himself for Holy Orders or discharging priestly duties
at Tours, at Lerins, and finally at Rome. But always by
night and day he was haunted by the thought of the Pagan
nation in which he had spent his long years of servitude,
whose language he had acquired, and the character of
whose people he so thoroughly understood. These natural
retrospections were heightened and deepened by supernatural
revelations of the will of Providence towards the Irish,
and himself as their apostle. At one time, an angel
presented him, in his sleep, a scroll bearing the
superscription, "the voice of the Irish;" at another, he
seemed to hear in a dream all the unborn children of the
nation crying to him for help and holy baptism. When,
therefore, Pope Celestine commissioned him for this
enterprise, "to the ends of the earth," he found him not
only ready but anxious to undertake it.

When the new Preacher arrived in the Irish Sea, in 432,
he and his companions were driven off the coast of Wicklow
by a mob, who assailed them with showers of stones.
Running down the coast to Antrim, with which he was
personally familiar, he made some stay at Saul, in Down,
where he made few converts, and celebrated Mass in a
barn; proceeding northward he found himself rejected with
scorn by his old master, Milcho, of Slemish. No doubt it
appeared an unpardonable audacity in the eyes of the
proud Pagan, that his former slave should attempt to
teach him how to reform his life and order his affairs.
Returning again southward, led on, as we must believe,
by the Spirit of God, he determined to strike a blow