is
saint's strange and universal power over Christendom.

"What peculiarly distinguished St. Martin was his sweet, serious,
unfailing serenity; no one had ever seen him angry, or sad, or, gay;
there was nothing in his heart but piety to God and pity for men. The
Devil, who was particularly envious of his virtues, detested above all
his exceeding charity, because it was the most inimical to his own
power, and one day reproached him mockingly that he so soon received
into favour the fallen and the repentant. But St. Martin answered him
sorrowfully, saying, 'Oh most miserable that thou art! if _thou_ also
couldst cease to persecute and seduce wretched men, if thou also
couldst repent, thou also shouldst find mercy and forgiveness through
Jesus Christ.'"[7]

[Footnote 7: Mrs. Jameson, Vol. II., p. 722.]

In this gentleness was his strength; and the issue of it is
best to be estimated by comparing its scope with that of the work of
St. Firmin. The impatient missionary riots and rants about Amiens'
streets--insults, exhorts, persuades, baptizes,--turns everything, as
aforesaid, upside down for forty days: then gets his head cut off, and
is never more named, _out_ of Amiens. St. Martin teazes nobody, spends
not a breath in unpleasant exhortation, understands, by Christ's first
lesson to himself, that undipped people may be as good as dipped if
their hearts are clean; helps, forgives, and cheers, (companionable
even to the loving-cup,) as readily the clown as the king; he is the
patron of honest drinking; the stuffing of your Martinmas goose is
fragrant in his nostrils, and sacred to him the last kindly rays of
departing summer. And somehow--the idols totter before him far and
near--the Pagan gods fade, _his_ Christ becomes all men's Christ--his
name is named over new shrines innumerable in all lands; high on the
Roman hills, lowly in English fields;--St. Augustine baptized his
first English converts in St. Martin's church at Canterbury; and the
Charing Cross station itself has not yet effaced wholly from London
minds his memory or his name.

That story of the Episcopal Robe is the last of St. Martin respecting
which I venture to tell you that it is wiser to suppose it literally
true, than a _mere_ myth; myth, however, of the deepest value and
beauty it remains assuredly: and this really last story I have to
tell, which I admit you will be wiser in thinking a fable than exactly
true, nevertheless had assuredly at its root