Page:The ancient Irish church.djvu/20

 in his Chronicle, in a passage quoted afterwards by the Venerable Bede, that Pope Celestine, in the year 431, consecrated one Palladius, and sent him to the Irish believing in Christ as their first bishop. This has been accepted by most historians as proof positive that there were at that time some who had already received the faith.

But when full weight has been given to all these considerations, it will nevertheless appear certain that before the preaching of Patrick the number of Christians in Ireland must have been very small. Prosper speaks in another place of Palladius as 'having made the barbarous island Christian,' from which one would be led to conclude that his mission was that of an evangelist to the heathen rather than that of a bishop for the faithful. But it is very evident that Prosper was only imperfectly acquainted with the facts of the case. For this latter statement he seems to have had no grounds whatever. From Irish sources we learn that Palladius was very far indeed from making the barbarous island Christian; on the contrary, his whole mission was a failure. He landed, it is said, on the coast of Wexford, but found that the 'Irish believing in Christ,' whom he was sent to shepherd, were non-existent; and he met with such determined opposition from the prince of that district that he shortly afterwards re-embarked, and never set foot again on Irish soil. Accordingly, when Patrick, the great apostle of Ireland, entered his missionary labours in the beginning of the fifth century, he found the whole country given over to the superstitions of Druidism. Indeed, Ireland and Scotland and the more remote parts ot Brittany were then the only places where that ancient cult survived.