A PROTESTANT SAINT

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 2, 1881

A PROTESTANT SAINT.

PATRICK, of the fifth century, was undoubtedly a saint. He was not a Rome-made saint, but one of God's New-Testament saints. It is a wrong to his memory and to our Protestant Christianity to concede him to the Romish church. In the popular mind Patrick stands for some devoted Papist enshrined in the hearts of the Catholic Irish. As history presents him to us, he is a large-hearted, pure-minded Christian minister of the early centuries.

We find the short story of his life in his Confessions. Stolen from his home in Britain, when seventeen, he was for six years a slave in Ireland. While in captivity the light came into his heart. His words, describing his conversion, burn with devotion. "The love and the fear of God more and more inflamed my heart. My faith and fervor were increased so that I prayed a hundred times a day, and also as many by night." Returning to his home, his life is in obscurity until he is forty-three. Then a Macedonian cry from Ireland came into his soul. He went alone, breaking away from the entreaties of friends, to a land of Druidical cruelty and heathen ignorance. He went with a Pauline earnestness, though without the large intellectual proportions of Paul. He calls himself unlearned.

He was a Bible preacher. In his Confessions are twenty-five quotations from the Scriptures. There is no allusion to the Pope, the Virgin Mary, or praying to the saints. His father and grandfather were ministers, living in holy wedlock. His religion came from Jerusalem, not from Rome. He studied the Scriptures and recommended them to the people. His followers were, for generations, eminently Biblical in their belief. When the emissaries of Rome met them in England and Scotland they resisted them. Ireland was essentially a Protestant (though this word was not yet born) country, until the eleventh century. The Romish myths that have gathered about the memory of this man were all formed after this time.

Patrick found Ireland a moral waste, he left it a land of light. He speaks of having baptized thousands of people. The first meeting-house was built at Armagh in 456. He ordained not less than three hundred and fifty pastors. Ireland was largely redeemed before he died, March 17, 465.

His work was not that of ignorant enthusiasm. Where he planted a church there he planted a school. The New England fathers, in building side by side the meeting-house and the schoolhouse, were but imitating Patrick. Ireland became the light of the dark ages in Western Europe. Armagh, Bangor and Derry numbered their students by thousands. We mentally associate Ireland with ignorance, but we are all her debtors. "The Irish people, living in the ends of the earth, have done more to preserve and promote learning than all other parts of Europe."

From Ireland went a sacred influence that lightened other lands. The school at Iona lifted up all Scotland. France, Switzerland, Germany, were traversed by men of Patrick's spirit. Columba and Columbanus were both Irishmen worthy of standing side by side with Patrick.

Very beautiful and Paul-like are the words in the Confession: "And now I commend my soul to God, who is faithful, for whom in reproach I have performed this mission. I pray God that he may give unto me perseverance, that I may bear for him a faithful testimony until my transition to my God."

Ireland was the last country in Europe to submit to the papal yoke. She bent her neck, forced by English bayonets. If the Irish people should drink in the spirit of that Patrick who stands before us in his Confessions and life-work, they would throw off that yoke, and rejoice in that freedom wherewith Christ makes men free.

Dr. Cathcart does not, I think, go too far in Baptism of the Ages when he says: "St. Patrick gives an account of his own conversion in his Confession, just as a regenerated candidate for baptism in a Baptist church would. He required apparently the same regeneration in his converts, and then he immersed them. The story of his life makes him so like a Baptist missionary that we believe he was one."—O. P. E., in Examiner and Chronicle.