ges, which he removed
from his churches, calling those idolaters who adhered to this practice;
he also condemned the adoration of relics, of the figure of the cross,
&c.; and he was not inaptly called, on this account, by the Jesuit
historian Maimbourg, the first Protestant minister.

There are other traces of a similar opposition during the ninth century,
but it seems to have entirely disappeared in the tenth, and it was again
renewed by the Albigenses in the eleventh century. Their history, however,
is foreign to the object of the present essay; and I shall endeavour to
give in my next chapter a short sketch of the legends of the saints,
composed during the middle ages.

Chapter VI. Origin And Development Of The Pious Legends, Or Lives Of
Saints, During The Middle Ages.

A collection of the lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar has
been accomplished by the Jesuits, and is well known as that of the
Bollandists, from the name of its first originator Bollandus. It extends
to fifty-three huge folios, though it has reached only to the middle of
October,(69) each day having a number of saints assigned to it for
commemoration. It contains, among a mass of the greatest absurdities, a
good deal of valuable information relating to the history of the middle
ages, particularly in respect to the customs and prevailing ideas of that
period. A great, if not the greatest part of the saints whose lives are
described in that collection have never existed, except in the imagination
of their biographers; and the best proof of this is that the learned
Benedictine monk, Dom Ruinart, an intimate friend and collaborator of the
celebrated Mabillon, has reduced the acts of martyrs, whom he considers as
true, to one moderate quarto, though the same work contains a refutation
of the Protestant Dodwell, who maintained that the number of the primitive
martyrs had been greatly exaggerated by their historians.(70)

The Christian church was already, at an early period of her existence,
disturbed by a great number of forgeries, relating to the history and
doctrine of our Lord and his disciples;(71) but the spirit in which they
were written, so contrary to that of the true Gospel, and the gross
absurdities which they contain, were convincing proofs of the apocryphal
character of those writings, which, consequently, were rejected as such
from the canon of Scripture. If the church could not escape such abuses at
a time when she wa