THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors

had been completed, it would have contained the

histories of 25,000 saints. So many the catholic

church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals; as

men, who had not only done her honour by the

eminence of their sanctity, but who had received while

on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of

supernatural power. And this vast number is but a

selection; the editors chose only out of the mass before

them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and

what was of catholic rather than of national interest.

It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology

which for so many ages delighted the Christian world,

which is still held in external reverence among the

Romanists, and of which the modern historians,

provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire

absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish

between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a

reasonable word. Of the attempt in our own day to

revive an interest in them we shall say little in this

place. They have no form or beauty to give them

attraction in themselves; and for their human interest,

the broad atmosphere of the world suited ill with these

delicate plants which had grown up under the shadow

of the convent wall; they were exotics, not from

another climate, but from another age; the breath of

scorn fell on them, and having no root in the hearts

and beliefs of men any more, but only in the

sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank. And

yet, in their place as historical phenomena they are as

remarkable as any of the pagan mythologies; to the

full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length

and firmness of hold they once exercised on the

conviction of mankind is to pass for anything in the

estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and

peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the

catholic faith.

Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from

ridicule; their extravagancies, even the most grotesque

of them, can be now seen to have their root in an idea,

often a deep one, representing features of natural history

or of metaphysical speculation--and we do not laugh

at them any more. In their origin, they were the

consecration of the first-fruits of knowledge; the

expression of a real reverential belief. Then time did its

work on them; knowledge grew and they could not

grow; they became monstrous and mischievous, and

were driven out by Christianity with scorn and indignation.

But it is with human institutions, as it is with

men themselves; we are tender with the dead when

their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism

can never more be dangerous, we have been able to

command a calmer attitude towards it, and to detect

under its most repulsive features sufficient latent

elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even

in their darkest aberrations men are never wholly given

over to falsehood and absurdity. When philosophy has

done for mediaeval mythology what it has done for

Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find in it at least

as deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life,

and we shall find also a moral element there which at

their best they never had. The lives of the saints

are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful;

yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty they are

always good.

And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves

on its magnitude. The Bollandists were restricted on

many sides. They took only what was in Latin--while

every country in Europe had its own home-growth in its

own language--and thus many of the most characteristic

of the lives are not to be found at all in their collection.

And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed

in all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of

various shorter lives which had grown up in different

localities out of popular tradition; so that many of their

longer productions have an elaborate literary character,

with an appearance of artifice which, till we know how

they came into existence, might blind us to the vast

width and variety of the traditionary sources from which

they are drawn. In the twelfth century there were

sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that in a

country where every parish had its own special saint and

special legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have

contained (Mr. Gibbon says must have contained) at

least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To severe

criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St.

Patrick, appears problematical. But at least there is

the historical fact, about which admits of no mistake,

that they did grow up in some way or other, that they

were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read; that

these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over

the earth, wherever the catholic faith was preached,

stories like these sprang out of the heart of the people,

and grew and shadowed over the entire believing mind

of the catholic world. Wherever church was founded,

or soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of

those who had died in the faith; wherever the sweet

bells of convent or of monastery were heard in the

evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and

remembrance of God, there rested the memory of some

apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the

sepulchre of some martyr whose relics reposed beneath

the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for

his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent

self-chosen austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer

and penance, on which the angels were believed to have

ascended and descended. It is not a phenomenon of

an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the history

of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers

of the faith passed out from their homes by that quiet

Galilean lake, to go to and fro over the earth, and

did their mighty work, and at last disappeared and

were not any more seen, these sacred legends began

to grow. Those who had once known them, who had

drawn from their lips the blessed message of light and

life, one and all would gather together what fragments

they could find of their stories. Rumours blew in from

all the winds. They had been seen here, had been

seen there, in the farthest corners of the earth, preaching,

contending, suffering, prevailing. Affection did not

stay to scrutinize. As when some member of a family

among ourselves is absent in some far place from which

sure news of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he

has been in the army, on some dangerous expedition,

or at sea, or anywhere where real or imaginary dangers

stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us

altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story

of his end can be collected but fitfully from strangers

who only knew his name, but had heard him nobly

spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at; reports,

the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference,

are to love strong grounds of confidence, and "trifles

light as air" establish themselves as certainties;--so,

in those first Christian communities, travellers came

through from east and west; legions on the march, or

caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been

in Rome and seen Peter disputing with Simon Magus;

another in India, where he had heard St. Thomas

preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him

from the wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as

he said, from a thorn tree, the seed of which St. Joseph

had sown there, and which had grown to its full size in

a single night, making merchandize of the precious

relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the

legends grew, and were treasured up, and loved, and

trusted; and alas! all which we have been able to do

with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow

moral on the impostures and credulities of the early

catholic. An atheist could not wish us to say more;

if we can really believe that the Christian church was

made over, in its very cradle to lies and to the father of

lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to

say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself

with any faith which after such an admission we may

profess to entertain. For as this spirit began in the

first age in which the church began to have a history;

so it continued so long as the church as an integral

body retained its vitality; and only died out in the

degeneracy which preceded, and which brought on the

Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories

held their place, and rang on from age to age, from

century to century; as the new faith widened its

boundaries and numbered ever more and more great

names of men and women who had fought and died for

it, so long their histories living in the hearts of those for

whom they laboured, laid hold of them and filled them,

and the devout imagination, possessed with what was

often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out

into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we

try them by any historical canon, we have to say that

quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed

among men; and not believed only, but held sacred,

passionately and devotedly; not filling the history

books only, not only serving to amuse and edify the

refectory, or to furnish matter for meditation in the

cell, but claiming days for themselves of special

remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers,

forming the spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of

millions of human souls.

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact

idolater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain

peak on the wild west Irish shore, where for more

than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip

of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the

presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and in the

sharp crystals of the trap rock a path has been worn

smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the

pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their

painful way along it as they have done for a thousand

years. Doubtless the "Lives of the Saints" are full of

lies. Are then none in the Iliad? in the legends

of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of

Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of

the Cid or of Siegfried? We say nothing of the lies

in these, but why? Oh, it will be said, but they are

fictions, they were never supposed to be true. But

they were supposed to be true, to the full as true as the

Legenda Aurea. Oh then, they are poetry; and besides,

they have nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is

it; they have nothing to do with Christianity. It has

grown such a solemn business with us, and we bring

such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive

to be at all naturally admissible such a light companion

as the imagination. The distinction between secular

and religious has been extended even to the faculties;

and we cannot tolerate in others the fulness and freedom

which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it has

been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found

themselves off the recognized ground of Romance and

Paganism, and they failed to see the same principles

at work, though at work with new materials. In the

records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often

insisted on that two kinds of truth run for ever side by

side, or rather, crossing in and out with each other, form

the warp and the woof of the coloured web which we

call history. The one, the literal and external truths

corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered

laws of fact: the other, the truth of feeling and of

thought, which embody themselves either in distorted

pictures of the external, or in some entirely new creation;

sometimes moulding and shaping real history, sometimes

taking the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or

popular legend; sometimes appearing as recognized

fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It is

useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and

falsehood. We are stating a fact, not a theory, and if it

makes truth and falsehood difficult to distinguish, that

is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is only false, when

it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction? but

when it is--to law. To try it by its correspondence to

the real is wretched pedantry; we create as nature

creates, by the force which is in us, which refuses to

be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are only false

when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our

inventions are fact, when we substitute truths of one kind

for truths of another; when we substitute,--and again we

must say when we intentionally substitute;--whenever

persons, and whenever facts seize strongly hold of the

imagination, (and of course when there is anything

remarkable in them they must and will do so,) invention

glides into the images as they form in us; it must, as it

ever has, from the first legends of a cosmogony, to the

written life of the great man who died last year or century,

or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot relate

facts as they are, they must first pass through ourselves,

and we are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing

in the transit. The great outlines alone lie around us

as imperative and constraining; the detail we each fill

up variously according to the turn of our sympathies,

the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of

things, and therefore it may be said that the only

literally true history possible, is the history which mind

has left of itself in all the changes through which it has

passed.

Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious

as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious

and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny;

Suetonius gives us prodigies, when Surius has miracles,

but that is all the difference; each follows the form of

the supernatural which belonged to the genius of his

age. Plutarch writes a life of Lycurgus with details of

his childhood, and of the trials and vicissitudes of his

age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as

questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of

England.

No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes.

Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice,

and indifference is impossible. Love is blind,

and so is every other passion; love believes eagerly what

it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it

dwells on what is beautiful, while dislike sees a tarnish

on what is brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do

we believe that all this is a disease of unenlightened

times, and that in our strong sunlight only truth can

get received: then let us contrast the portrait for

instance of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free

Trade Hall, at Manchester, at the county meeting, and

in the Oxford Common Room. It is not so. Faithful

and literal history is possible only to an impassive spirit;

it is impossible to man, until perfect knowledge and

perfect faith in God shall enable him to see and endure

every fact in its reality; until perfect love shall kindle

in him under its touch the one just emotion which

is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.

How far we are in these days from approximating

to such a combination we need not here insist. Criticism

in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have

accomplished great intellectual triumphs: and in

Germany and France and among ourselves we have our

new schools of the philosophy of history; yet their real

successes have hitherto only been destructive; when

philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its

own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work

without a theory, and what is a theory but an imperfect

generalization caught up by a predisposition? what

is Comte's great division of the eras, but a theory, and

facts but as day in his hands which he can mould to

illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be,

let his theory be what it will. Intellect can destroy but

it cannot make alive again,--call in the creative faculties,

call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have living

figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which

ever lived before. Alas, the high faith in which Love

and Intellect can alone unite in their fulness, has not

yet found utterance in modern historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to

the recording of human affairs is, beyond question,

Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness

of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling; he

took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may

have been Republican, but he has left no sign whether

he was either: he appears to have sifted facts with

scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn,

his hatred, according only to individual merit, and these

are rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of

his portraits than expressed in words by himself. Yet

such a power of seeing into things was only possible to

him, because there was no party left with which he

could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in

Rome through which he could feel; the spirit of Rome,

the spirit of life had gone away to seek other forms, and

the world of Tacitus was a heap of decaying institutions;

a stage where men and women, as they themselves were

individually base or noble, played over their

little parts. Life indeed was come into the world, was

working in it, and silently shaping the old dead corpse

into fresh and beautiful being; Tacitus alludes to it

once only in one brief scornful chapter; and the most

poorly gifted of those forlorn biographers whose

unreasoning credulity was piling up the legends of St. Mary

and the Apostles which now drive the ecclesiastical

historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and

faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among

mankind, than the keenest and gravest intellect which

ever set itself to contemplate them.

And now having in some degree cleared the ground

of difficulties, let us go back to the Lives of the Saints.

If Bede tells us lies about St. Cuthbert, we will disbelieve

his stories, but we will not call Bede a liar, even

though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has

set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the

clearest evidence. We are driven to no such alternative;

our canons of criticism are different from Bede's, and

so are our notions of probability. Bede would expect

a priori, and would therefore consider as sufficiently

attested by a consent of popular tradition, what the

oaths of living witnesses would fail to make credible to

a modern English jury. We will call Bede a liar only

if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert, as a

picture of a life which he considered admirable and

excellent, as one after which he was endeavouring to

model his own, and which he held up as a pattern of

imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it

admirable at all, when he was making no effort at the

austerities which he was lauding. The histories of the

Saints are written as ideals of a Christian life; they

have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and

straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they

are nothing. For fourteen centuries the religious mind

of the catholic world threw them out as its form of

hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of human

life which each Christian within his own limits was

endeavouring to realize. The first martyrs and

confessors were to those poor monks what the first Dorian

conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what

Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were

wherever Homer was sung or read; or in more modern

times what Turpin was in the court of Charlemagne or

the Knights of the Round Table in the halls of the

Norman castles. This is what they were; and the

result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As

with the battle heroes too, the inspiration lies in the

universal idea; the varieties of character (with here and

there an exception) are slight and unimportant; as

examples they were for universal human imitation.

Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of

chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain or Antony in

the desert are equal models of patient austerity. The

knights fight with giants, enchanters, robbers, unknightly

nobles, or furious wild beasts; the Christians fight with

the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight leaves

the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint

in quest of penance, and on the bare rocks or in

desolate wildernesses subdues the devil in his flesh with

prayers and sufferings, and so alien is it all to the whole

thought and system of the modern Christian, that he

either rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures,

or receives them with disdainful wonder, as one

more shameful form of superstition with which human

nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of

monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that

there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about

it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not

literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men

did for many centuries lead the sort of life which they

are said to have led. We have got a notion that the

friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the

life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern

university, where the old monks' language and affectation

of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist

with as large a mass of bodily enjoyment as man's

nature can well appropriate; and very likely this was

the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen

in the fifteenth century. It had begun to be, and it

was a symptom of a very rapid disorder in them,

promptly terminating in dissolution; but long, long ages

lay behind the fifteenth century, in which wisely or

foolishly these old monks and hermits did make themselves

a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded

the reality, in being a very slightly idealized

portrait of it. We are not speaking of the miracles; that

is a wholly different question. When men knew little

of the order of nature, whatever came to pass without

an obvious cause was at once set down to influences

beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were

witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad

powers, of course the especial servants of God would

not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome

the devil. And there were many other reasons why the

saints should work miracles. They had done so under

the old dispensation, and there was no obvious reason

why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And

again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which

is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest

natural is the highest supernatural, it is not everybody

that is able to see that; natural facts permit us to be

so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of

commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express,

there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But

the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they

so. Men did not become saints by working miracles,

but they worked miracles because they had become

saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives

lay in the means which they had used to make themselves

what they were: and as we said, in this part of

the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--

scarcely even exaggeration. We have documentary evidence,

which has been passed through the sharp ordeal

of party hatred, of the way some men (and those,

men of vast mind and vast influence in their day, not

mere ignorant fanatics,) conducted themselves, where

myth has no room to enter. We know something of

the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket, and other uneasy

penances of his; and there was another poor monk,

whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun:

that was he who, when the earth's mighty ones were

banded together to crush him under their armed heels,

spoke but one little word; and it fell among them like

the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their hands

against each other, and the armies melted away; and

the proudest monarch of the earth lay at that monk's

threshold three winter nights in the scanty clothing of

penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or again,

to take a fairer figure: there is a poem extant, the

genuineness of which we believe has not been challenged,

composed by Columbkill, commonly called St.

Columba. He was a hermit in Aran, a rocky island in

the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was

summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner

which appeared to him to be a divine call, to go away

and be bishop of Iona. The poem is a "Farewell to

Aran," which he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us

see something of a hermit's life there. "Farewell," he

begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), "a long

farewell to thee, Aran of my heart. Paradise is with

thee, the garden of God within the sound of thy bells.

The angels love Aran. Each day an angel comes there

to join in its services." And then he goes on to

describe his "dear cell," and the holy happy hours

which he had spent there, "with the wind whistling

through the loose stones, and the sea spray hanging on

his hair." Aran is no better than a wild rock. It is

strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of

the old hermitages; and at their best they could have

been but such places as sheep would huddle under in

a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which would

pierce through to them.

Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there

are silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same

touching story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a

monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters,

rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and

wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of

pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp

keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual

ooze: for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through

which the cold and the wind find as free an access as

the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog would

object to accept a night's lodging in them; and if they

had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic tongues

would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger

perhaps supposes that they were the very dungeons of

which he has heard such terrible things. He asks his

guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks'

dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that

dripping roof above them, was the self-chosen home of

those poor men. Through winter frost, through rain

and storm, through summer sunshine, generation after

generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at

last lay down and died.

It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and

it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it

would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional

interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have

produced but one more unreality in an age already too full

of such. No one supposes we should have set to work

to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in

his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors

and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he

could get anything better. Either we are wiser, or more

humane, or more self-indulgent; at any rate we are

something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an

impassable gulf which this age or this epoch will not see

bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,

however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected,

and were endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in

our educational system; a very serious blank indeed,

and one which, somehow, we must contrive to get filled

if the education of character is ever to be more than a

name with us. To try and teach people how to live

without giving them examples in which our rules are

illustrated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of

perspective, and of light and shade, without designs to

study them in; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme

and metre without song or poem in which rhyme and

metre are seen in their effects. It is a principle

which we have forgotten, and it is one which the old

Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they

set out with saying to themselves "we must have

examples, we must have ideals;" very likely they never

thought about it at all; love for their holy men, and a

thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and

love unconsciously working gave them the best for

which they could have wished. The boy at school at

the monastery, the young monk disciplining himself as

yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had

devoted himself, the old halting on toward the close of

his pilgrimage, all of them had before their eyes, in the

legend of the patron saint, a personal realization of all

they were trying after; leading them on, beckoning to

them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their

difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had

left, as he had trod that hard path before them. It was

as if the church was for ever saying to them:--"You

have doubts and fears, and trials and temptations

outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and

feel the burden of your sin. Here was one who, like

you, in this very spat, under the same sky, treading the

same soil, among the same hills and woods and rocks

and riven, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned

like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did

penance, and washed out his sins; he fought the fight,

he vanquished the evil one, he triumphed, and now he

reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same ground

which yields you your food, once supplied him; he

breathed and lived, and felt, and died here; and now,

from his throne in the sky, he is still looking down

lovingly on his children, making intercession for you

that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by

he may himself offer you at God's throne as his own."

It is impossible to measure the influence which a

personal reality of this kind must have exercised on the

mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through

a life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract

excellences to strain after; all is distinct, personal,

palpable. It is no dream. The saint's bones are

under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features

undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have

been opened and the body seen without mark or taint

of decay. Such things have been, and the emaciation

of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily

some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of,

or preached upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in

light in the long chapel windows; and in the summer

matins his figure, lighted up in splendour, gleams down

on them as they pray, or streams in mysterious shadowy

tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft

celestial glory, and shining as he shines in heaven.

Alas, alas, where is it all gone?

We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide

question, what possibly may have been the meaning of

so large a portion of the human race and so many

centuries of Christianity having been surrendered and

seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary

asceticism. If right once, then it is right now; if now

worthless, then it could never have been more than

worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on

it were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given

for that which is not bread. We supposed ourselves

challenged recently for our facts. Here is an enormous

fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred

over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of

superstition, of the twilight of the understanding, of

barbarism, and of nursery credulity; it is matter for the

philosophy of history, if the philosophy has yet been

born which can deal with it; one of the solid,

experienced facts in the story of mankind which must be

accepted and considered with that respectful deference

which all facts claim of their several sciences, and

which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing

it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy,

to love. We must remember that the men who wrote

these stories, and who practised these austerities, were

the same men who composed our liturgies, who built

our churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral

is, perhaps, on the whole, the most magnificent

creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out

of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy

of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being

certain progressive organizing laws in which the fretful

lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in

some larger unity. Thus age is linked on to age, as we

are moving forward, with an horizon for ever expanding

and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of

any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance,

and definite forms of thought working through long

historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws.

--imply a distinct step in human progress; something

previously unrealized is being lived out, and rooted into

the heart of mankind. Nature never half does her

work. She goes over it, and over it, to make assurance

sure, and makes good her ground with wearying

repetition. A single section of a short paper is but a

small space to enter on so vast an enterprise, nevertheless,

a few very general words shall be ventured as a

suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may

possibly have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to

the world whatever form the spirit of the world assumes,

the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite;

as one verges into one extreme the other will

verge into the contrary. In those rough times the law

was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong

animal heart which guided it, were the excellences

which the world rewarded, and monasticism, therefore,

in its position of protest, would be the destruction and

abnegation of the animal. The war hero in the

battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis

of the fleshly man, the saint in the desert of the

spiritual. But this is slight, imperfect, and if true at all

only partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not

contradictories; they are the complements in the perfect

character; and in the middle ages, as in all ages of

genuine earnestness, interfused and penetrated each

other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors;

and those grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in

the cathedral aisles were something higher than only

one more form of the beast of prey. Monasticism

represented something more positive than a protest against

the world. We believe it to have been the realization

of the infinite loveliness and beauty of personal purity.

In the earlier civilization, the Greeks, however

genuine their reverence for the gods, do not seem to

have supposed any part of their duty to the gods to

consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as

was their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as

beauty of form, with all their loftiness and their nobleness,

with their ready love of moral excellence in some

of its manifestations, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty

and to home, they had little or no idea of what we

mean by morality. With a few rare exceptions, pollution,

too detestable to be even named among ourselves,

was of familiar and daily occurrence among their

greatest men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman;

and was not supposed to be incompatible, and

was not, in fact, incompatible with any of those especial

excellences which we so admire in the Greeks.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of

the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality.

A public officer of state, whose business was to inquire

into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish

offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we

have seen only once on this planet. There was never

a people before, and there has been none since, with

sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality

is not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself.

It is obedience to law, practised and valued, loved

for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid

endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself. The

Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and

it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as

the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon as

the energy grew slack, when the religion was no

longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,

and there was no more danger to face, and the world

was at their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind;

there was no loveliness in virtue to make it

desired, and the Rome of the Censors presents, in its

later age, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the

coarsest animal desire, with means unlimited to gratify

it. In Latin literature, as little as in the Greek, is

there any sense of the beauty of purity. Moral essays

on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the

wise man whose passions and whose appetites are

trained into obedience to reason. But this is no more

than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got

itself expressed in words when men were tired of the

reality; it involves no sense of sin. If sin could be

indulged without weakening our self-command, or without

hurting other people, Roman philosophy would have

nothing to say against it.

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy;

without speculating on the why, they felt that indulgence

of animal passion did, in fact, pollute them,

and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.

Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces

of the universe, giving the spirit to God, but declaring

matter to be eternally and incurably evil; and looking

forward to the time when the spirit should be emancipated

from the body, as the beginning of, or as the

return to, its proper existence, took no especial care

what became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of

flesh. If it sinned, sin was its element; it could

not do other than sin; purity of conduct could not

make the body clean, and no amount of bodily

indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit--a very

comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various

disguises, has appeared a good many times on the

earth. But Christianity, shaking it all off, would

present the body to God as a pure and holy sacrifice,

as so much of the material world conquered from the

appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode

they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and

scourgings, the penances and night-watchings; it was

this which sent St. Anthony to the tombs and set

Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,

and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much

as one corrupt thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant;

when the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men

are very apt to be so. If, in the recoil from

Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint

thus purified had contracted supernatural virtue and

could work miracles, they had not sufficiently attended

to the facts, and so far are not unexceptionable witnesses

to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and in

virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage, we are lifted

forward a mighty step which we can never again retrace.

Personal purity is not the whole for which we have to

care, it is but one feature in the ideal character of man.

The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly

all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us

poor, mean, and emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is

with science; generations of men have given themselves

exclusively to single branches, which, when mastered,

form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in

life, so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years

to make good a single step. Weary and tedious enough

it seems when we cease to speak in large language, and

remember the numbers of individual souls who have

been at work at it; but who knows whereabouts we

are in the duration of the race? Are we crawling out

of the cradle, or are we tottering into the gave?

In nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood?

Who knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our

steps when we have taken them, and thankfully to

accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it is

impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to

any character which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth

we require not greatness only, but goodness; and

not that goodness only which begins and ends in conduct

correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that

keen pure feeling for it, which resides in a conscience

as sensitive and susceptible as woman's modesty.

So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this

matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first

furrow in the crust of a soil, which hitherto the

historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.

If they are conscientious enough not to trifle

with the facts, as they look back on them from the

easiness of modern Christianity which has ceased to

demand any heavy effort of self-sacrifice, they either

revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which made

such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud

in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders,

they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of

mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the

papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of

immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or

bad success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross

along their journey in this earth of ours, they set it by,

pass it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor

common-place simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will

not do. Mankind have not been so long on this planet

altogether, that we can allow so large a chasm to be

scooped out of their spiritual existence.

We intended to leave our readers with something

lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism

and a few specimen extracts; both of which must now,

however, be necessarily brief--we are running out our

space. Whoever is curious to study the lives of the

saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than

to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life

when he can command an early one, for the genius in

them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like riverwater,

is most pure nearest to the fountain head. We

are lucky in possessing several specimens of the mode

of their growth in late and early lives of the same saints,

and the process in all is similar. Out of the lives of

St. Bride three are left; out of the sixty-six of

St. Patrick, there are eight; the first of each belonging

to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth. The

first are in verse; they belong to a time when there

was no one to write such things, and were popular in

form and popular in their origin--the flow is easy, the

style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to

prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is

ossified, and the exuberance of legendary creativeness

we exchange for the hard dogmatic record of fact without

reality, and fiction without grace. The marvellous

in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the after

miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of

poets' metaphors for literal truth. There is often real,

genial, human beauty in the old verse. The first two

stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's Hymn are of high

merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a

translation:--

"Bride the queen, she loved not the world;

She floated on the waves of the world

As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.

Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps

In the far land of her captivity,

Mourning for her child at home."

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning

of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage.

The poetical "Life of St. Patrick," too, is full of fine,

wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a

shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend,

well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving

a gigantic foot-print on a rock from which he

sprang into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from

some remarkable natural feature of the spot; but, as

it is told here, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and

it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the

boy. But in the prose all is crystalline; the story

is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a

series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick

is described, as the after apostle, raising the dead Celts

to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force,

and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and

literal raisings. And so in many ways the freshness

and individuality is lost with time. The larger saints

swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits;

chasms were supplied by an ever ready imagination;

and, like the stock of good works laid up for

general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready

when any defect was to be supplied. So it was that,

after the first impulse, the progressive fire of a saint

rolled on like a snow-ball down a mountain-side, gathering

up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,

appropriate or inappropriate, sometimes real jewels of

genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old

creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till

at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in

pieces on the Reformation.

One more illustration--one which shall serve as evidence

of what the really greatest, most vigorous, minds

in the twelfth century could accept as possible or probable,

and which they could relate (on what evidence we

do not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember

something of St. Artselm: both as a statesman and as

a theologian, he was unquestionably the ablest man of

his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which he

tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint with

thirty of his companions, was preaching within the

frontiers of a lawless pagan prince; and, disregarding

all orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued

to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears

of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.

Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers

was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated.

The scene of the execution was a wood, and the

heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves

and the wild birds.

"But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in

the church in the person of the holy Denis, was again

wrought by divine providence to preserve the bodies of

his saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose

from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and

carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and

afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of

his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug

graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried

himself."

It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming

Anselm's authorship; and there is no reason why the

authorship should not be his. Out of the heart come

the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the

intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad,

noble or base--thank God for it!--as they judge well

or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love

God and hate the devil. And yet it is instructive.

We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and

influence--with all the advantages of modern science,

learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm

with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having

fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of

mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous)

as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.

"Mutato nomine de te

Fabula narratur."

We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and

turn away and straightway forget what manner of men

we are. The superstition of science scoffs at the

superstition of faith.

____