So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter.  If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil, which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.  If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they look back on them from the easiness of modern Christianity which has ceased to demand any heavy effort of self-sacrifice, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion—­and, loud in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the papacy.  For the inner life of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad success as was given them, to carry Christ’s cross along their journey in this earth of ours, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor common-place simper of sorrow or of scorn.  It will not do.  Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.

We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism and a few specimen extracts; both of which must now, however, be necessarily brief—­we are running out our space.  Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life when he can command an early one, for the genius in them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like riverwater, is most pure nearest to the fountain head.  We are lucky in possessing several specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the same saints, and the process in all is similar.  Out of the lives of St. Bride three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick, there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth.  The first are in verse; they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and were popular in form and popular in their origin—­the flow is easy, the style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and the exuberance of legendary creativeness we exchange for the hard dogmatic record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace.  The marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the after miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets’ metaphors for literal truth.  There is often real, genial, human beauty in the old verse.  The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride’s Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a translation:—­

“Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
She floated on the waves of the world
As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.