Saint Patrick | Page 3

books. The
shelves are simple affairs of stained maple, covered heavily with
successive coats of varnish, cracked, as is that of the desk, by age and
heat. The contents are varied. Of religious works there are the
Septuagint, in two fat little blue volumes, like Roman candles; Conant's
Genesis; Hodge on Romans; Hackett on Acts, which the minister's
small children used to spell out as "Jacket on Acts;" Knott on the
Fallacies of the Antinomians; A Tour in Syria; Dr. Grant and the
Mountain Nestorians, and six Hebrew Lexicons, singed by fire,--a
paternal inheritance.
There are a good many works, too, of general literature, but rather
oddly selected, as will happen where one makes up his library chiefly
by writing book-notices: Peter Bayne's Essays; Coleridge; the first
volume of Masson's Life of Milton; Vanity Fair; the Dutch Republic;
the Plurality of Worlds; and Mommsen's Rome. That very attractive
book in red you need not take down; it is only the history of Norwalk,
Conn., with the residence of J. T. Wales, Esq., for a frontispiece; the
cover is all there is to it. Finally, there are two shelves of Patent Office
Reports, and Perry's Expedition to Japan with a panoramic view of
Yeddo. This shows that the minister has numbered a congressman
among his flock.
It is here that Dr. Parsons is diligently engaged, this cold March
afternoon, to the music of his crackling air-tight stove. He is deeply
absorbed in his task, and we may peep in and not disturb him. He has a
large number of books spread out before him; but looking them over,
we miss Lange's Commentaries, Bengel's Gnomon, Cobb on
Galatians,--those safe and sound authorities always provided with the
correct view.

The books which lie before the Doctor seem all to, deal with a Romish
Saint, and, of all the saints in the world, Saint Patrick. In full sight of
his own steeple, from which the bell is even now counting out the
sixty-nine years of a good brother just passed away in hope of a
Protestant heaven,--tolling out the years for the village housewives,
who pause and count; under such hallowing influences,--beneath, as it
were, the very shadow of the Missionary Map and the Pauline Chart,
and with a gray Jordan rushing down through a scarlet Palestine
directly before him, suggestive of all good things; with Knott on the
Fallacies at his right hand, and with Dowling on Romanism on his left,
the Doctor is actually absorbed in Papistical literature. Here are the
works of Dr. Lanigan and Father Colgan and Monseigneur Moran.
Here is the "Life and Legends of Saint Patrick," illustrated, with a
portrait in gilt of Brian Boru on the cover. Here are the Tripartite Life,
in Latin, and the saint's Confession, and the Epistle to Co-roticus, the
Ossianic Poems, and Miss Cusack's magnificent quarto, which the
Doctor has borrowed from the friendly priest at the factory village four
miles away, who borrowed it from the library of the Bishop to lend to
him.
Perhaps you have never undertaken to prepare a life of Saint Patrick. If
so, you have no idea of the difficulties of the task. In the first place, you
must settle the question whether Saint Patrick ever existed. And this is
a disputed point; for while there are those, like Father Colgan, whose
clear faith accepts Saint Patrick just as he stands in history and tradition,
yet, on the other hand, there are sceptics, like Ledwick, who contend
that the saint is nothing but a prehistoric myth, floating about in the
imagination of the Irish people.
Having settled to your satisfaction that Patrick really lived, you must
next proceed to fix the date of his birth; and here you enter upon
complicated calculations. You will probably decide to settle first, as a
starting-point, the date of the saint's escape from captivity; and to do
this you will have to reconcile the fact that after the captivity he paid a
friendly visit to his kinsman, Saint Martin of Tours, who died in 397,
with the fact that he was not captured until 400.

Next you will come to the matter of the saint's birthplace; and this is a
delicate question, for you will have to decide between the claims of
Ireland, of Scotland, and of France; and you will very probably find
yourself finally driven to the conclusion--for the evidence points that
way--that Saint Patrick was a Frenchman.
Next comes the question of the saint's length of days; and if you
attempt to include only the incidents of his life of which there can be no
possible doubt, you will stretch his age on until you will probably fix it
at one hundred and twenty years.
But when you have settled the existence, the date of birth, and the
nationality