The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1921. ST. PATRICK’S DAY

New Zealand Tablet, 17 March 1921, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1921. ST. PATRICK’S DAY

S.- again the feast of the great Apostle of NCE again the feast of the great Apostle of the Irish race recalls us to a consideration of Ireland, of her glory, of her sufferings, of her hopes, of the unspeakable mystery of her history. Ireland is indeed a* miracle. The hand of God is visible in the superhuman survival of her people and in the marvel of their fidelity to the Faith which our Apostle planted nearly sixteen hundred years ago on the Hill of Tara. No mere human theorising, no philosophy of history, no plausible explanation of a survival of the fittest can supply the key to the stupendous fact that Ireland. to-day is the Ireland of the days of Patrick, one in Faith, one in ideals, one in traditions with the island whither the ■voice of his dreams called Patrick in order to preach the Gospel of Christ among the people with whom he had lived in slavery in his youth. * Look back across the ages at the apostolate of Patrick and at the harvest he won for Christ. He evangelised every province himself, his prayers, his austerities, his example, his preaching, converted the entire race; and when he lay down, weary with labors and full of years, for his last long sleep a heart-broken Erin mourned him from the Lee to Lough Swilly and from Dublin to Galway. Other hands took up the torch as it fell from his grasp, and bishops and priests trained by himself carried on his great work so successfully that by the beginning of the Middle Ages the whole island was studded with monasteries and schools, famed for learning and sanctity throughout Christendom. Clonard, Clonmacnoise, Muckross, and

Ardagh won European fame; and thither came scholars in quest of the knowledge that could only be had in the great schools of ancient Ireland. Kings sent their sons to the Irish schools,"and when a person was missed by his friends on the Continent, of Europe it became a proverbial saying that he had gone to Ireland for learning. These schools trained too the zealous missionaries who were chosen by God to keep the Faith burning throughout Europe. In St. Gall in Switzerland, on the heights of Fiesole above Florence, in the environs of Paris, down on the southern shores of Italy, over against Magna Graecia, to the present day there are names that remain as monuments more lasting than brass to the memory of Ireland's missionary saints. Irish scholars found their way all over Europe, and taught with distinction in the great Universities, and wherever they went they brought with them that grand Irish Faith which no power on earth could resist or overcome. In those far-away years before the Danes and the English came to rob and to murder the Irish people, green Erin, on her throne amid the Western seas, held aloft the lamp of learning and shed an undying radiance over all the civilised world. Green Erin in those years won that glorious title- which is still her own: The Island of Saints and Scholars. With the invaders came the beginning of her woes. Brian beat the Danes at Clontarf, and for a while there was peace. But the English freebooters, bent on plunder, came later, and there began that long, bloody struggle between Ireland and England which has never since ceased, and never shall cease as long as a vestige of the invader's power remains in a single Irish count)-. It was the struggle of a weak nation against a strong. Humanly speaking it ought to have been over .centuries ago,, but the fact that it is not over yet and that it never will be over until English rulers are expelled from Ireland is proof that there was more than human power sustaining the Irish people in that fight for Faith and Fatherland. All the powers of*Hell were arrayed against them. They were betrayed from the beginning as they have always been betrayed whenever they trusted to the pledges of the English. Their churjhfs were burned down as they are burned at the present day. Their priests were murdered as they are murdered by the English this very year. A price was seton the head of a teacher just as Irish boys and girls are thrown into prison for speaking their own language and singing their own songs to-day. Every effort '</> win freedom was punished with unspeakable atrocities. Nothing that the devils of Hell could suggest to the perverted rulers of England was left undone in the attempt to destroy the Irish race. A diabolical code of so-called laws was invented for the destruction of the Faith of the people. Bribery, treachery, calumny, murder, brutality, lust were the weapons employed by Englishmen in their warfare against Irish freedom and against Irish Faith. It has not been a three years' war, like that unjust war that gave the country of the Boers to English and Jewish plutocrats ; it has not been a five years' war, like that cruel war during which liars told brave men that they were fighting for small nations. It was a war of seven hundred years, a war that is raging fierce to-day, a war that can have but one issue: the victory of Ireland over the enemies of her people and of her Faith.

* It is sad to look across the seas at Ireland now, and to think of our own friends who are fighting so bravely against the liars who professed that they fought Prussia for the freedom of small nations. It is sad to think of the little children murdered, of the mothers shot at their own doors, of the boys beaten and manned and deformed by British soldiers, of the sacrileges in the churches where some of us were baptised, of the plunder of the sacred .vessels from which we received in our youth the Body of; Our Lord, of the priests assassinated by drunken**English criminals in the service of a Government that 'invited Irish boys to enlist and told them that England was fighting for Ireland’s freedom. It is sad, indeed, just as all the story of Ireland since the coming of the English is sad: it is

but another blood-stained and tear-stained page to be added to the many already written. But, oh, ,it is glorious too!. It is glorious to look back and think that Ireland has never been beaten, and that our Nation never at the behest of a royal adulterer or of his illegitimate daughter denied the Faith of Patrick, never bowed her neck- to brute force, and never even for a generation gave up struggling against fearful odds for her rights as a nation. It is glorious, too, to look around the world to-day and to see what Ireland has done for the cause of Christianity, in America, in Australia, and even in China. She is the pillar of civilisation and the sole force in the world now resisting the tide of corruption that is the fruit of the apostasy of Prussia and of England. Ireland has carried her Cross, and, looking at her achievements for the Faith, surely we can say that she has won her Crown. In the mysterious ways of Providence that little land of ours has done magnificent apostolic work and garnered a harvest that in itself is well worth all her passion and sufferings. But there is more than that to rejoice about. She has never been conquered, and the brutalities of the present day will not succeed where Cromwell and Henry VIII. and Elizabeth failed. We cannot doubt that the present gloom is that of the hour before the dawn and that the day of which St. Malachy spoke is at hand at last, when after her seven ages of sorrow Ireland will arise in triumph and overcome her foes and even heap coals of fire on the head of her oppressor as she has done more than once before. Ireland does not mean the four and a quarter millions to which British atrocities have reduced our people at home; Ireland means twenty-five millions spread all over the globe, every one of whom is with her to the end in her last struggle for the victory that is at hand. There is no room now for despondency. The blood of her recent heroes was not shed in vain: its fruit is the invincible spirit of to-day, and the steadfast determination of us all to be with her to the end no matter what the cost. Might may conquer Right for a while, and a lie may hide the truth, but God keeps watch above His own, and victory will come, victory must come, because liberty is right and just and a nation's birthright, and no* nation has won it as Ireland has by her fidelity to her ideals, by her loyalty to Christ through centuries of storm and stress.