and there was no obvious reason
why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And
again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which
is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
natural is the highest supernatural, it is not everybody
that is able to see that; natural facts permit us to be
so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express,
there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But
the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they
so. Men did not become saints by working miracles,
but they worked miracles because they had become
saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives
lay in the means which they had used to make themselves
what they were: and as we said, in this part of
the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--
scarcely even exaggeration. We have documentary evidence,
which has been passed through the sharp ordeal
of party hatred, of the way some men (and those,
men of vast mind and vast influence in their day, not
mere ignorant fanatics,) conducted themselves, where
myth has no room to enter. We know something of
the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket, and other uneasy
penances of his; and there was another poor monk,
whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun:
that was he who, when the earth's mighty ones were
banded together to crush him under their armed heels,
spoke but one little word; and it fell among them like
the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their hands
against each other, and the armies melted away; and
the proudest monarch of the earth lay at that monk's
threshold three winter nights in the scanty clothing of
penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or again,
to take a fairer figure: there is a poem extant, the
genuineness of which we believe has not been challenged,
composed by Columbkill, commonly called St.
Columba. He was a hermit in Aran, a rocky island in
the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was
summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner
which appeared to him to be a divine call, to go away
and be bishop of Iona. The poem is a "Farewell to
Aran," which he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us
see something of a hermit's life there. "Farewell," he
begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), "a long
farewell to thee, Aran of my heart. Paradise is with
thee, the garden of God within the sound of thy bells.
The angels love Aran. Each day an ang