ry circumstance offered to be proved has
excited the surprise of intelligent Protestants. Miracles, which to them
seemed proved to the utmost degree of demonstration, have, to their
surprise, been rejected. Whatever there is most awful in religion, most
sacred in an oath, or most tremendous in the censures of the church, is
employed in the process of canonization to elicit truth and detect
falsehood. Every check and countercheck is used, which slowness of
proceeding, or a repetition of it in other stages and under different
forms, can effect. The persons employed in it are the members of the
Roman Catholic church, the most exalted by their rank, and the most
renowned for their virtues and talents. When the proceedings are
concluded, they are printed and exposed to the examination of the whole
world. The sixth volume of the celebrated treatise of Benedict XIV. on
the beatification and canonization of saints, contains the acts of the
saints canonized by himself.

X.

With these helps our author sat down to his work. We may suppose him
addressing to the saints, whose lives he was about to write, a prayer
similar to the beautiful prayer addressed to them by Bollandus at the
end of his general preface, and which may be thus abridged: "Hail, ye
citizens of heaven! courageous warriors! triumphant over the world! from
the blessed scenes of your everlasting glory, look on a low mortal, who
searches everywhere for the memorials of your virtues and triumphs. Show
your favor to him; give him to discover the valuable monuments of former
times; to distinguish the spurious from the legitimate; to digest his
work in proper order and method; to explain and illustrate whatever is
obscure. Take under your protection all who have patronized or assisted
him in his undertakings: obtain for all who read his work, that they
imitate the examples of virtue which it places before their eyes; and
that they experience how sweet, how useful, and how glorious it is to
walk in your steps."

In the preface to the French translation, the work is said to have cost
our author the labor of thirty years. It was his practice, when he began
to write the life of any saint, to read over and digest the whole of his
materials, before he committed any thing to paper. His work evidently
shows, that his mind was full of its subject, {030} and that what he
wrote was the result of much previous information and reflection. On
many occasions he must have written on s