portance; and traditions of early times support the
conclusion. The whole of an elaborate story of Patrick finding bishops in
Munster, and coming to a compromise with them, is a late invention, forged
for an ecclesiastical purpose.

There is certainly evidence of an intention to preach Christianity in
Ireland before Patrick's time, and this evidence itself affords evidence
of a still earlier teaching. In speaking of the visit of Germanus to
Britain to put down Pelagianism, the first of two visits as tradition
says, I intentionally said nothing about the visit of Germanus's deacon
Palladius to Rome. Some writers would not allow the phrases "Germanus's
deacon," and "visit to Rome." They say that Palladius was a deacon of
Rome; from that he is made archdeacon of the Pope; and from that again a
cardinal and Nuncio apostolical. But I shall take him to be the deacon of
Germanus, a Gaul by birth and education, though some believe that he must
have been himself an Irishman.

The Chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine, of which we have heard before[44],
has in the less corrupt of the two editions the statement that in 431
"Palladius was consecrated by Pope Celestine, and sent to the Scots
believing in Christ, as their first bishop." The Scots, of course, then
and for some centuries later, were the Irish. It is interesting to us to
find Pope Leo XIII, in his Bull restoring the Scottish hierarchy in 1878,
gravely taking Prosper to mean that Celestine sent Palladius as the
apostle of the Scots in the modern sense of the word, that is, the people
of what we call Scotland. Fordun, the chronicler of Scotland, came upon
the same rock, and was driven by consequence into wild declarations about
the work of Palladius in North Britain. Fordun, however, had the
disadvantage of not being infallible.

Prosper of Aquitaine is not a person to be implicitly followed, when the
subject is the claims and the great deeds of bishops of Rome. There is a
fair suspicion that it was he who credited Eleutherus with the mission to
Lucius[45]. His very title, Prosper of Aquitaine, reminds us that
Aquitaine includes Gascony. He is suspected of being a romancer. With him,
as indeed with many of the evidences of the importance of the action of
Rome in early times, great caution is necessary.

Remarks of this kind I do not make from choice; they are forced upon me.
It is a pleasure of a very real kind to feel grateful; but when people
base upon benefits conferred