The world of Find and Ossin, of Cael and Crede, was marked by a certain urbanity and freedom, a large-mindedness and imaginative power.  We are therefore prepared to expect that the Messenger of the new life would be received with openness of mind, and allowed to deliver his message without any very violent opposition.  It was the meeting of unarmed moral power and armed valor; and the victory of the apostle was a victory of spiritual force, of character, of large-heartedness; the man himself was the embodiment of his message, and through his forceful genius his message was effective.  He visibly represented the New Way; the way of the humane and the divine, transforming the destructive instinct of self-assertion.  He visibly represented the divine and the immortal in us, the new birth from above.

Yet there were tragedies in his apostolate.  In another letter a very vivid and pathetic account is given of one of these.  Coroticus, a chieftain of Britain, and therefore nominally a Christian and a citizen of Rome, had sent marauding bands to Ireland to capture slaves.  Some of the new converts were taken captive by these slave-hunters, an outrage which drew forth an indignant protest from the great Messenger: 

“My neophytes in their white robes, the baptismal chrism still wet and glistening on their foreheads, were taken captive with the sword by these murderers.  The next day I sent letters begging them to liberate the baptized captives, but they answered my prayer with mocking laughter.  I know not which I should mourn for more,—­those who were slain, those who were taken prisoner, or those who in this were Satan’s instruments, since these must suffer everlasting punishment in perdition.”

He appeals indignantly to the fellow-Christians of Coroticus in Britain:  “I pray you, all that are righteous and humble, to hold no converse with those who do these things.  Eat not, drink not with them, accept no gifts from them, until they have repented and made atonement, setting free these newly-baptized handmaidens of Christ, for whom He died....  They seem to think we are not children of one Father!”

The work and mission of this great man grow daily better known.  The scenes of each marked event are certainly identified.  His early slavery, his time of probation, was spent in Antrim, on the hillside of Slieve Mish, and in the woods that then covered its flanks and valleys.  Wandering there with his flocks to the hill-top, he looked down over the green darkness of the woods, with the fertile open country stretching park-like beyond, to the coast eight miles away.  From his lonely summit he could gaze over the silvery grayness of the sea, and trace on the distant horizon the headlands of his dear native land.  The exile’s heart must have ached to look at them, as he thought of his hunger and nakedness and toil.  There in deep pity came home to him the fate of the weak ones of the earth, the vanquished, the afflicted, the losers in the race.  Compassion showed him the better way, the way of sympathy and union, instead of contest and dominion.  A firm and fixed purpose grew up within him to make the appeal of gentleness to the chiefs and rulers, in the name of Him who was all sympathy for the weak.  Thus the inspiration of the Message awakened his soul to its immortal powers.