Christian church was made over, in its very cradle to lies and to the father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which after such an admission we may profess to entertain.  For as this spirit began in the first age in which the church began to have a history; so it continued so long as the church as an integral body retained its vitality; and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded, and which brought on the Reformation.  For fourteen hundred years these stories held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century; as the new faith widened its boundaries and numbered ever more and more great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long their histories living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured, laid hold of them and filled them, and the devout imagination, possessed with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out into life, and form, and reality.  And doubtless, if we try them by any historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held sacred, passionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only, not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain peak on the wild west Irish shore, where for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and in the sharp crystals of the trap rock a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years.  Doubtless the “Lives of the Saints” are full of lies.  Are then none in the Iliad? in the legends of AEneas?  Were the stories sung in the liturgy of Eleusis all so true? so true as fact?  Are the songs of the Cid or of Siegfried?  We say nothing of the lies in these, but why?  Oh, it will be said, but they are fictions, they were never supposed to be true.  But they were supposed to be true, to the full as true as the Legenda Aurea.  Oh then, they are poetry; and besides, they have nothing to do with Christianity.  Yes, that is it; they have nothing to do with Christianity.  It has grown such a solemn business with us, and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the imagination.  The distinction between secular and religious has been extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the fulness and freedom