months to the
center of power in the land, to Tara with its fortresses, its
earthworks, its great banquet-halls and granaries and well-adorned
dwellings of chief and king. A huge oval earthwork defended the king's
house; northward of this was the splendid House of Mead,--the
banquet-hall, with lesser fortresses beyond it. Southward of the central
dwelling and its defence was the new ringed fort of Laogaire the king,
son of the more famous king Nial of the Hostages. At this circular fort,
Rath-Laogaire, on Easter day, Saint Patrick met the king face to face,
and delivered to him the message of the New Way, telling him of the
unveiling of the Divine within himself, of the voice that had bidden him
come, of the large soul of immortal pity that breathed in the teachings
among the hills of Galilee, of the new life there begun for the world.
Tradition says that the coming of the Messenger had been foretold by the
Druids, and the great work he should accomplish; the wise men of the
West catching the inner brightness of the Light, as the Eastern Magians
had caught it more than four centuries before. The fruits of that day's
teaching in the plain of Tara, in the assembly of Laogaire the king,
were to be gathered through long centuries to come.

In the year 444, the work of the teacher had so thriven that he was able
to build a larger church on a hill above the Callan River, in the
undulating country south of Lough Neagh. This hill, called in the old
days the Hill of the Willows, was only two miles from the famous
fortress of Emain of Maca. It was a gift from the ruler Daire, who, like
so many other chiefs, had felt and acknowledged the Messenger's power.
Later, the hill came to be called Ard-Maca, the Height of Maca; a name
now softened into Armagh, ever since esteemed the central stronghold of
the first Messenger's followers.

The Messenger passed on from chief to chief, from province to province,
meeting with success everywhere, yet facing grave perils. Later
histories take him to the kings of Leinster and Munster, and he himself
tells us that the prayer of the children of Foclut was answered by his
coming, so that he must have reached the western ocean. It was a
tremendous victory of moral force, of the divine and immortal working
through him, that the Messenger was able to move unarmed among the
warriors of many tribes that were often at war with each other;
everywhere meeting the chiefs and kings, and meeting them as an e