Now, coming down to the fifth century of the Christian era, we find in the calling of St. Patrick an exact counterpart to the calling of Abraham. True religion appeared to be once more upon the point of disappearing from the earth. The Eastern Churches, torn and debased by endless heresies, dissensions and schisms, were rapidly sinking into that miserable abyss of apostasy from which they have never since permanently arisen. The condition of the Western Church was equally critical; for although, thanks to the transcendent genius of St. Augustine and the divine zeal and authority of the Roman Pontiffs, the pestilential tide of Pelagianism had been forced back to its native Britain, yet storm-clouds were gathering in the depths of the Northern forests and on the Eastern tablelands, which seemed fated to sweep away civilization, law, science and religion from the face of the globe. Already the first tremendous billows of barbarian invasion had rolled over Europe and spent their fury among the sands of Africa. Alaric the Goth had ravaged Italy and sacked Rome; Genseric the Vandal sat enthroned in the ancient city of Carthage. And this was but the beginning of evils; for innumerable hordes were still to come, urged on by love of adventure and lust of conquest, but yet more by their eagerness to escape the advancing shadow of the terrible Huns, those most savage of all barbarians, whose gigantic empire, dreaded alike by Goth and Roman, was stretching itself over hills and valleys, dense forests and lofty mountain peaks, morasses, seas, rivers and trackless deserts, from the wall of China to the banks of the Rhine. It was at this emergency that God spoke to the heart of the great saint whose memory we are gathered to honor: “Go forth out of thy country and from thy kindred and out of thy father’s house, and come into the land which I shall show thee.” And where is this land which the Lord has chosen? Where is the home of those who are to enjoy light whilst darkness enshrouds the earth, and liberty whilst all Europe is trampled under the feet of Goths and Huns and Vandals? Far away in the West there stood an island, moderate in extent, wonderful in fertility, vying with the emerald in beauty, whose rugged cliffs, beetling over the unconquered ocean, marked the extreme limit of the known world. This happy island had been for untold centuries inhabited by a people who, protected by their watery ramparts from Scythian incursions and Roman conquests, and unimbued with the vain subtleties of Grecian philosophy, maintained a sturdy independence, and tenaciously adhered to the laws, the institutions and the religion of their ancestors.