ressed in them to be the author; the Confession is quoted
by all the authors of his life, and the letter was written before the
conversion of the Franks under king Clovis, in 496. See Tillemont, t.
16, p. 455, and Brininnia Sancta.

A.D. 464.

IF the virtue of children reflects an honor on their parents, much more
justly is the name of St. Patrick rendered illustrious by the
innumerable lights of sanctity with which the church of Ireland, planted
by his labors in the most remote corner of the then known world, shone
during many ages; and by the colonies of saints with which it peopled
many foreign countries; for, under God, its inhabitants derived from
their glorious apostle the streams of that eminent sanctity by which
they were long conspicuous to the whole world. St. Patrick was born in
the decline of the fourth century;[1] and, as he informs us in his
Confession, in a village called Bonaven Taberniae, which seems to be the
town of Killpatrick, on the mouth of the river Cluyd, in Scotland,
between Dunbriton and Glasgow. He calls himself both a Briton and a
Roman, or of a mixed extraction, and says his father was of a good
family, named Calphurnius, and a denizen of a neigh-boring city of the
Romans, who, not long after, abandoned Britain, in 409. Some writers
call his mother Conchessa, and say she was niece to St. Martin of Tours.
At fifteen years of age he committed a fault, which appears not to have
been a great crime, yet was to him a subject of tears during the
remainder of his life. He says, that when he was sixteen, he lived still
ignorant of God, meaning of the devout knowledge and fervent love of
God, for he was always a Christian: he never ceased to bewail this
neglect, and wept when he remembered that he had been one moment of his
life insensible to the divine love. In his sixteenth year he was carried
into captivity by certain barbarians, together with many of his father's
vassals and slaves, taken upon his estate. They took him into Ireland,
where he was obliged to keep cattle on the mountains and in the forests,
in hunger and nakedness, amidst snows, rain, and ice. While he lived in
this suffering condition, God had pity on his soul, and quickened him to
a sense of his duty by the impulse of a strong interior grace. The young
man had recourse to him with his whole heart in fervent prayer and
fasting; and from that time, faith and the love of God acquired
continually new strength in his {600} tender soul