As the conversion of Ireland to Christianity did not begin with Saint Patrick, so also he did not live to complete it. To say this is not to belittle his work or to deprive him of the honour that has been accorded to him by every generation of Irishmen since his death. No one man has ever left so strong and permanent impression of his personality on a people, with the single and eminent exception of Moses, the deliverer and lawgiver of Israel. It is curious to note that the comparison between these two men was present to the minds of our forefathers. Both had lived in captivity. Both had led the people from bondage. Some of the legends of St. Patrick were perhaps based on this comparison, especially the account of his competition with the Druids. Some of his lives go so far as to give him the years of Moses, six score years, making him live till the year 492, sixty years after the beginning of his mission. There is good evidence, however, that the earlier date of his death, 461, found in our oldest chronicle, and also in the Welsh chronicle, is the authentic date. Father Hogan, in his "Documenta Vitae S. Patricii," has drawn up a table of the acts of St. Patrick, and after this date, 461, the table is a blank. I have already alluded to the feature adopted by our early chroniclers from St. Jerome's version of Eusebius--the marking of certain epochs by giving the sum of years from a preceding epoch. We must remember that in those days the custom so familiar to us of giving an arithmetical name to every year, all in one series, was quite unknown. The first historian to use this method consistently was Bede, and it did not obtain general vogue until long after his time. In Ireland, though Bede's writings were intimately known, his method of dating by the year of the Christian era does not appear to have been taken up until the eleventh century--nearly three centuries after his time. What then was the ordinary method of dating? It was by regnal years. For example, the beginning of St. Patrick's mission is thus dated in the ancient chronicle: "Patrick came to Ireland in the ninth year of Theodosius the younger, in the first year of the episcopate of Sixtus, forty-second bishop of the Roman Church." The Irish Nennius gives an Irish regnal date for this event--"the fifth year of King Loiguire." It may be noted that this manner of dating lasted until our own time in the dating of the statutes of the English parliament.