a shallow
moral on the impostures and credulities of the early
catholic. An atheist could not wish us to say more;
if we can really believe that the Christian church was
made over, in its very cradle to lies and to the father of
lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to
say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself
with any faith which after such an admission we may
profess to entertain. For as this spirit began in the
first age in which the church began to have a history;
so it continued so long as the church as an integral
body retained its vitality; and only died out in the
degeneracy which preceded, and which brought on the
Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories
held their place, and rang on from age to age, from
century to century; as the new faith widened its
boundaries and numbered ever more and more great
names of men and women who had fought and died for
it, so long their histories living in the hearts of those for
whom they laboured, laid hold of them and filled them,
and the devout imagination, possessed with what was
often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we
try them by any historical canon, we have to say that
quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed
among men; and not believed only, but held sacred,
passionately and devotedly; not filling the history
books only, not only serving to amuse and edify the
refectory, or to furnish matter for meditation in the
cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers,
forming the spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of
millions of human souls.

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact
idolater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain
peak on the wild west Irish shore, where for more
than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip
of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the
presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and in the
sharp crystals of the trap rock a path has been worn
smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the
pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
painful way along it as they have done for a thousand
years. Doubtless the "Lives of the Saints" are full of
lies. Are then none in the Iliad? in the legends
of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of
the Cid