in Christ, what shall I do for you? Am I so unworthy before God and men that I cannot help you? Is it a crime to have been born in Ireland?[20] And have we not the same God as they have? I sorrow for you, yet I rejoice, for if ye are taken from the world ye are believers through me, and are gone to Paradise." The "Cry of the Deer," or "Lorica," as it is also called, is in Irish. The saint is said to have made it when on his way to visit King Laoghaire [Leary] at Tara, and the assassins who had been planted by the king to slay him and his companions thought as he chanted this hymn that it was a herd of deer that passed them by, and thus they escaped. The metre of the original is a kind of unrhymed or half-rhymed rhapsody, called in Irish a _Rosg_, and is perfectly unadorned. The language, however, though very old, has of course been modified in the process of transcription. Patrick calls upon the Trinity to protect him that day at Tara, and to bind to him the power of the elements. I bind me to-day[21] God's might to direct me, God's power to protect me, God's wisdom for learning, God's eye for discerning, God's ear for my hearing, God's word for my clearing, God's hand for my cover, God's path to pass over, God's buckler to guard me, God's army to ward me, Against snares of the devils, Against vices, temptations, Against wrong inclinations, Against men who plot evils To hurt me anew, Anear or afar with many or few. * * * * * Christ near, Christ here, Christ be with me, Christ beneath me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ be o'er me, Christ before me, Christ in the left and the right, Christ hither and thither, Christ in the sight, Of each eye that shall seek me,[22] etc. In the Book of Armagh, in the last chapter of Tirechan's life, St. Patrick is declared to be entitled to four honours in every church and monastery of the island. One of these honours was that the hymn written by St. Seachnall, his nephew, in praise of himself, was to be sung in the churches during the days when his festival was being celebrated, and another was that "his Irish canticle" was to be always sung,[23] apparently all the year through, in the liturgy, but perhaps only during the week of his festival. The Irish canticle is evidently this "Lorica," which was, as we see from this notice in the Book of Armagh, believed to be his in the seventh century, and it has been sung under that belief from that day almost to our own.[24]