We can still see plainly even the finer traits of that character,
while the land of his birth is a matter of dispute, and of his early
history we know little, except that he was of noble birth, that he
was carried to Ireland by pirates at the age of sixteen, and that
after five years of bondage he escaped thence, to return A.D. 432,
when about forty-five years old; belonging thus to that great age of
the Church which was made illustrious by the most eminent of its
Fathers, and tasked by the most critical of its trials. In him a
great character had been built on the foundations of a devout
childhood, and of a youth ennobled by adversity. Everywhere we
trace the might and the sweetness which belonged to it, the
versatile mind yet the simple heart, the varying tact yet the fixed
resolve, the large design taking counsel for all, yet the minute
solicitude for each, the fiery zeal yet the genial temper, the skill
in using means yet the reliance on God alone, the readiness in
action with the willingness to wait, the habitual self-possession
yet the outbursts of an inspiration which raised him above himself,
the abiding consciousness of authority--an authority in him, but not
of him--and yet the ever-present humility. Above all, there burned
in him that boundless love, which seems the main constituent of the
Apostolic character. It was love for God; but it was love for man
also, an impassioned love, and a parental compassion. It was not
for the spiritual weal alone of man that he thirsted. Wrong and
injustice to the poor he resented as an injury to God. His vehement
love for the poor is illustrated by his "Epistle to Coroticus,"
reproaching him with his cruelty, as well as by his denunciations of
slavery, which piracy had introduced into parts of Ireland. No
wonder that such a character should have exercised a talismanic
power over the ardent and sensitive race among whom he laboured, a
race "easy to be drawn, but impossible to be driven," and drawn more