Our one efficient political science hinges on selfinterest, and the uniform action of motives among the masses of mankind—­of selfish motives reducible to system.  Such philosophies and such sciences would but poorly explain the rise of Christianity, of Mahometanism, or of the Reformation.  They belong to ages of comparative poverty of heart, when the desires of men are limited to material things; when men are contented to labour, and eat the fruit of their labour, and then lie down and die.  While such symptoms remain among us, our faith in progress may remain unshaken; but it will be a faith which, as of old, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. ____

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints.  So many the catholic church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals; as men, who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of supernatural power.  And this vast number is but a selection; the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of national interest.  It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.  Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say little in this place.  They have no form or beauty to give them attraction in themselves; and for their human interest, the broad atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants which had grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank.  And yet, in their place as historical phenomena they are as remarkable as any of the pagan mythologies; to the full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold they once exercised on the conviction of mankind is to pass for anything in the estimate—­and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the catholic faith.