St. Patrick


If there is one thing that people who are not Catholic have gone wrong
upon more than another in the intellectual things of life, it is the
conception of a Personality. They are muddled about it where their own
little selves are concerned, they misappreciate it when they deal with
the problems of society, and they have a very weak hold of it when they
consider (if they do consider) the nature of Almighty God.

Now, personality is everything. It was a Personal Will that made all
things, visible and invisible. Our hope of immortality resides in this,
that we are persons, and half our frailties proceed from a
misapprehension of the awful responsibilities which personality involves
or a cowardly ignorance of its powers of self-government.

The hundred and one errors which this main error leads to include a bad
error on the nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or
anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or
muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual
Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function of
legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and has no
grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from some
personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be a
rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret
Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, because in their origin
they so exactly serve to explain or illustrate some personal character