for
granted. For instance, the real reason for rejecting the account of the
vision which appeared to St Waltheof in the holy Eucharist, must be
disbelief of the Catholic doctrine."(77)

The miracle alluded to above, and which cannot be rejected without
disbelief in the Catholic doctrine, is as follows:--"On Christmas-day, when
the convent was celebrating the nativity of our Lord, as the friar was
elevating the host, in the blessed sacrifice of the mass, he saw in his
hand a child fairer than the children of men, having on his head a crown
of gold studded with jewels. His eyes beamed with light, and his face was
more radiant than the whitest snow; and so ineffably sweet was his
countenance, that the friar kissed the feet and the hands of the heavenly
child. After this the divine vision disappeared, and Waltheof found in his
hands the consecrated water."(78)

The whole collection is full of similar stories, some of which are really
outrageous; as, for instance, that which it relates about St Augustine,
the great apostle of England.

This saint was, during his peregrinations about the country, received with
great honours in the north of England; "but," says the work in question,
"very different from this are the accounts of his travels in Dorsetshire.
While there, we hear of his having come to one village, where he was
received with every species of insult. The wretched people, not content
with heaping abusive words upon the holy visitors, assailed them with
missiles, in which work, the place being probably a sea-port, the sellers
of fish are related to have been peculiarly active. Hands, too, were laid
upon the archbishop and his company. Finding all efforts useless, the
godly company shook the dust from their feet, and withdrew. The
inhabitants are said to have suffered the penalty of their impieties, even
to distant generations. All the children born from that time bore and
transmitted the traces of their parents' sins in the shape of a loathsome
deformity."(79)

The writer who relates this story had not the courage or the honesty of M.
Chavin de Malan to tell that the insult offered to the holy visitors
consisted in attaching tails of fish to their robes, and that the
loathsome deformity, with which the children of the perpetrators of that
insult were born during many generations, was a tail.

Absurd as this monkish story is, it is nevertheless characteristic of the
spirit of the sacerdotal pride and vindictivene