I have a mind to go to heaven; and I know my
mind right well. If the world is to be such as this, and the rulers
thereof such as you, I will flee from you. I will not enter into the
congregation of sinners, neither will I cast in my lot with the
bloodthirsty. I will be alone with God and His universe. I will go to
the mountain cave or to the ocean cliff, and there, while the salt wind
whistles through my hair, I will be stronger than you, safer than you,
richer than you, happier than you. Richer than you, for I shall have for
my companion the beatific vision of God, and of all things and beings God-
like, fair, noble, just, and merciful. Stronger than you, because virtue
will give me a power over the hearts of men such as your force cannot
give you; and you will have to come to my lonely cell, and ask me to
advise you, and teach you, and help you against the consequences of your
own sins. Safer than you, because God in whom I trust will protect me:
and if not, I have still the everlasting life of heaven, which this world
cannot give or take away. So go your ways, fight and devour one another,
the victims of your own lusts. I am minded to be a good man; and to be
that, I will give up--as you have made all other methods impossible for
me--all which seems to make life worth having'? Oh! instead of finding
fault with such men; instead of, with vulturine beak, picking out the
elements of Manichaeism, of conceit, of discontent, of what not human
frailty and ignorance, which may have been in them, let us honour the
enormous moral force which enabled them so to bear witness that not the
mortal animal, but the immortal spirit, is the Man; and that when all
which outward circumstance can give is cast away, the Man still lives for
ever, by God, and in God.

And they did teach that lesson. They were good, while other men were
bad; and men saw the beauty of goodness, and felt the strength of it, and
worshipped it in blind savage admiration. Read Roswede's Vitae Patrum
Eremiticorum; read the legends of the hermits of the German forests; read
Colgan's Lives of the Irish Saints; and see whether, amid all fantastic,
incredible, sometimes immoral myths, the goodness of life of some one or
other is not the historic nucleus, round which the myths, and the worship
of the saint, have crystallized and developed.

Take, for instance, the exquisite hymn of St. Bridget, which Colgan
attributes to the sixth century: though it is prob