190 



strength of his arbitrary and despotical conclusions, and it surely 

 cannot be required to enter more into their merits. But there is 

 another who, equally "contrary to the consent of all the writers that 

 ever make mention of Saint Patrick,"* many of them actually or 

 very nearly his contemporaries, labours to establish that the world 

 has been hitherto wholly in error as to the era of the saint ; that he, 

 in the nineteenth century, knows more of the matter than those who 

 lived in the fifth, and has "taken a view altogether novel with respect 

 to the ancient Church of Ireland and Saint Patrick's mission, and in- 

 deed as to the history of Ireland generally /'-f 



"The truth is," says this gentleman, "as will be shewn in the fol- 

 lowing pages, that the first apostle of Ireland, Patrick, the Roman 

 Briton, introduced Christianity into Ireland centuries before the year 

 430, and Palladius was truly sent to the Scots believing in Christ, 

 ''^ a nation oj Christians," where a Christian Church had long flou- 

 rished in apostolic purity ; and Celestine, on the spread of the Pela- 

 gian heresy in the British islands, sent Palladius on a mission to 

 eradicate that error ;"+ so says Sir William Betham, and it is very 

 observable, that while he attempts to displace the object of his specu- 

 lation from the century in which he has been unanimously placed, he 

 neither in the above nor in any of his subsequent pages, ventures to 

 fix the period in which he did live, and we only know that Sir Wil- 

 liam says he lived centuries before 431, while reason obliges us to fix 

 him at least subsequent to the days of our Redeemer. But now for 

 the grounds of this literary oscillation. 



A certain book, styled in the Researches " The Book of Armagh," 

 spenis intended to be the sole document on which this " novel view " 



* Usher's Letters, No. 33. f Betham's Antiquarian Researches, p. 248. 



1 Betham's Antiquarian Researches. 



