miracles because they had become saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they had used to make themselves what they were:  and as we said, in this part of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth—­ scarcely even exaggeration.  We have documentary evidence, which has been passed through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way some men (and those, men of vast mind and vast influence in their day, not mere ignorant fanatics,) conducted themselves, where myth has no room to enter.  We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket, and other uneasy penances of his; and there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun:  that was he who, when the earth’s mighty ones were banded together to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word; and it fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest monarch of the earth lay at that monk’s threshold three winter nights in the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness.  Or again, to take a fairer figure:  there is a poem extant, the genuineness of which we believe has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill, commonly called St. Columba.  He was a hermit in Aran, a rocky island in the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a divine call, to go away and be bishop of Iona.  The poem is a “Farewell to Aran,” which he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit’s life there.  “Farewell,” he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), “a long farewell to thee, Aran of my heart.  Paradise is with thee, the garden of God within the sound of thy bells.  The angels love Aran.  Each day an angel comes there to join in its services.”  And then he goes on to describe his “dear cell,” and the holy happy hours which he had spent there, “with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea spray hanging on his hair.”  Aran is no better than a wild rock.  It is strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet which would pierce through to them.

Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story.  Whoever loiters among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual ooze:  for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light.  Such as they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a