Therefore it matters little to a wise man, standing on the top of
Croagh Patrick, the grandest mountain perhaps, with the grandest
outlook, in these British isles, as he looks on the wild Irish there
on pattern days, up among the Atlantic clouds, crawling on bare and
bleeding knees round St. Patrick's cell,--it matters little, I say,
to the wise man, whether St. Patrick himself owned the ancient image
which is worshipped on that mountain peak, or the ancient bell which
till late years hung in the sanctuary,--such a strange oblong bell as
the Irish saints carried with them to keep off the demons--the magic
bells which appear (as far as I am aware) in the legends of no
country till you get to Tartary and the Buddhists;--such a bell as
came (or did not come) down from heaven to St. Senan; such a bell as
St. Fursey sent flying through the air to greet St. Cuanady at his
devotions when he could not come himself; such a bell as another
saint, wandering in the woods, rang till a stag came out of the
covert, and carried his burden for him on his horns. It matters as
little to the wise man whether that bell belonged to St. Patrick, as
whether all these child's dreams are dreams. It matters little to
him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain
peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long
named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling
with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the
Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at
the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute
force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old
Greece, but by the spiritual force of which (so the text was then
applied) it is written, 'This kind cometh not out but by prayer and
fasting,' till he smote the evil things with 'the golden rod of
Jesus,' and they rolled over the cliff, in hideous rout, and perished
in the Atlantic far below. But it matters much to a wise man that