, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would
expect _a priori_, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested
by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses
would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede
a liar only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert as a picture
of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after
which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a
pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable
at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was
lauding. The histories of the saints are written as ideals of a
Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they are nothing. For
fourteen centuries the religious mind of the Catholic world threw them
out as its form of hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of
human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring
to realise. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks
what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what
Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung
or read; or in more modern times, what the Knights of the Round Table
were in the halls of the Norman castles. The Catholic mind was
expressing its conception of the highest human excellence; and the
result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle
heroes, too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties
of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and
unimportant; the object being to create examples for universal human
imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of
chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain, or Antony in the desert, are
equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants,
enchanters, robbers, unknightly nobles, or furious wild beasts; the
Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight
leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest
of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues
the devil in his flesh with prayers and penances; and so alien is it all
to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either
rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them
with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful fo