xisted,
because lies are told of them, is, I hold, most irrational. The
falsehood would not have been invented unless it had started in a truth.
The high moral character ascribed to them would never have been dreamed
of by persons who had not seen living instances of that character. Man's
imagination does not create; it only reproduces and recombines its own
experience. It does so in dreams. It does so, as far as the moral
character of the saint is concerned, in the legend; and if there had not
been persons like St. Bridget in Ireland, the wild Irish could never have
imagined them.

Therefore it matters little to a wise man, standing on the top of Croagh
Patrick, the grandest mountain perhaps, with the grandest outlook, in
these British isles, as he looks on the wild Irish there on pattern days,
up among the Atlantic clouds, crawling on bare and bleeding knees round
St. Patrick's cell,--it matters little, I say, to the wise man, whether
St. Patrick himself owned the ancient image which is worshipped on that
mountain peak, or the ancient bell which till late years hung in the
sanctuary,--such a strange oblong bell as the Irish saints carried with
them to keep off the demons--the magic bells which appear (as far as I am
aware) in the legends of no country till you get to Tartary and the
Buddhists;--such a bell as came (or did not come) down from heaven to St.
Senan; such a bell as St. Fursey sent flying through the air to greet St.
Cuanady at his devotions when he could not come himself; such a bell as
another saint, wandering in the woods, rang till a stag came out of the
covert, and carried his burden for him on his horns. It matters as
little to the wise man whether that bell belonged to St. Patrick, as
whether all these child's dreams are dreams. It matters little to him,
too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain peak, 'in
the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting,
like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the
storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous
Python of the lakes), which assembled at the magic ringing of his bell,
till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and
the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the spiritual force of which
(so the text was then applied) it is written, 'This kind cometh not out
but by prayer and fasting,' till he smote the evil things with 'the
golden