Chapter XXIV: The Land of the Morning

Soon after the baptism the longing of Ethne’s heart was granted. She and Marius, with Baithene and Lucia and the babes, set off on their long journey to the old Irish home.

They started from Ostia, the port of Rome, from the quays on the Tiber (near the house where St. Monica had died), and coasted to Marseilles, where they landed. Thence they crossed the Visigothic kingdom to the mouth of the Loire, where they chartered an armed vessel for Ireland. Britain it was not possible to cross, torn as it then was by the successive irruptions from the north, Saxon, Jute, and Angle, which for the time made it heathen, but in the end, as we know, made it England. They touched at the cove (Perran Porth) on the western coast, still in the hands of the Britons, where Ethne and Baithene had listened to the epistle of Patrick and to the bell in the little church.

To all of them that little bay was a shrine of sacred memories and a spring of inexhaustible hope. They brought the babes across the sandy cove into the little church, with offerings of gold and silver, and laid them in the arms of the priest for benediction. And then they set sail again across the Irish Channel.

At the mouth of the river Boyne they drew the large flat-bottomed sea-galley up on the sands, and they made their way across the country to the house of the chieftain, the father of Ethne and Baithene. But for Dewi they would hardly have found it. The old chieftain and his wife could not endure the house on the cliff after it had been robbed of the treasures of their hearts by the pirates. For a time the very sight of the sea was terrible to the mother’s heart, like the sight of a blood-stained dagger that had been plunged into the hearts of her children; and they had gone to live on other lands belonging to the clan, near the river Blackwater.

There Ethne and Baithene, with the babes, were welcomed home. That welcome brought a new revelation of what love and loyalty can mean to the hearts of Marius and Lucia. Every man and woman in the regions round rejoiced over them with great joy, as at the return of a son or daughter of their own; and also of something unutterably more important than any son or daughter of theirs could ever be, born chief and lady, yet flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, the glory of their clan, the pride of their hearts, for whom every drop of their own hearts’ blood was due, and would have been freely given.

Marius and Lucia, subjects of a corrupt court, whose Imperial families had often no past and therefore no future, to whom the throne was a mere front seat at a revel or a theatre, and the crown a mere decoration, felt here for the first time the overwhelming tide of the passion of loyalty. Citizens of a city which had no genuine common life of its own, which had flourished too long by draining out all the national and patriotic life in others, they learned for the first time what could be meant by the words Patria, Fatherland, Mother-tongue. Masters of a household of slaves, they had for the first time a glimpse of the honour there could be in loyal homage, to those who received and those who rendered it, of the faithfulness there could be in service based on kinship and affection. And simple as the dwelling was, with halls and chambers of clay and timber, to Marius and Lucia there was an inner grandeur in it higher than all the marble palaces of Ravenna or Rome.

“Sister,” he said to Lucia, when they were alone, “your husband takes you out of a crumbling mass, of which you were simply the upper crust, and grafts you into a living tree, of which you and yours will be the fairest branch.”

The chieftain and his wife stood at the door of the hall to welcome them. Their garments were homespun from the wool of their own flocks dyed in native dyes. But they stood there every inch royal in the grace of their reception of the strangers; and also in every pulse mother and father as they pressed the son and daughter to their hearts, and took the babes tenderly in their arms.

Afterwards Lucia said to Ethne—

“I would have expected that thy father and mother and thy close kindred should be like thee, princely and simple, royally regarding the wants and claims of all, and with sympathetic discrimination measuring the differences in place and character of each. But this charm goes through all your people; there is not one clown, one obtrusive, awkward person amongst them. Every one is as respectful to you as if you were their queen, and as much at home with you as if you were their sister. How is it?”

“I know not,” said Ethne, blushing at the tender compliment, “unless it is that I _am_ as a princess and a sister to them, and that we all belong to each other, as the stem to the flower and the flower to the fruit; each content with its own place, and not wanting or deeming it possible to take the place of any one else.”

“But that would be like the Kingdom of Heaven, my sister,” said Lucia.

“I suppose the Kingdom of Heaven _is_ the one Family of the Heavenly Father and the Divine King,” said Ethne meditatively; “and I suppose that is the ideal and the pattern of the clan. And you will find it a help in striving to make it what it should be, to comprehend the highest it can mean. But, my sister,” she added, sighing, “alas! I fear all chiefs and all clans are not what they should be, either to each other or among themselves.”

For only that morning she had heard how one chieftain among Patrick’s converts, King Leoghaire, had commanded his sons to bury him with his face turned towards his foes, on the ramparts of the hill of Tara—“with his face turned southwards towards the men of Leinster, as fighting with them, for he was the enemy of the men of Leinster all his life.”

Baithene had told Ethne and Marius this, on which Marius had mournfully observed—

“Is this then also a land of divisions and crumblings? Do the men of Leinster and the men of Ulster hate each other as the Huns hate the Romans and the Saxons the Britons?”

And Ethne had replied—

“Beloved, I am afraid the whole world is a land of divisions and dissolvings. What Patrick has brought us is the one universal Church of the One Living God, as he told the princesses of our race at the well—‘_Our God is the God of all men_.’ If our Ireland, if your Italy, can live in His life, we shall be _one_ and at peace, and strong. And this is what we in our little way, what Patrick and Leo in their great way, are labouring for night and day, heart and soul, every day and for ever.”

It became indeed clear to them all, that in Ireland and elsewhere the world is a battle-field, because the heart of every one in it is a battle-field.

Not long after that, it is said, one of the greatest of the Irish saints was baptized with the double name of Wolf and Dove.[7]

“If only,” Marius said, “we could keep the _Church_ from becoming a battle-field! As yet, Ireland seems to have no heretics—Manicheans, Arians, or Eutychians.”

“Only in the germ, at all events,” said Ethne. “I suppose the germs of all the heresies and sins are everywhere.”

But although they were too near the seat of judgment and the throne of rule not to see the dark as well as the bright side, Lucia and Marius felt they had come as to a sacred hearth, glowing with love and life, warm with the natural warm-heartedness of the race towards their own, and still more with the glow of first love in the hearts of Patrick’s Christians.

It was near Easter when they arrived, the great season of the baptisms. Only three years before, Ethne and Baithene, with Ethne their mother, had been baptized among the first converts. And now well-nigh the whole clan—old and young, children and grey-haired men and women—gathered as catechumens around Patrick and his priests for instruction. It was a time of wonderful awakening and joy. Marius had seen Rome lit up for Easter, and at Ravenna darkness turned into day through the night of Easter Eve, by the gigantic candles and torches flaming along all the streets. But never did any illumination seem to him so festive as this in that far-off barbaric island, which the glory of the sunrise had so lately touched.

The halls of Ethne’s home were lit up with torches; every hut and cabin had its humble illumination; and the hills flamed the good news to one another from summit to summit, the great Easter greeting, “_The Lord is risen_,” “_He is risen indeed!_”

And when the firelight melted into the dawn, the white-robed catechumens were awake and moving in festive processions from place to place, and all the land was full of songs of joy—new songs. Patrick throughout his mission to Ireland from the beginning had aimed straight at the hearts of her people, at the consciences of her chiefs, at the hearts of her poets.

Among his first converts was the chief poet, Dubthach, the Laureate of the nation. And now new songs were pouring forth from their lips. Their harps were strung to the heavenly music, so that from the beginning, for Ireland, the harp became the symbol at once of patriotism and faith.

From the first all that was best and noblest and wisest in the land—all the artistic skill, all the wisdom and knowledge Ireland had—were laid at the feet of Christ. Druids and bards became priests and singers of the Christian Church. Not as an iconoclast of all the beauty and wisdom already existing did Christianity win Ireland; but consecrating all that was already wise, perfecting all that was already beautiful. As far as possible the existing organization was accepted. Bishops were the bishops, not of a territory, but of a clan, or kindred group of men. The old laws were not destroyed, but expanded and raised into the new. Patrick, though himself a Gallo-Roman, learnt in every sense the language of the people, the language of their hearts. There is scarcely another European nation that has, breathing through the first moments of its Christian life, a hymn in its own mother-tongue. But Patrick’s hymn was the _Hymnus Scoticus_, the Irish hymn in which every peasant mother could teach her little children “the Practice of the Presence of God,” binding daily round them as a constant “lorica” or breastplate in the daily battle the invocation—

“Christ within us,
Christ around us;
Christ beneath us,
Christ above us,”

always and for ever.

And, moreover, in every place where he came and founded a colony of Christians, Patrick left, if possible, a copy of the Gospels, or both “the Testaments of God.” These were indeed in Latin, but then, necessarily, Latin was the key to the treasuries of all the ages. And Patrick in bringing Ireland into the kingdom of God brought her also into the inheritance of all the civilized past, lifting in a sacred ark above the floods of Danish barbarism and Moslem fanaticism, so soon to sweep over the nations, not only the revelation of God, but the wisdom of Greece and Rome.

Fifty years afterwards, the queenly Saint Brigit, then a babe in arms, had arisen, and (herself also a captive and a slave) had gathered men and women around her in thousands to the feet of Christ. Before that century had closed, the light and warmth of Christianity had penetrated into the remotest regions of the land, north and south, east and west; to Donegal, Derry, Banchor, and Connaught. Before another century had closed, from the fountains of the Irish monasteries the living waters had poured forth through Scotland and England, Gaul, Switzerland, and Germany; whilst to those fountains themselves, kings, nobles, men of letters from all parts, all who longed for fresher Christian life and deeper human learning, had come to drink. All this Marius could not know, but he felt the glow of the morning, felt that he had indeed found the Fountain of Youth. And all his life afterwards he would say to Ethne, when the days were darkest and the battle fiercest—

“The sun is shining still in thy land, beloved! We may be sure the battle is a victory there.”