theless, these modern hagiologists,
however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected,
and were endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in
our educational system; a very serious blank indeed,
and one which, somehow, we must contrive to get filled
if the education of character is ever to be more than a
name with us. To try and teach people how to live
without giving them examples in which our rules are
illustrated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of
perspective, and of light and shade, without designs to
study them in; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme
and metre without song or poem in which rhyme and
metre are seen in their effects. It is a principle
which we have forgotten, and it is one which the old
Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they
set out with saying to themselves "we must have
examples, we must have ideals;" very likely they never
thought about it at all; love for their holy men, and a
thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and
love unconsciously working gave them the best for
which they could have wished. The boy at school at
the monastery, the young monk disciplining himself as
yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had
devoted himself, the old halting on toward the close of
his pilgrimage, all of them had before their eyes, in the
legend of the patron saint, a personal realization of all
they were trying after; leading them on, beckoning to
them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their
difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had
left, as he had trod that hard path before them. It was
as if the church was for ever saying to them:--"You
have doubts and fears, and trials and temptations
outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and
feel the burden of your sin. Here was one who, like
you, in this very spat, under the same sky, treading the
same soil, among the same hills and woods and rocks
and riven, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned
like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did
penance, and washed out his sins; he fought the fight,
he vanquished the evil one, he triumphed, and now he
reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same ground
which yields you your food, once supplied him; he
breathed and lived, and felt, and died here; and now,
from his throne in the sky, he is still looking down
lovingly on his children, making intercession for you
that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by
he ma