One God and Three Persons, whether in private or public
worship, in contracts, or in courts of law; and instead
of these, re-establish all over the country, in high
places and in every place, the gloomy groves of the
Druids, making gods of the sun and moon, the natural
elements, and man's own passions, restoring human sacrifices
as a sacred duty, and practically excluding from the
community of their fellows, all who presumed to question
the divine origin of such a religion. The preaching of
Patrick effected a revolution to the full as complete as
such a counter-revolution in favour of Paganism could
possibly be, and to this thorough revolution we must
devote at least one chapter before going farther.

The best accounts agree that Patrick was a native of
Gaul, then subject to Rome; that he was carried captive
into Erin on one of King Nial's returning expeditions;
that he became a slave, as all captives of the sword did,
in those iron times; that he fell to the lot of one
Milcho, a chief of Dalriada, whose flocks he tended for
seven years, as a shepherd, on the mountain called Slemish,
in the present county of Antrim. The date of Nial's death,
and the consequent return of his last expedition, is set
down in all our annals at the year 405; as Patrick was
sixteen years of age when he reached Ireland, he must
have been born about the year 390; and as he died in the
year 493, he would thus have reached the extraordinary,
but not impossible age of 103 years. Whatever the exact
number of his years, it is certain that his mission in
Ireland commenced in the year 432, and was prolonged till