his death, sixty-one years afterwards. Such an unprecedented
length of life, not less than the unprecedented power,
both popular and political, which he early attained,
enabled him to establish the Irish Church, during his
own time, on a basis so broad and deep, that neither
lapse of ages, nor heathen rage, nor earthly temptations,
nor all the arts of Hell, have been able to upheave its
firm foundations. But we must not imagine that the powers
of darkness abandoned the field without a struggle, or
that the victory of the cross was achieved without a
singular combination of courage, prudence, and
determination--God aiding above all.

If the year of his captivity was 405 or 406, and that of
his escape or manumission seven years later (412 or 413),
twenty years would intervene between his departure out
of the land of his bondage, and his return to it clothed
with the character and authority of a Christian Bishop.
This interval, longer or shorter, he spent in qualifying
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