questioning the authenticity of the "Confession," which is in
unpolished Latin, the writer calling himself "indoctus,
rusticissimus, imperitus," and it is full of a deep religious
feeling. It is concerned rather with the inner than the outer life,
but includes references to the early days of trial by which
Succath's whole heart was turned to God. He says, "After I came
into Ireland I pastured sheep daily, and prayed many times a day.
The love and fear of God, and faith and spirit, wrought in me more
and more, so that in one day I reached to a hundred prayers, and in
the night almost as many, and stayed in the woods and on the
mountains, and was urged to prayer before the dawn, in snow, in
frost, in rain, and took no harm, nor, I think, was there any sloth
in me. And there one night I heard a voice in a dream saying to me,
'Thou hast well fasted; thou shalt go back soon to thine own land;'
and again after a little while, 'Behold! thy ship is ready.'" In
all this there is the passionate longing of an ardent mind for home
and Heaven.

At the age of twenty-two Succath fled from his slavery to a vessel
of which the master first refused and finally consented to take him
on board. He and the sailors were then cast by a storm upon a
desert shore of Britain, possibly upon some region laid waste by
ravages from over sea. Having at last made his way back, by a sea
passage, to his home on the Clyde, Succath was after a time captured
again, but remained captive only for two months, and went back home.
Then the zeal for his Master's service made him feel like the
Seafarer in the Anglo-Saxon poem; and all the traditions of his home
would have accorded with the rise of the resolve to cross the sea,
and to spread Christ's teaching in what had been the land of his
captivity.