Starry Stapelia. _Stapelia radiata._
Dedicated to _St. John of the Cross_.
[391] Gentleman’s Magazine.
~November 25.~
_St. Catharine_, 3d Cent. _St. Erasmus_, or _Elme_.
~St. Catharine.~
This saint is in the church of England calendar, and the almanacs. It is
doubtful whether she ever existed; yet in mass-books and breviaries, we
find her prayed to and honoured by hymns, with stories of her miracles
so wonderfully apocryphal that even cardinal Baronius blushes for the
threadbare legends. In Alban Butler’s memoirs of this saint, it may be
discovered by a scrutinizing eye, that while her popularity seems to
force him to relate particulars concerning her, he leaves himself room
to disavow them; but this is hardly fair, for the great body of readers
of his “Lives of the Saints,” are too confiding to criticise hidden
meanings. “From this martyr’s uncommon erudition,” he says, “and the
extraordinary spirit of piety by which she sanctified her learning, and
the use she made of it, she is chosen, in the schools, the patroness and
model of christian philosophers.” According to his authorities she was
beheaded under the emperor Maxentius, or Maximinus II. He adds, “She is
said first to have been put upon an engine made of four wheels joined
together, and stuck with sharp pointed spikes, that when the wheels were
moved her body might be torn to pieces.” The acts add, that at the first
stirring of the terrible engine, the cords with which the martyr was
tied, were broke asunder by the invisible power of an angel, and, the
engine falling to pieces by the wheels being separated from one another,
she was delivered from that death. Hence, the name of “St. Catharine’s
wheel.”
[Illustration: ~St. Catharine and the Emperor Maxentius.~