soil of belief. The
great saints of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who converted
Europe to Christianity, were as modest and unpretending as true,
genuine men always are. They claimed no miraculous powers for
themselves. Miracles might have been worked in the days of their
fathers. They for their own parts relied on nothing but the natural
powers of persuasion and example. Their companions, who knew them
personally in life, were only a little more extravagant. Miracles and
portents vary in an inverse ratio with the distance of time. St.
Patrick is absolutely silent about his own conjuring performances. He
told his followers, perhaps, that he had been moved by his good angel
to devote himself to the conversion of Ireland. The angel of metaphor
becomes in the next generation an actual seraph. On a rock in the
county of Down there is, or was, a singular mark, representing rudely
the outline of a foot. From that rock, where the young Patrick was
feeding his master's sheep, a writer of the sixth century tells us
that the angel Victor sprang back to heaven after delivering his
message, and left behind him the imprinted witness of his august
visit. Another hundred years pass, and legends from Hegesippus are
imported into the life of the Irish apostle. St. Patrick and the Druid
enchanter contend before King Leogaire on Tara Hill, as Simon Magus
and St. Peter contended before the Emperor Nero. Again a century, and
we are in a world of wonders where every human lineament is lost. St.
Patrick, when a boy of twelve, lights a fire with icicles; when he
comes to Ireland he floats thither upon an altar-stone which Pope
Celestine had blessed for him. He conjures a Welsh marauder into a
wolf, makes a goat cry out in the stomach of a thief who had stolen
him, and restores dead men to life, not once or twice but twenty
times. The wonders with which the atmosphere is charged gravitate
towards the largest concrete figure which is moving in the middle of
them, till at last, as Gibbon says, the sixty-six lives of St. Patrick
which were extant in the twelfth century must have contained at least
as many thousand lies. And yet of conscious lying there was very
little; perhaps nothing at all. The biographers wrote in good faith
and were industrious collectors of material, only their notions of
probability were radically different from ours. The more marvelous a
story, the less credit we give to it; warned by experience of
carelessness, c