bear it through the circle of the
stars. But left to their own guidance, or reined by a
fool's hand, they may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's
end, and set a world on fire. One real service, and
perhaps only one, knowledge alone and by itself will
do for us--it can explode existing superstitions. Everything
has its appointed time, superstition like the rest;
and theologies, that they may not overlive the period
in which they can be of advantage to mankind, are
condemned, by the conditions of their being, to weave
a body for themselves out of the ideas of the age
of their birth; ideas which, by the advance of knowledge,
are seen to be imperfect or false. We cannot
any longer be told that there must be four inspired
gospels--neither more nor less--because there are
four winds and four elements. The chemists now
count some sixty elements, ultimately, as some of
them think, reducible into one; and the gospel, like
the wind, may blow from every point under heaven.
But effectual to destroy old superstitions, whether
it is equally successful in preventing others from
growing in their place, is less certain and obvious..
In these days of table-turnings, mesmerisms, spirit-
rappings, odyle fluids, and millenarian pamphlets selling
80,000 copies among our best-educated classes, we
must be allowed to doubt.

Our one efficient political science hinges on selfinterest,
and the uniform action of motives among the
masses of mankind--of selfish motives reducible to
system. Such philosophies and such sciences would
but poorly explain the rise of Christianity, of
Mahometanism, or of the Reformation. They belong to ages
of comparative poverty of heart, when the desires of
men are limited to material things; when men are
contented to labour, and eat the fruit of their labour, and
then lie down and die. While such symptoms remain
among us, our faith in progress may remain unshaken;
but it will be a faith which, as of old, is the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
____

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors
had been completed, it would have contained the
histories of 25,000 saints. So many the catholic
church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals; as
men, who had not only done her honour by the
eminence of their sanctity, but who had received while
on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of
supernatural power. And this vast number is but a
se