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 scrutinise. 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, or 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 merchandise 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 Catholics. 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 ran