hymn, Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera, famous as having been supposed by some stupid critic to be the lost evening hymn which Hilary sent from the East to his daughter along with the Lucis largitor splendide. It probably is as old as the sixth or seventh century, both the structure of the verse and the allusions to pagan beliefs and Christian heresies indicating that antiquity. The use of alliteration and other peculiarities indicate an Irish author, but probably a monk of Bobbio, as the accentuated Sapphic verse was in use in that country. Here are seven of its most characteristic stanzas:
To the clear stars of heaven I am not worthy
The base eyes of my most sad behavior
Even to lift: weighed down with sorrows earthy,
Spare me, O Saviour.
Boon which I ought to show I have neglected,
Evil I did: no limit might resist me;
Crime by no secret conscience was rejected;