Of the lives of the saint, the least valuable of all is that by Jocelin, an English monk, who wrote soon after the conquest. This is given in the Bollandists and in Messingham's Florilegium. Earlier and better lives, four in number, were collected and published by Colgan in his Acta Triadis Thaumaturgae, a work of which we doubt the existence of a copy on this side of the Atlantic.
Among these earlier lives, one by Probus is of much value. It was printed, strangely enough, among the works of Venerable Bede, in the Basil edition of that father issued in 1563, and, apparently, the whole work was taken from manuscripts preserved at the Irish convent at Bobbio.
These are the more important material for the life of the apostle of Ireland, together with unpublished matter in some very ancient Irish manuscripts, codices known for centuries, such as the Book of Armagh, a manuscript of the eighth or ninth century, which contains a life of Saint Patrick by Muirchu-Maccu-Mactheni; the Leabhar Breac, considered the most valuable Irish manuscript on ecclesiastical matters; the Tripartite Life in the British Museum, the early national annals, etc.
As to the antiquity and value of these ancient codices Westwood in his Palaeographia Sacra Pictoria (London, 1843-5) may be consulted.
For the liturgy of the early Irish Church, we have a missal preserved at Stowe, in England, and ascribed to the sixth century, but which unfortunately has never been fully and completely published; a missal preserved in the monastery founded by Saint Columbanus at Bobbio, and printed by Mabillon in his Iter Italicum; the Antiphonarium Benchorense; the Exposition of the Ceremonies of the Mass preserved in the Leabhar Breac and a treatise on the Mass Vestments in the same volume, as well as the Liber Hymnorum, and various separate hymns.
The lives of the Irish saints, many of which have been published by Colgan, Messingham, the Bollandists, as well as the meagre Irish secular annals, throw much light on the social and religious life of the ancient Irish.
Such is, in brief, the documentary array to be appealed to in the controversy, as to the origin and character of the Irish Church.
And surely what has come down in fragments shows a church which the Anglican Church could not but condemn. The warmest advocate of the identity of the Anglican Church in Ireland with the early Irish Church, would find the old Irish mass, as preserved in the Stowe or the Bobbio missal, a very objectionable worship; the monks and nuns unsuited to our age; and the prayers, penitentiary, and belief in miraculous powers in the church utterly inconsistent with Protestant ideas; while the Catholic Irish would find the mass, if said in one of their churches, so like that they daily hear, that it would excite scarce a word of comment; monks and nuns would certainly excite less; and the prayers of that early day still circulate with the commendation of the actual head of the Catholic Church, the successor of Celestine.
The position having been abandoned that St. Patrick never existed, national pride, which from the days of Jocelin has bent its energies to prove that he was a Briton of the island of Great Britain and born in Scotland, now would prove that he was a genuine Englishman in his total renunciation of papal authority.