A Syrian from the Christian village of Maaloula once told a BBC reporter, when his hometown was besieged by al-Qaeda militants: "we sent you St Paul to take you out of the darkness".
It always struck me, because from a historical point of view what happened on these islands before Christianity arrived really was darkness, in the sense that the new religion brought with it literacy.
Today we celebrate St Patrick, a British slave whose message of hope was so rapidly taken up on the emerald isle that almost uniquely it had no martyrs; Irish people often complain their country is conformist and Christianity seems to have been taken up as rapidly then as centre-Left ideas now.
