Three Latin pieces are ascribed to St. Patrick: a “Confession,” which is
in the Book of Armagh, and in three other manuscripts; {10a} a letter to
Coroticus, and a few “Dieta Patricii,” which are also in the Book of
Armagh. {10b} There is no strong reason for questioning the authenticity
of the “Confession,” which is in unpolished Latin, the writer calling
himself “indoctus, rusticissimus, imperitus,” and it is full of a deep
religious feeling. It is concerned rather with the inner than the outer
life, but includes references to the early days of trial by which
Succath’s whole heart was turned to God. He says, “After I came into
Ireland I pastured sheep daily, and prayed many times a day. The love
and fear of God, and faith and spirit, wrought in me more and more, so
that in one day I reached to a hundred prayers, and in the night almost
as many, and stayed in the woods and on the mountains, and was urged to
prayer before the dawn, in snow, in frost, in rain, and took no harm,
nor, I think, was there any sloth in me. And there one night I heard a
voice in a dream saying to me, ‘Thou hast well fasted; thou shalt go back
soon to thine own land;’ and again after a little while, ‘Behold! thy
ship is ready.’” In all this there is the passionate longing of an
ardent mind for home and Heaven.
At the age of twenty-two Succath fled from his slavery to a vessel of
which the master first refused and finally consented to take him on
board. He and the sailors were then cast by a storm upon a desert shore
of Britain, possibly upon some region laid waste by ravages from over
sea. Having at last made his way back, by a sea passage, to his home on
the Clyde, Succath was after a time captured again, but remained captive
only for two months, and went back home. Then the zeal for his Master’s
service made him feel like the Seafarer in the Anglo-Saxon poem; and all
the traditions of his home would have accorded with the rise of the
resolve to cross the sea, and to spread Christ’s teaching in what had
been the land of his captivity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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