To the _Patrician Apostle_, the beloved patriarch of Ireland, was reserved the glory of maturing the fruit which his predecessors had planted. His constitutional zeal and absorbing devotion in the service of his Creator were but the secondary qualifications which pre-eminently marked him out for so hazardous an enterprise. The primary and grand facility which this _true hero_ possessed for the attainment of his great design, was his intimate converse with the manners and language of the natives,--obtained during his captivity not long before,--which, making way at once to the _hearts_ of his auditory, was an irresistible passport to their heads and their understandings. In the sequel of this volume it will be fully shown, that when St. Patrick entered upon his prescribed task,--towards the close of the fifth century,--the monarch and his court were celebrating their pagan festival, or preparing for it, on the hill of Tara. Can a nation be called Christian where the sovereign and court are pagan? Or will a few exceptions from the mass of the population be indulged with fortresses of imperishable architecture, while the nation at large took shelter within _wattles_ and walls of clay?--and that, too, at a moment when Christianity was considered a name of reproach, and its few solitary abettors constrained to exile or to degradation! No sooner, however, were the simplicities of Christianity expounded to the natives through the medium of their native tongue, than the refined organism of the Irish constitution, habituated by discipline to sublime pursuits, took fire from the blaze of the sacred scintilla, and enlisted them as its heralds, not only at home but throughout Europe. Precisely at this instant it was that all the _ancient_ names of places in the island--recorded by Ptolemy from other foreign geographers--were changed and new-modelled; the converts--“_ut in nova deditione_”--not thinking it sufficient to abandon the forms of their previous belief, and adopt the more pure one, if they did not obliterate every vestige of nominal association which could tend to recall their fancies to the religion which they relinquished. Accordingly, from the names of Juernis, Macollicon, Rhigia, Nagnata, Rheba, etc., sprang up the names of Killkenny, Killmalloch, and the thousand other names, commencing with “Kill,” to be met with in every district and subdivision throughout the country.