There is, however, a disturbing element which must be kept in mind in criticising the Lives of Ciaran. He was the son of a carpenter, and he was said to have died at the age of thirty-three. It is quite clear that these coincidences with the facts of the earthly parentage and death of Christ were observed by the homilists--indeed the author of the Irish Life says as much, at the end of his work. They provoked a natural and perhaps wholly unconscious desire to draw other parallels; and if we may use a convenient German technical term, there is a traceable _Tendenz_ in this direction, as is indicated in the Annotations on later pages. It is not to be supposed that even these apparently imitative incidents are (not to mince matters) mere pious frauds; they may well have come into existence in the folk-consciousness automatically, before they received their present literary form. But such a development could hardly have centred in an unworthy subject; there must have been a well-established tradition of a _Christ-likeness_ of character in the man, for such parallels in detail to have taken shape.[3] The homiletic purpose of these documents is most clearly shown in the Irish Life. This was written to be preached as a sermon on the saint's festival ["this day _to-day_," Sec. 1], at Clonmacnois ["he came _to this town_," Sec. 34: "a fragment of the cask remained _here_ till recently," Sec. 36: "_here_ are the relics of Ciaran," Sec. 41. Similarly the First Latin Life, Sec. 35, calls the saint "_Our_ most holy patron"]. The actual date of the Irish sermon is less easy to fix; the language has been modernised step by step in the process of transmission from manuscript to manuscript, but originally it may have been written about the eleventh century, though incorporating fragments of earlier material. The passage just quoted, saying that a certain relic had remained _till recently_, may possibly indicate that the homily had been delivered shortly after one of the many burnings and plunderings which the monastery suffered; in such a calamity the relic might have perished. The prophecy put into Ciaran's mouth, that "there would be great persecution of his city from evil men in the end of the world" [Irish Life, Sec. 38] seems to relate to such an event: it is very suggestive that exactly the same exprestion "great persecution from evil men" (_ingrem mor o droch-daoinibh_) is used in the _Chronicon Scotorum_ of certain raids on the monastery which took place in the year A.D. 1091; and that on the strength of an old prophecy there was a belief in Ireland that the world was destined to come to an end in the year 1096, as we learn from the _Annals of the Four Masters_ under that date.[4] It must, however, be remembered that a date determined for a single incident does not necessarily date the whole compilation containing it.