night’s lodging in them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors.  The stranger perhaps supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such terrible things.  He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks’ dormitories.  Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men.  Through winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine, generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at last lay down and died.

It is all gone now—­gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints.  It would have produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such.  No one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get anything better.  Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf which this age or this epoch will not see bridged over.  Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists, however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name with us.  To try and teach people how to live without giving them examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without designs to study them in; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme and metre without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are seen in their effects.  It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one which the old Catholics did not forget.  We do not mean that they set out with saying to themselves “we must have examples, we must have ideals;” very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have wished.  The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had devoted himself, the old halting on toward the close of his pilgrimage, all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the patron saint, a personal realization of all they were trying after; leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he had trod that hard path before them.  It was as if the church was for ever saying to them:—­“You