The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 113

Where there are a number of the same articles of clothing to be made, it is advisable to cut out one garment first, being careful to take the pattern in paper, and to complete it before cutting out the rest of the material. By this means an opinion can be formed as to whether it fits properly and any necessary alterations may be made. The other articles may then be cut out all together, care being taken to pin the separate parts together, to avoid their being mislaid or any mistakes made. It is no doubt essential that sewing should be neatly done, but I think this need not be achieved at the entire expense of all rapidity of execution. It really is perfectly ludicrous to see some women at their work. They look at each st.i.tch when completed, and give it a little approving pat with the top of the thimble; and at this rate, though the neatness of the work may be undeniable, still so little is accomplished, that it is hardly worth the trouble of doing it at all. Method in plain-work is also highly necessary, and much time and labor may be spared by keeping all the materials in the proper places. If every article when done with is put away carefully, it is sure to be forthcoming when again required. Thus, there is no time wasted in searching for a missing reel of cotton, or hunting up a pair of scissors. The cleanliness of the work is also thereby kept unimpaired.

The greatest care should be taken with the pieces of broken needles, which are too apt to be left carelessly about the floor, and which are most dangerous, especially when there are any young children in the house. I must confess, and I do it with shame, that there was a time when I was not as careful as I am now. I never shall forget my husband's indignation upon coming into my room one day, where our second baby was crawling about on the ground, at finding a piece of a broken needle in her hand, quite ready to put it in her mouth. I think he was more angry with me then than he had ever been before during our married life. It was certainly a good lesson to me, for I have been most careful ever since, and I'll trouble him or anybody else to find a broken needle about my carpet _now_. Waste should be carefully avoided, both with regard to ends of cotton and pieces of material.

The sc.r.a.ps of the latter which are too small to be of any use, instead of being left littered about the room, should be thrown into a waste-basket, to be cleared by the housemaid, and the larger pieces should be tidily put away. The time will probably come when they will be required for some purpose or other; and if pinned up in a tight bundle they will not occupy much s.p.a.ce in a drawer or basket kept for the purpose.

I trust I have not ridden my hobby to death, nor worn out the patience of my readers, but it is a subject the importance of which I strongly feel. It must not, however, be supposed that I advocate the cultivation of work to the exclusion of more intellectual pursuits, or that I wish to take the bread from the mouth of my poorer sister. I consider a thorough {744} knowledge of the science of plain-work to be essential to every woman, be she rich or poor, and that in it she will always find a sphere of usefulness. It will, if cultivated, turn out for her own benefit, and the comfort and happiness of those around her, and surely it shall be said of her that "her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her."

THE BIRTHPLACE OF SAINT PATRICK.

BY J. CASHEL HOEY.

The question of the birthplace of St. Patrick--a question which has been debated with considerable learning and acrimony for several centuries--has always seemed to me to have an interest far beyond the rival claims of clans and the jealous litigation of the antiquary. It is interesting not merely because it is in reality a curious archaeological problem, but also because it may in some measure afford a clue to the character of one of the greatest saints and greatest men of his own age or of any other--a saint who was the apostle of a nation which he found all heathen and left all Christian; who succeeded in planting the Catholic faith without a single act of martyrdom, but planted it so firmly that it has never failed for now 1,400 years, though tried in what various processes of martyrdom G.o.d and man too well know; a saint whose apostolate was the mainspring of an endless succession of missionary enterprises, prosecuted with the same untiring zeal in the nineteenth century as in the fifth, wherever the vanguard of Christendom may happen to be found, whether in Austria, in Gaul, in Switzerland, or in Iceland, as now at the furthest confines of America and of Australasia. Add to these ordinary evidences of the supernatural efficacy of St. Patrick's mission the testimony which is derived from the peculiar spiritual character of the people that he converted. The Irish nation retains the impress which it received from the hands of St. Patrick in a way that I believe no other Christian nation has preserved the mould of its apostle. If that nation has never even dreamed of heresy or schism, it is because, in terms as positive as an ultramontane of our own days could devise, [Footnote 119] St. Patrick established the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff as a chief canon of the Irish Church.

Patience in poverty, an innate love of purity, prodigal alms-giving, and mutual charities, the practice of heavy penances and of long fasts, a peculiarly vivid sense of purgatory, and a strong devotion to the doctrine of the Trinity, which the saint taught in the figure of the shamrock--these have always been the distinguishing characteristics of Irish piety. They were the peculiar characteristics of the Christian of the fourth century, who had not yet learned to live at peace with the world--who felt that as yet Christians were in the strictest sense one family community--who practised mortification, as if the untamed pagan {745} blood were still burning in his veins, and the great temptation to whose faith was the heresy of Arius, and the question of the relations of the three divine persons. But St.

Patrick was not only a great saint--was not merely and simply the apostle of the Irish; he was their teacher and their lawgiver, their Cadmus and Lycurgus as well. The school of letters which he founded in Ireland so well preserved the learning which had become all but extinguished throughout western Europe, that your own Alfred, following a host of your n.o.bles and clerics, went thither to be taught, and the universities of Paris and Pavia owe their earliest lights to Irish scholars. The Brehon laws, which are at last to be published, by order of Parliament, a complete code of the most minute and comprehensive character, were, according to the evidence of our annalists, carefully revised and remodelled by St. Patrick, with the consent of the different estates of the kingdom of Ireland; and there is good reason to believe that this revision, of which there is abundant intrinsic evidence, had reference not merely to the Christian doctrine and the canons of the Church, but to the body of the Roman civil law.

[Footnote 119: "Quaecunqne causa valde difficilis exorta fuerit atque ignota cun?tis Scotorum gentis jadicils, ad cathedram archiepiscopi Hibernensium, atque hujus antist.i.tis examinationem recte referenda. Si vero in illa, c.u.m suis sapientibus, facile sanari non poterit talis causa praedictae negotiationis, ad Sedem Apostolicam decrevimus esse mittendam; id est, ad Petri Apostoli cathedram, auctoritatem Romae urbis habentem." This canon of St.

Patrick is contained in the "Book of Armagh," the antiquity of which is instanced in the text of the present paper. The canon is of a date early in the fifth century; and it would be difficult to show so early, so emphatic and so complete a recognition of the Papal authority in the ecclesiastical legislation of any other national church.]

It would throw a certain light upon the character of a saint whose works were so various and so full of vitality, if we could arrive at any solid conclusion as to the place of his nativity, the quality of his parentage, and the sources of his education. The theory most generally accepted, and which certainly has the greatest weight of authority in its favor, is that which a.s.sumes that St. Patrick was born in Scotland, at Dumbarton, on the Clyde--the son, as we may suppose, of a French or British official employed in the Roman service at that extreme outpost of their settlements in this island, where he would have spent his youth surrounded by a perpetual clangor of barbarous battle, amid clans of Picts and Celts swarming across the barriers of the Lowland. The opinion that St. Patrick was a Scotchman has the unanimous a.s.sent of all the antiquaries of Scotland; but I am not aware that any of them has succeeded in identifying any single locality named in the original doc.u.ments with any place of sufficient antiquity in or near Dumbarton; nor could I, in the course of a careful examination of the district and the recognized authorities concerning its topography, arrive at any acceptable evidence on the subject. I have to add to the Scotch authorities and pleadings, however, all the best of the Irish. That St. Patrick was born in Scotland is the opinion of Colgan, [Footnote 120] a writer whose services to the history of the Irish Church cannot be excelled and have not been equalled. The opinion of Colgan has overborne almost every other authority which intervened between his time and the present. The Bollandists [Footnote 121] accepted it without hesitation; and I hasten to add to their great sanction that of the two most learned antiquaries of the latter days of Ireland, Dr. John O'Donovan and Professor Eugene O'Curry. They, I am aware, were also of Colgan's opinion; and so, I believe, are Dr. Reeves and Dr. Todd, whose views on most points of ecclesiastical antiquities connected with Ireland are ent.i.tled to be named with every respect.

[Footnote 120: Colga.n.u.s, R. P. F. Joannes, "_Triadis Thaumaturgae, sen Divorum Patricii, Columbae, et Brigidiaetrium Hiberniae Patronorum, Acta_." Lovanii, 1647.]

[Footnote 121: "_Acta Sanctorum Martii_" a Joanne Bollando, tom. il.

Antverpiae, 1668.]

Still it is to be said, on the other hand, that the opinion that St.

Patrick was born in France has always had a traditional establishment in Ireland. It is a.s.serted in one of the oldest of his lives, that of St. Eleran, and indicated in another, that of Probus. Don Philip O'Sullivan Bearre [Footnote 122] is not the first nor the last of the more modern biographers of the saint who has held that he was of French birth, though of British blood. But before the time of Dr.

Lanigan, the most acute, the {746} most conscientious, and perhaps the most generally learned of Irish historians, there appears to have been no really candid and scientific examination of the original doc.u.ments and evidences. Irish scholars were too angrily engaged in the controversy of Scotia Major and Scotia Minor to be seriously regarded when they proposed to remove St. Patrick's birthplace from the neighborhood of Glasgow to the neighborhood of Nantes. Until Dr.

Lanigan published his Ecclesiastical History, [Footnote 123] no one seems to have even attempted to identify he localities named in the various original doc.u.ments which concern the saint. Dr. Lanigan came to the conclusion that he was born not at Dumbarton but in France, at or in the neighborhood of Boulogne-sur-Mer. I am able, I hope, to perfect the proof which Dr. Lanigan commenced, and which, if he had been enabled to follow it up by local research and by the light lately cast on the geography of Roman Gaul, would, I am sure, have come far more complete from his hands.

[Footnote 122: D. Philippi O'Sullevani Bearri Iberni, "_Patritiana Decas_." Madrid, 1629.]

[Footnote 123: Lanigan, John, D.D. "An Ecclesiastical History of Ireland." Dublin, 1820.]

I hold, then, with Doctor Lanigan, and with a tradition which has long existed in Ireland, and also in France, that St. Patrick was born on the coast of Armoric Gaul; and that Roman in one sense by descent--by his education in a province where Roman civilization had long prevailed, where the Latin language was spoken, and the privileges of the empire fully possessed--Roman too by the possession of n.o.bility, which he himself declares, and of which his name was a curious commemoration [Footnote 124]--Roman, in fine, in the connection of his family which he testifies with the Roman government and with the Church, St. Patrick was a Celt of Gaul by blood. The fact that the district between Boulogne and Amiens was at that time inhabited by a clan called Britanni has misled both those who supposed he must have been born in the island of Britain and those who held that, if born in France, he must have been born in that part of it which was subsequently called Brittany.

[Footnote 124: Gibbon says ("Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,"

v. vi.) "At this period the meanest subjects of the Roman empire a.s.sumed the ill.u.s.trious name of Patricius, which by the conversion of Ireland has been communicated to a whole nation." It is supposed that the name was conferred on St. Patrick in consideration of his parting with his n.o.bility for a motive of charity, as he mentions in his Epistle to Coroticus. But he was certainly not the first of the name. Patricius was also the name of St. Augustine's father, born fully a century before.]

The original doc.u.ments which bear on the point are only two in number --the "Confession" of St. Patrick himself, and the hymn in his honor composed by his disciple St. Fiech. Of the antiquity of these doc.u.ments we have evidence the most complete that can be conceived.

Not merely does written history certify the record of their age--they have borne much more delicate tests. The hymn of St. Fiech is written in a dialect of Irish that is to the Irish of the Four Masters as the English of Chaucer is to the English of Lord Macaulay. The quotations of Scripture which are given in the "Confession" of St. Patrick are taken from the version according to the interpretation of the Septuagint, and not according to the recent version of St. Jerome, which had indeed been just executed in St. Patrick's time, but had not yet been publicly received. At the same time, the "Liber Armacha.n.u.s,"

which contains the original copy of the "Confession," contains also St. Jerome's translation of the New Testament--thus curiously marking the fact that the date of the one doc.u.ment by a little preceded the date of the other. The ma.n.u.script itself has been subjected to a most curious and rigorous examination. The authentic signature of Brian, Imperator Hibernorum, commonly called Brian Boroimhe, on the occasion of his visit to Armagh, carries us back at a bound eight hundred years in its history; but the scholar who is expert in the hue of vellum and the style of the scribe, will tell us that the "Book of Armagh" was {747} evidently a book of venerable age even then. The Rev. Charles Graves, [Footnote 125] a fellow of the University of Dublin, and a scholar specially skilled in the study of the Irish ma.n.u.scripts and hieroglyphs, published a paper some years ago in the "Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy" on the question of the age of the "Book of Amagh." That the version at present preserved in the library of Trinity College is a copy from a far older version he says there can be no doubt. The marginal notes of the scribe show that he found it difficult in many places to read the ma.n.u.script from which he was transcribing. But the same notes, the character of his writing, and a reference to the Irish primate of the time under whose authority the work was undertaken, leave no doubt that the transcript was executed by a scribe named Ferdomnach, during the primacy of Archbishop Torbach, at a date not later than the year of Our Lord 807.

[Footnote 125: Graves, Rev. C, "On the Age of the Book of Armagh: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy," vol. iii., p. 816.]

Of the "Confession," beside the original copy in the "Book of Armagh,"

there are several ma.n.u.script versions of great age in England: two at Salisbury; two in the Cotton library; one, I believe, at Cambridge; another very interesting and valuable copy, that which was used by the Bollandists in printing their edition of the "Confession," existed until the time of the revolution in the famous French monastery of St.

Vedastus. Fragments of the precious ma.n.u.scripts of that learned congregation are scattered among the libraries of Arras, of Saint Omer, of Boulogne, and of Douai; but among them I could not find any trace of the missing ma.n.u.script of St. Patrick's "Confession;" nor could the present learned representatives of Bollandus, who were good enough to interest themselves in my inquiry, give me any room to hope that it still exists. It would have been of much importance to have been able to compare the style and the text of the only existing French copy with the original in Ireland--especially as that French copy belonged to the very district from which St. Patrick originally came.

There are four localities designated in these doc.u.ments; three of them in the "Confession of St. Patrick," and one in the hymn of St. Fiech.

In the "Confession," St. Patrick says of himself, "Patrem habui Calphurnium Diaconum (or Diacurionem) qui fuit e vico Bonaven-Taberniae; villam Enon prope habuit, ubi ego in capturam decidi." The hymn of St. Fiech adds that the saint was born at a place called Nem-tur.

The ancient "Lives of St. Patrick" cite these localities with little variation.

The first Life, given in Colgan's collection, and ascribed to St.

Patrick junior, says, "Natus est igitur in illo oppido, Nempthur nomine. Patricius natus est in campo Taburnae."

The second Life, which is ascribed to St. Benignus, is word for word the same with the first on this point.

The third, supposed to be by St. Eleran, suggests that he was of Irish descent through a colony allowed by the Romans to settle in Armorica; but that his parents were of Strato Cludi (Strath Clyde); that he was born, however, "in oppido Nempthur, quod oppidum in campo Taburniae est." This life is of very ancient date, and shows clearly enough how old is the Irish tradition concerning the saint's birth in France.

The fourth Life, by Probus, says: "Brito fuit natione ... de vico Bannave Tiburniae regionis, haud procul a mare occidentali--quem vic.u.m indubitanter comperimus esse Neustriae provinciae, in qua olim gigantes." Here, again, we observe the same confused tradition of the saint's French origin; for Neustria was the name in the Merovingian period of the whole district comprised between the Meuse and the Loire.

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The fifth and best known life, by Jocelyn, has it: "Brito fuit natione in pago Taburniae--co quod Roma.n.u.s exercitus tabernacula fixerant ibidem, secus oppidum Nempthor degens, mare Hibernico collimitans habitatione."

The sixth Life, by St. Evin, declares that he was "de Brittanis Alcluidensibus, natus in Nempthur."

The Breviaries repeat the same names with as little attempt to fix the actual localities.

The Breviary of Paris says: "In Britiania natus, oppido Empthoria."

The Breviary of Armagh: "In illo Brittaniae oppido nomine Emptor." The old Roman Breviary says simply: "Grenere Brito." The Breviary of Rheims: "In maritimo Brittaniae territorio." The Breviary of Rouen: "In Brittania Gallicana." The Breviary of the canons of St. John of Lateran: "Ex Brittania magna insula."

It will be observed that in the princ.i.p.al of these authorities there is a concurrence in accepting the locality called so variously Nemthur and Empthoria, as well as the second of the localities, the Taberniae, named by St. Patrick himself; and also that there is no appearance of certainty in the minds of the writers as to the exact sites of the places of which they speak. None of them ventures to name the exact district or diocese where Empthoria or the Taberniae are to be found.

But certain scholia upon the "Hymn of St. Fiech," which were for the first time published by Colgan in the "Triadis Thaumaturgae," boldly lay down the proposition that "Nemthur est civitas in Brittania Septentrionali, nempe Alcluida;" and the name is also translated as meaning "Holy Tower." The same writer, however, adds in another note that St. Patrick was not carried into his Irish captivity from Dumbarton, but from Boulogne, where he and his family were visiting some of their friends at the time when the Irish pirates swept down upon the coast of Gaul. The Irish annals say that about the period of St. Patrick's captivity, Nial of the Nine Hostages lost his life on the Sea of Iccius between France and England. These long piratical forays were not uncommon at the time. [Footnote 126] A little later, the last of our pagan kings, Dathy, was killed by lightning near the Rhaetian Alps.

[Footnote 126: Totum c.u.m Scotus Iernem Movit, et infesto spumsvit remige Tethys CLAUDIAN.]

Colgan with a curious credulity accepted this improbable solution of the scholiast, of which it may in the first place be said that it is incompatible with the statement of St. Patrick himself, who declares distinctly that he was captured at a country house belonging to his father, near the town to which his family belonged.

Usher, however, who had equal opportunities of studying the original doc.u.ments, also adopted this explanation. Several Irish writers, and especially Don Philip O'Sullivan, vaguely conscious of the tradition of St. Patrick's French origin, attempted to reconcile the fact of his being a Briton with the fact of his birth in France by the supposition that he was a Breton of Brittany. This theory, however, falls summarily to the ground when it is opposed to the fact that the province now known by the name of Brittany was not inhabited by any tribe which bore the name in the time of St. Patrick, "The year 458,"

says the Benedictine Lobineau [Footnote 127] in his learned history of Brittany, "is about the epoch of the establishment of the Bretons in that part of ancient Armorica which at present bears the name of Bretagne." There was, however, a clan called Brittani, further toward the north of France, a clan whose territory Pliny and the Greek Dionysius Periegetes had long before designated with accuracy: Pliny in these words, "Deinde Menapii, Morini, Oromansaci juncti pago, qui Gessoriacus vocatur; {749} Brittani, Ambiani, Bellovaci." [Footnote 128] The Brittani of the time of St. Patrick are to be found in the country that lies between Boulogne and Amiens. It is there that Lanigan came upon the first authentic traces of the origin of our apostle.

[Footnote 127: Lobineau. D. Gui Alexis, "_Histoire de Bretagne_."

Paris, 1707.]

[Footnote 128: Plinii Secundi, "_Historia Naturalis_; de Gallia," 1.

iv. The editors of the Dauphin's edition have a note on the word Brittaui, which is worth quotation. "Ita libri omnes. Hi inter Gessoriacenses Ambianosqne medii, in ora similiter positi, ea loca teuuere certe, ubi nunc oppida Stapulae, Monetrolium, Hesdinium, et adjacentem agrum, Pontic.u.m ad Somonam amnem. Cluverius hic Briannos legi mavult." See also the learned essay on the Britons of Armorica in the "_Acta Sanctorum, Vita S. Ursulae_;" Octobris, vol. ix., p.

108. A glance at the map will show the close relation of the district marked by the present towns of Etaples, Montreuil, Hesdin, and Ponthieu to the localities named a little farther on. That the Britons of Great Britain originally came from this district is declared in the Welsh Triads, thus: "The three beneficent tribes of the Isle of Britain. The first was the nation of the Cymmry, who came with Hu the mighty to the Isle of Britain, who would not possess nor country nor lands through writing and persecution, but of equity and in peace; the second was the stock of the Lioegrians, who came from the land of Gwasgwyn (Gascolgne), and were descended from the primitive stock of the Cymmry: the third were the Brython, and from the land of Llydaw they came, having their descent from the primary stock of the Cymmry." And again, Cynan is spoken of as lord of Meirlon (probably a Celtic form of the word _Morini_) in Llydaw.

Taliessin also mentions the _Morini Btython_ in his _Prif Gyfarch_, Lydaw, Latinized Letavia, is one of the early Celtic names of the country of the Morini, as Neustria, in the Life by Probus, was that given in the Merovingian period to the whole province between the Meuse and Loire, including Boulogne of course. Pliny mentions Boulogne itself as the _Portus Morinorum Brittanicus_. ]

He was guided to his conclusion, mainly, I think, by the "History of the Morini," published in the year 1639, by the Jesuit Malbrancq, [Footnote 129] and which seems strangely to have escaped the notice of every earlier Irish writer. In this work, there are two chapters devoted to the tradition of the connection of St. Patrick with the see of Boulogne. Malbrancq relates this tradition, which states that previous to his departure for the Irish mission, St. Patrick remained for some time at Boulogne, occupied in preaching against the Pelagian heresy, to contend with which Saint Germa.n.u.s and Lupus had crossed over to Britain. Malbrancq refers, in proof of this fact, to the "Chronicon Morinense," to the Catalogue of the Bishops of Boulogne, and to the "Life of St. Arnulphus of Soissons." This tradition is to a certain extent a clue in tracing the early and intimate connection of St. Patrick with this country--but as yet it is nothing more.