to show a pair of light grey eyes beneath, sure I was but little used to a dull life once,” twinkling with saturnine humour. with a sigh.

Somehow his wife had felt it in her bones that he would thus appear. It was the cer-eneugh. He canna be in twa places at ance, tainty of beholding such an apparition which had caused her to quake and tremble for the previous half-hour. She had a wholeShe had a wholesome fear of Rob; he was, she would have told you, the best of fathers and husbands, "a canny man, and muckle thocht o'; but there was just ae thing aboot him, whiles he wad na be guided by naebody."

Na, ye munna do that," said Rob emphatically. Forgettin' will no do. What I say mun be remembered, no forgotten. Ye thocht I had a craw to pluck wi' the keeper for gi'en us his company sae aften upo' my ain accoont, did ye? Na, na; I like the potency in love affairs.

REMINISCENCES OF THE HIGH CHURCH REVIVAL.

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.

LETTER V.—THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.

tunity for throwing myself into medieval position which is not history, and is not con-
literature, and studying in contemporary scious fiction-it
writings what human life had really been
like in this island, in an age of which the
visible memorials remained in churches and
cathedrals and monastic ruins.

I do not regret my undertaking, though I little guessed the wilderness of perplexities into which I was throwing myself. I knew that I was entering a strange scene, but anticipation is not sensation, nor had anything which I had hitherto read prepared me completely for what I should find. The order of nature, whether always unbroken or not, is generally uniform. In the lives of the Christian saints the order of nature seems only to have existed to give holy men an opportunity of showing their superiority to material conditions. The evidence is commonly respectable. The biographer may be a personal friend, or at least the friend of a friend, yet not " Jack the GiantKiller" or the "Arabian Nights" introduces one more entirely into a supernatural world. When a miracle occurs, the unbeliever is astonished; the believer, who records the story, sees no more than he expects. He looks only to the object, and if the motive is sufficient, the more marvellous the event the more likely it is to have occurred, and the less it requires proof or critical examination. If a sceptic dares to doubt, it is only that he may be the more utterly confounded. The accounts are given gravely, as if they were of real facts, without grace, without imagination, without any of the ornamental work of acknowledged invention the sublime and ridiculous mixed together indiscriminately, with the ridiculous largely predominating. Was it possible that such stuff could be true? or even intended to be taken for truth? Was it not rather mere edifying reading for the monks' refectories; the the puerile absurdities thrown in to amuse innocently their dreary hours? Was it not as idle to look for historical truth in the lives of the saints, as in "Amadis de Gaul" or "Orlando Furioso "?

times; it is produced in our times; it will
was produced in old
be produced wherever and as long as human
society exists-something which honestly
believes itself to be fact, and is created, never-
theless, by the imagination. The stories of
the Edda were not felt to be false when
they were sung in old Danish halls. The
genuine myth is not invented-is not written,
but grows. It begins from a small seed, and
unfolds into form as it passes from lip to
lip. It is then assigned by tradition to a
particular person. "The story I tell you
came from So-and-So," says some one, wishing
to give it credibility.
"He was on the spot
and saw or heard it."
"So-and-So" may
never have heard of it; but the story may still
survive and carry his name along with it as a
further legend. Now, and always, remark-
able persons become mythical. Anecdotes
are told of them, almost always inaccurate;
words are assigned to them which they never
spoke. Smaller luminaries are robbed to
swell the greatness of the central orb. We, in
these days of equality, disbelieve in excep-
tional heroes, as the Middle Ages believed
in them.

Disbelief shows itself in scandal. There is a pleasure in finding that an eminent man is but a mortal after all, and proof of weakness can be discovered if it is wanted. Great qualities, on the other hand, are magnetic, and every report, good or evil, true or false, about persons possessed of them is likely to stick. Hero-worship and saintworship are honourable forms of a universal tendency; but it is idle to expect from worshippers an accurate investigation into fact. Evidently the stories which I was studying were legends, though in sober prose-legends which were never examined into, because it would have been a sin to doubt them. doubt them. There was one sceptic even among the apostles; but St. Thomas was held up as an example to be shunned. According to the doctrines of the Church the spirit of belief was angelic, the spirit of doubt was devilish; and thus in devout It seemed so, and yet it seemed not so. ages, and in the devout atmosphere of conFor the great saints (or for the small saints vents and monasteries, the volume of spiritual where they had founded religious houses) there wonders grew unchecked. To balance eviwere special commemorative services, in dence and compare the degrees of it is mere which their most grotesque performances were waste of time. The evidence of such witnot forgotten. It was not easy to believe that nesses is worth nothing, unless they can be men specially called religious, and who con- produced and cross-examined. The child sidered truth to be one of the duties which when he has first seen a conjuror, the disciple religion prescribed, could thus deliberately who has been at a spiritualist's séance, cannot consecrate what they knew, and would ad-report faithfully what has passed immediately mit, to be lies. under his eyes. To have seen something

There is a class of com

which he cannot understand delights him,
and he describes it with the unconscious
omissions and exaggerations which make a
natural explanation impossible. So it was
with the hagiologist; he tells his story in
good faith. Perhaps we have the authentic
narrative of an eye-witness; yet the only fact
of which we can feel assured is that he
believed, or professed to believe, that the
subject of it worked miracles. He has a
conviction, to begin with, that holy men had
powers of this kind, and therefore it was a
matter of course that these powers should
have shown themselves. Character is no
protection. We may assume that Anselm,
for instance, would report nothing which he
did not suppose to be true; but piety, which
is a security for good faith, is none against
credulity; or perhaps, if we could have asked
Anselm, we should have found that his
very notion of truth was not our notion;
that he meant by truth, truth of idea, rather
than literal truth of fact. Intellect, again, is
no protection; among the saints' biographers
are found the greatest names in the Church.
Athanasius wrote a life of St. Anthony;
Bede wrote a life of St. Cuthbert. It is not
too much to say that both these distinguished
men, and the thousand smaller men who
followed in their tracks, were possessed, and
that things which were not, appeared to them
as things that were. So it is in our own
time. Čardinal Newman tells us that he can-
not resist the evidence for the liquefaction of
the blood of St. Januarius. That is, any number
of witnesses can be brought to declare that
they have seen it. If the smallest civil action
in an English court of justice turned on the
liquefying of blood under similar circum-
stances, and a thousand witnesses swore that
they had seen it, the evidence would go for
nothing, unless the substance called blood
had been examined and analyzed by compe-
tent chemists, and the process repeated in
the presence of trained observers. Ordi-
nary spectators see phenomena every day,
which to them are equally inexplicable, at
Maskelyne and Cooke's. Miracles, authenti-
cated by the same kind of testimony, and
the same degree of it, are worked at Lourdes
and at Knock, and at saints' shrines, and at
mesmeric doctors' reception - rooms. The
testimony of credulous and ignorant people
in such cases is worth simply nothing, and
the multiplication of nothing remains nothing
still. As to St. Januarius, it is noticeable
that a miracle, closely resembling that which
Cardinal Newman believes, used to be worked |
in the same Neapolitan territory in the

Roman tirnes. Horace, describing the various stations at which he stopped on his from way Rome to Brindisi, says—

"Dehinc Gnatia Lymphis

Iratis extructa dedit risusque jocosque,
Dum flammâ sine thura liquescere limine sacro
Persuadere cupit. Credat Judæus Apella
Non ego-namque Deos didici securum agere ævum
Nec siquid miri faciat Natura Deos id
Tristes ex alto cœli dimittere tecto."

Cardinal Newman, with the Jew Apella, would have believed in the supernatural liquefaction of the incense. Horace would 'laugh and jest" at St. Januarius. It is not a matter of proof but of temperament. Why should we allow our convictions on the most serious of subjects to be influenced by evidence which we should not dare to admit if we were deciding a common civil or criminal case?

For an intending biographer this was a serious discovery. I could not repeat what I found written, for the faith was wanting. A spiritualist many years after assured me that I could work a miracle myself if I had but faith. Could I but have faith in the Great Nothing all things would be possible for me-but, alas! I had none. So with the lives of the saints. St. Patrick I found once lighted a fire with icicles, changed a Welsh marauder into a wolf, and floated to Ireland upon an altar stone. I thought it nonsense. I found it eventually uncertain whether Patricius was not a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as existed. After a short experiment I had to retreat out of my occupation, and let the series go on without me. But the excursion among the Will-o'-the-wisps of the spiritual morasses did not leave me as it found me. I was compelled to see that in certain conditions of mind the distinction between objective and subjective truth has no existence. An impression is created that it is fit, right, or likely that certain things should take place, and the outward fact is assumed to correspond with that impression. When a man feels no doubt, he makes no inquiry, for he sees no occasion for it; yet his conviction is as complete as the most searching investigation could have made it. His own feeling that something is true is to him complete evidence that it is true. True it may be; and yet not true in the sense which he attaches to the word. There are several kinds of truth. There is the truth of pure mathematics, which is perfect as long as it concerns lines or figures which exist only as abstractions. There is the truth of a drama like Hamlet, which is literally invention, yet is a

true picture of men and women. There is he had acknowledged it, and a controversy the truth of a fable. There is the truth of followed in which Kingsley, instead of adan edifying moral tale. There is the truth of mitting, as he ought to have done, that he a legend which has sprung up involuntarily had spoken unadvisedly, and in too sweeping out of the hearts of a number of people, and terms, defended himself, and defended himtherefore represents something in their own self unsuccessfully. Kingsley, in truth, enminds. Finally, there is the dull truth of tirely misunderstood Newman's character. plain, experienced fact, which has to be pain- Newman's whole life had been a struggle for fully sifted out by comparison of evidence, truth. He had neglected his own interests; by observation, and, when possible, by ex- he had never thought of them at all. He periment, and is held at last, after all care had brought to bear a most powerful and has been taken, by those who know what subtle intellect to support the convictions of truth of fact means, with but graduated cer- a conscience which was superstitiously sensitainty, and as liable at all times to revision tive. His single object had been to discover and correction. The distinction, common- what were the real relations between man and place as it seems, was forgotten by the hagi- his Maker, and to shape his own conduct by ologists. It is forgotten, for that matter, by the conclusions at which he arrived. To remost historians. All men, when their feelings present such a person as careless of truth was are interested, believe what they wish to be- neither generous nor even reasonable. But lieve, or what their preconceptions represent Newman as little understood his adversary. to them as internally probable. Theologians He was not called on, perhaps, to look far avow that other methods besides examina- into a subject which did not concern him. tion of evidences are required to establish | the truths of faith. The truths of faith must be held with absolute certitude. The truths of science, the most assured of them, are held only as high probabilities; and the evidence has therefore to be supplemented by emotion, imagination, and speculative reasoning introduced from adjoining provinces. Cardinal Newman describes in his "Grammar of Assent" the process by which probabilities are converted into certainties; with the help of it he can justify his own belief in the miracle at Naples. He can create antecedent likelihoods which dispense with completeness of proof, or remove antecedent unlikelihoods which call for fuller and more minute proofs. It is the theory on which, unconsciously held, the crop of legends in the Catholic Church has grown for century after century, and is growing now luxuriant as ever. It is the theory on which our Lady is believed to be showing herself in France, in Ireland, or more recently to the Anglican monks at Llantony. It is not a theory by which any truth was ever discovered that can be tested, and sifted, and verified by experiment, or applied to the practical service of mankind.

And this leads me to say a very few words on a subject to which I alluded in an earlier letter; the question that rose fifteen years ago between Cardinal Newman and Charles Kingsley. Mr. Kingsley, writing impetuously as he often did, said that the Catholic clergy did not place truth among the highest virtues, and he added that Father Newman acknowledged it. Father Newman asked him when

He had been attacked, as he thought, wan-
tonly. He struck back; and he struck most
effectively. Kingsley, however, had passed
through his own struggles. He, too, had
been affected at a distance by the agitations
of the Tractarian controversy. He, like many
others, had read what Newman had written
about ecclesiastical miracles. The founda-
tions of his own faith had been disturbed.
He was a man of science; he knew what
evidence was. He believed that Newman's
methods of reasoning confounded his per-
ceptions of truth, disregarding principles
which alone led to conclusions that could
be trusted in other subjects, and which,
therefore, he could alone trust in religion.
His feelings had been, perhaps, embittered
by the intrusion of religious discord into
families in which he was interested, traceable
all of it to the Oxford movement. He him-
self had determined to try every fact which
was offered for his belief by the strict rules
of inductive science and courts of justice;
and every other method appeared to him to
be treason to his intellect, and to reduce
was before
truth, where truth of fact
everything essential, to the truth of fable,
or fiction, or emotional opinion. This was
at the bottom of his mind, however un-
guardedly he expressed himself. He was an
orthodox Protestant. The outward evidence
for the Gospel history was strong in itself.
It was supplemented by the effect which
Christianity had produced in the world by
the position which it had assumed, and the
renovation which it had produced in the
human heart and character. It was supple-