ere 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, the legends of the
saints 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 possessed on the convictions 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 there also at least as
deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a
moral element which the Pagans 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 the magnitude of
the Christian hagiology. 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 mo