his chapel.  His prayers, and a cross drawn upon the sand, availed to rescue a ship that was in peril on the sea.  When English pirates had plundered his shrine, the waves opened and swallowed them up.  Later on he withdrew to Rome, where he won the confidence of Clement VII, and he died at Mentone.  But his fame remained great in Guienne.  Half a century onward, during the war of 1570, when from Bordeaux men saw the church of Lormont across the river burning in the name of religion, the old folks shook their heads and recalled the words of the saintly Thomas.

Less fortunate was a young Franconian herdsman, John Beheim, of Niklashausen—­a ‘poor illiterate’, Trithemius calls him.  In the summer of 1476, as he watched his flocks in the fields, he had a vision of the gracious Mother of God, who bade him preach repentance to the people.  His fame soon spread, and multitudes gathered from great distances to hear him.  The nearest knelt to entreat his blessing, those further off pressed up to touch him, and if possible, snatched off pieces of his garments, till he was driven to speak from an upper window.  But his way was not plain.  Instigated seemingly by others, he began to touch things social:  taxes should not be paid to princes, nor tithes to clergy; rivers and forests were God’s common gifts to men, where all might fish or hunt at will.  Such words were not to be borne.  The Bishop of Wurzburg, his diocesan, took counsel with the Archbishop of Mainz; and the prophet was ordered to be burnt.  But death only increased his fame.  Still greater crowds flocked to visit the scene of his holy life, until in January 1477 the Archbishop had the church of Niklashausen razed to the ground as the only means of suppressing this popular canonization.

We make a great mistake if we allow ourselves to suppose that because that age knew less than ours, because its bounds were narrower and the undispelled clouds lower down, it therefore thought itself feeble and purblind.  By contrast with the strenuous hurry-push of modern life such movement as we can see, looking backwards, seems slow and uncertain of its aim; before the power of modern armaments how helpless all the might of Rome!  It is easy to fall into the idea that our mediaeval forefathers moved in the awkward attitudes of pre-Raphaelite painting, that their speech sounded as quaint to them as it does to us now, and that it was hardly possible for them to take life seriously.  But in fact each age is to itself modern, progressive, up-to-date; the strong and active pushing their way forward, impatient of trifling, and carrying their fellows with them.  A future age that has leapt from one planet to another, or even from one system to another sun and its dependants, that has ’called forth Mazzaroth in his seasons, and loosed the bands of Orion’, that has covered the earth with peace as with a garment and pierced the veil that cuts us off from the dead, will look back to us as groping blindly in darkness.  But they will be wrong indeed if they think that we realize our blindness.