have doubts and fears, and trials and temptations outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the burden of your sin.  Here was one who, like you, in this very spat, under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and woods and rocks and riven, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the evil one, he triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven.  The same ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed and lived, and felt, and died here; and now, from his throne in the sky, he is still looking down lovingly on his children, making intercession for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may himself offer you at God’s throne as his own.”  It is impossible to measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain after; all is distinct, personal, palpable.  It is no dream.  The saint’s bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features undissolved.  Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and the body seen without mark or taint of decay.  Such things have been, and the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle.  Daily some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached upon.  In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel windows; and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour, gleams down on them as they pray, or streams in mysterious shadowy tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory, and shining as he shines in heaven.  Alas, alas, where is it all gone?

We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human race and so many centuries of Christianity having been surrendered and seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism.  If right once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is not bread.  We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts.  Here is an enormous fact which there is no evading.  It is not to be slurred over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superstition, of the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing it to have a meaning)