even
in their darkest aberrations men are never wholly given
over to falsehood and absurdity. When philosophy has
done for mediaeval mythology what it has done for
Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find in it at least
as deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life,
and we shall find also a moral element there which at
their best they never had. The lives of the saints
are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful;
yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty they are
always good.

And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves
on its magnitude. The Bollandists were restricted on
many sides. They took only what was in Latin--while
every country in Europe had its own home-growth in its
own language--and thus many of the most characteristic
of the lives are not to be found at all in their collection.
And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed
in all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of
various shorter lives which had grown up in different
localities out of popular tradition; so that many of their
longer productions have an elaborate literary character,
with an appearance of artifice which, till we know how
they came into existence, might blind us to the vast
width and variety of the traditionary sources from which
they are drawn. In the twelfth century there were
sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that in a
country where every parish had its own special saint and
special legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have
contained (Mr. Gibbon says must have contained) at
least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To severe
criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St.
Patrick, appears problematical. But at least there is
the historical fact, about which admits of no mistake,
that they did grow up in some way or other, that they
were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read; that
these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over
the earth, wherever the catholic faith was preached,
stories like these sprang out of the heart of the people,
and grew and shadowed over the entire believing mind
of the catholic world. Wherever church was founded,
or soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of
those who had died in the faith; wherever the sweet
bells of convent or of monastery were heard in the
evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
remembrance of God, there rested the memory of some
apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the
sepul