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Show IRELAND'S SOWS. (Philadelphia Telegraph.) All over the world, wherever men of the Irish race are found, the name of Ireland's patron sain? will be reverently spoken and his character and deeds venerated, with an ardor and devotion that more than fifteen centuries have not dulled. St. Patrick looms as one of the great men of the early Church. Through ihe fog of time he can be distinctly dis-tinctly seen doing the work of a leader and a missionary, mis-sionary, and planting air outpost of Christianity on the then edge ot. the world that successfully withstood all the assaults of Paganism, amf which has endured ill unimpaired strength down to the present year. He builded on a rock and neither the floods of skepticism nor the shifting sands of doubt and irreligion havp ever shaken the structure of belief that he erected.' Only men of truly heroic stature rear permanent memorials to themselves in the hearts and imaginations of their kind and live on with their memories but growing brigrter with the passage of the years. Pussibly St. Patrick was forlunate in the people peo-ple among whom he became a missionary. A" man such as he must have been would have- particularl,.' impressed the impulsive, emotional, warm -hearted Celts. Once given, an Irishman's devotion is unswerving, un-swerving, and he helps to make his-a1tachments more tenacious and determined. Make an Irishman Irish-man believe that a cause or a principle i.-5 worth righting for, and he will stick to it through fair weather and foul. St. Patrick must have made the fifth century Irishman believe that Christianity was worth more than anything else in the world, and the "twentieth century Irishman is not a whit less convinced o! its value than his forbears were. For- the same reason Irishmen are loyal sons of the Catholic Church. They believe in the doctrines of the Church, and not all the power of England has been able to swerve them a hair's breadth from that faith. Equally true to the land of his birth, the Irish- man presents the paradoxical political spectacle of a passionate lover of Ireland and a splendid rei-i-dent of the land of his adoption. He never forgets Ireland, and transmits his love for it to the second and third generations, but no man is a better citizen and a more ardent patriot than the Irishman iu the United States. It was the Irishman who was the greatest aid of all aliens to this country when it was struggling upward intp the galaxy of nations, and it was Irish brains and Irish courage that largely helped to make the United States the grea? republic of the world. For what he did for Christianity Chris-tianity and the fine race that is bone of our bone and blood of our blood, America rightly honors St. Patrick's as he is honored in the land he redeemed from pagan darkness. |
