is
miraculously supplied with a shoulder of mutton or a pair of trousers,
according to the nature of his necessities. He encounters ridicule or
personal insult, and instantly the blasphemer is struck dead, or
idiotic, or dumb, after the example of those who mocked Elisha's bald
head; and Wodrow generally winds up these judgments with an appropriate
admonitory text, as, for instance, "Touch not His anointed, and do His
prophets no harm." As the persons for whom these special miracles are
performed generally happen to be sorely beset by worldly privations and
dangers, which are at their climax at the very time when they are able
to call in supernatural intervention, a logician might be inclined to
ask why, if the operations, and, as it were, the very motives, of the
Deity are examined in respect of those events which are propitious to
His favourite, they should not also be examined with the same critical
pertinacity as to the greatly predominating collection of events which
are decidedly unpropitious to him, so as to bring out the reason why the
simpler course of saving him from all hardships and persecution had not
been followed, instead of the circuitous plan of launching heavy
calamities against him, and then issuing special miraculous powers to
save him from a small portion of these calamities. But such logic would
probably be unprofitably bestowed, and it is wiser to take the
narratives as they stand and make the best use of them. Whoever looks at
them with a cold scientific eye, will at once be struck by the close
analogy of Wodrow's vaticinations and miracles to those of other times
and places, and especially to those credited to the saints of the early
Catholic Church, to which many of them, indeed, bear a wonderfully exact
resemblance.

The Early Northern Saints.

Carried on by the power of association, we are thus brought to the door
of an exceedingly interesting department of book-club literature,--the
restoration of the true text of the early lives of the saints--a
species of literature now recognised and separated from others by the
title of Hagiology. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great
library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins
with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint
successively according to his day in the calendar. Ignorance is more
excusable on the question what constitutes saintship, and, supposing you
to have found your sai