g on from age to age, from century to century;
as the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever more and more
great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long
their histories, living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured,
laid hold of them and filled them: and the devout imagination, possessed
with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any
historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in
this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held
sacred, passionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only,
not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter
for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the
spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolator, what a
strange sight must be that still mountain-peak on the wild west Irish
shore, where, for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved
chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long
ago there of the Irish apostle; and where, in the sharp crystals of the
trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding
knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless
the 'Lives of the Saints' are full of lies. Are there none in the Iliad?
or in the legends of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of
Siegfried true? We say nothing of the lies in these; but why? Oh, it
will be said, but they are fictions; they were never supposed to be
true. But they _were_ supposed to be true, to the full as true as the
'Legenda Aurea.' Oh, then, they are poetry; and besides, they have
nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to
do with Christianity. Religion has grown such a solemn business with us,
and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to
be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the
imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been
extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the
fulness and freedom which we have lost