ostle, raising the dead Celts
to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force,
and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and
literal raisings. And so in many ways the freshness
and individuality is lost with time. The larger saints
swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits;
chasms were supplied by an ever ready imagination;
and, like the stock of good works laid up for
general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready
when any defect was to be supplied. So it was that,
after the first impulse, the progressive fire of a saint
rolled on like a snow-ball down a mountain-side, gathering
up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
appropriate or inappropriate, sometimes real jewels of
genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old
creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till
at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in
pieces on the Reformation.

One more illustration--one which shall serve as evidence
of what the really greatest, most vigorous, minds
in the twelfth century could accept as possible or probable,
and which they could relate (on what evidence we
do not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember
something of St. Artselm: both as a statesman and as
a theologian, he was unquestionably the ablest man of
his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which he
tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint with
thirty of his companions, was preaching within the
frontiers of a lawless pagan prince; and, disregarding
all orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued
to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears
of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.
Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers
was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated.
The scene of the execution was a wood, and the
heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves
and the wild birds.

"But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in
the church in the person of the holy Denis, was again
wrought by divine providence to preserve the bodies of
his saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose
from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and
carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and
afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of
his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug
graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried
himself."

It is even s