Zimmer fully admits, though he had once denied, the genuineness of the _Confession_ and the missive to the subjects of Coroticus; that is, he admits that they were written by Patricius, a bishop in Ireland in the fifth century. But he holds that the activity of this bishop was entirely confined to south-eastern Ireland (Laigin), that he accomplished nothing for the evangelisation or ecclesiastical organisation of the rest of Ireland, that he died (A.D. 459: Zimmer) conscious of failure, and for nearly two centuries after his death had a merely local reputation. The rejection of the traditional Patrick is, so far as I understand, based chiefly on two arguments: (1) Zimmer’s interpretation of the _Confession_; and (2), if Patrick’s work had at all corresponded in scope, magnitude, and import to the descriptions of it given by Irish writers of the seventh century, it would have been noticed by Bede in his _Ecclesiastical History_. As for the _Confession_ I have said enough in the text, and have shown, I think, that its note is not, as Zimmer holds, consciousness of failure. As for the argument from the silence of Bede,[444] on which he lays much stress, I may quote what I said in reviewing his book: The value of arguments from silence “depends entirely on the cases; in some cases an argument from silence is conclusive. But can it be said to weigh much here, if we reflect that a notice of Patrick and his work in Bede’s book could have been simply a defensible digression? We can place our finger on the unproven premiss in Zimmer’s argument; he speaks of ‘Bede’s evidently keen interest in the early beginnings of Christianity in the British isles’ (p. 11). Substitute ‘Britain’ for ‘the British isles’ and the cogency of the argument disappears. Ninian and Columba are immediately relevant to his subject, Patrick is not; and, assuming the common tradition of Patrick’s work (as believed in Ireland _c._ A.D. 700) to be roughly true, it would be no more surprising to find nothing about it in Bede than it would be to find no mention of Augustine in an ecclesiastical history of Germany written on the same lines as Bede’s.”—_English Hist. Review_, July 1903.[445] Zimmer’s reason for restricting the sphere of work of his Patricius to Laigin, or part of Laigin, seems to be the circumstance that the author of the earliest biography, Muirchu, belonged to this part of Ireland, being connected with Slébte. [It is possible, though he does not allege it, that another reason may have been the tradition which associates Palladius (whom he equates with Patrick) with the territory corresponding to the county of Wicklow.] The suggestion is that in this neighbourhood, at Slébte, for instance, were preserved traditions and writings of the obscure Patricius, who was in the seventh century to be transformed into the great apostle of Ireland. It is obvious that the argument, even if it were based on a correct statement of facts, is quite insufficient to prove the thesis.