But a new element was about to appear upon the troubled stage, and a new
figure, one whose doings, however liberally we may discount the more
purely supernatural part of them, strikes us even now as little short of
miraculous. There are plenty of heathen countries still; plenty of
missionaries too; but a missionary at whose word an entire island--a
heathen country given up, it must be remembered, to exceedingly heathen
practices--resigns its own creed, and that missionary, too, no king, no
warrior, but a mere unarmed stranger, without power to enforce one of
the decrees he proclaimed so authoritatively, is a phenomenon which we
should find some little difficulty now, or, indeed, at any time, in
paralleling.

In one respect St. Patrick was less fortunate than his equally
illustrious successor, Columba, since he found no contemporary, or
nearly contemporary chronicler, to write his story; the consequence
being that it has become so overgrown with pious myths, so tangled and
matted with portents and miracles, that it is often difficult for us to
see any real substance or outline below them at all.

What little direct knowledge we have is derived from a famous Irish
manuscript known as "The Book of Armagh," which contains, amongst other
things, a Confession and an Epistle, believed by some authorities to
have been actually written by St. Patrick himself, which was copied as
it now stands by a monkish scribe early in the eighth century. It also
contains a life of the saint from which the accounts of his later
historians have been chiefly drawn.

According to the account now generally accepted he was born about the
year 390, though as this would make him well over a hundred at the time