that agnostic confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know.  As to the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of life, a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet seen; an approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic religion has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in effecting.

THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS

[1889]

Charles, or more properly, Karl, King of the Franks, consecrated Roman Emperor in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, and known to posterity as the Great (chiefly by his agglutinative Gallicised denomination of Charlemagne), was a man great in all ways, physically and mentally.  Within a couple of centuries after his death Charlemagne became the centre of innumerable legends; and the myth-making process does not seem to have been sensibly interfered with by the existence of sober and truthful histories of the Emperor and of the times which immediately preceded and followed his reign, by a contemporary writer who occupied a high and confidential position in his court, and in that of his successor.  This was one Eginhard, or Einhard, who appears to have been born about A.D. 770, and spent his youth at the court, being educated along with Charles’s sons.  There is excellent contemporary testimony not only to Eginhard’s existence, but to his abilities, and to the place which he occupied in the circle of the intimate friends of the great ruler whose life he subsequently wrote.  In fact, there is as good evidence of Eginhard’s existence, of his official position, and of his being the author of the chief works attributed to him, as can reasonably be expected in the case of a man who lived more than a thousand years ago, and was neither a great king nor a great warrior.  The works are—­1.  “The Life of the Emperor Karl.” 2.  “The Annals of the Franks.” 3.  “Letters.” 4.  “The History of the Translation of the Blessed Martyrs of Christ, SS.  Marcellinus and Petrus.”

It is to the last, as one of the most singular and interesting records of the period during which the Roman world passed into that of the Middle Ages, that I wish to direct attention.[15] It was written in the ninth century, somewhere, apparently, about the year 830, when Eginhard, ailing in health and weary of political life, had withdrawn to the monastery of Seligenstadt, of which he was the founder.  A manuscript copy of the work, made in the tenth century, and once the property of the monastery of St. Bavon on the Scheldt, of which Eginhard was abbot, is still extant, and there is no reason to believe that, in this copy, the original has been in any way interpolated or otherwise tampered with.  The main features of the strange story contained in the “Historia Translations” are set forth in the following pages, in which, in regard to all matters of importance, I shall adhere as closely as possible to Eginhard’s own words.