st
characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their
collection. And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in
all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of various shorter lives
which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so
that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary
character, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know how they
came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of
the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth
century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that
in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special
legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says
_must_ have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To
severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick,
appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about
which there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in some way
or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read;
that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth,
wherever the Catholic faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out
of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire
believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or
soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in
the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were
heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
remembrance of God, there dwelt the memory of some apostle who had laid
the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics
reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for
his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen
austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the
angels of God were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a
phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the
history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the
faith passed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to
and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last
disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to
grow. Those who had once known the Apostles, who had drawn from their
lips the blessed