nds of St. Mary
and the Apostles which now drive the ecclesiastical
historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among
mankind, than the keenest and gravest intellect which
ever set itself to contemplate them.

And now having in some degree cleared the ground
of difficulties, let us go back to the Lives of the Saints.
If Bede tells us lies about St. Cuthbert, we will disbelieve
his stories, but we will not call Bede a liar, even
though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the
clearest evidence. We are driven to no such alternative;
our canons of criticism are different from Bede's, and
so are our notions of probability. Bede would expect
a priori, and would therefore consider as sufficiently
attested by a consent of popular tradition, what the
oaths of living witnesses would fail to make credible to
a modern English jury. We will call Bede a liar only
if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert, as a
picture of a life which he considered admirable and
excellent, as one after which he was endeavouring to
model his own, and which he held up as a pattern of
imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it
admirable at all, when he was making no effort at the
austerities which he was lauding. The histories of the
Saints are written as ideals of a Christian life; they
have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they
are nothing. For fourteen centuries the religious mind
of the catholic world threw them out as its form of
hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of human
life which each Christian within his own limits was
endeavouring to realize. The first martyrs and
confessors were to those poor monks what the first Dorian
conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what
Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were
wherever Homer was sung or read; or in more modern
times what Turpin was in the court of Charlemagne or
the Knights of the Round Table in the halls of the
Norman castles. This is what they were; and the
result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As
with the battle heroes too, the inspiration lies in the
universal idea; the varieties of character (with here and
there an exception) are slight and unimportant; as
examples they were for universal human imitation.
Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spiri