of every hermit since St. Antony. It is impossible
to read the pages of Reginald of Durham (for he, the
biographer of St.
Cuthbert, is also the biographer
of St. Godric) without feeling how difficult it is
to obtain anything like the truth, even from eye-witnesses,
if only men are (as they were in those days) in a state
of religious excitement, at a period of spiritual revivals.
The ignorant populace were ready to believe, and
to report, anything of the Fakeer of Finchale.
The monks of Durham were glad enough to have a wonder-working
man belonging to them; for Ralph Flambard, in honour
of Godric, had made over to them the hermitage of Finchale,
with its fields and fisheries. The lad who, in
after years, waited on the hermit, would have been
ready enough to testify that his master saw daemons
and other spiritual beings; for he began to see them
on his own account; {312} fell asleep in the forest
coming home from Durham with some bottles; was led
in a vision by St. John the Baptist to the top of
a hill, and shown by him wonders unspeakable; saw,
on another occasion, a daemon in St. Godric’s
cell, hung all over with bottles of different liquors,
offering them to the saint, who bade the lad drive
him out of the little chapel, with a holy water sprinkle,
but not go outside it himself. But the lad, in
the fury of successful pursuit, overstepped the threshold;
whereon the daemon, turning in self-defence, threw
a single drop of one of his liquors into the lad’s
mouth, and vanished with a laugh of scorn. The
boy’s face and throat swelled horribly for three
days; and he took care thenceforth to obey the holy
man more strictly: a story which I have repeated,
like the one before it, only to show the real worth
of the evidence on which Reginald has composed his
book. Ailred, Abbot of Rievaux (for Reginald’s
book, though dedicated to Hugh Pudsey, his bishop,
was prompted by Ailred) was capable (as his horrible
story of the nun of Watton proves) of believing anything
and everything which fell in with his fanatical, though
pious and gentle, temper.
And here a few words must be said to persons with
whose difficulties I deeply sympathise, but from whose
conclusions I differ utterly: those, namely,
who say that if we reject the miracles of these saints’
lives, we must reject also the miracles of the New
Testament. The answer is, as I believe, that
the Apostles and Evangelists were sane men:
men in their right minds, wise, calm; conducting themselves
(save in the matter of committing sins) like other
human beings, as befitted the disciples of that Son
of Man who came eating and drinking, and was therefore
called by the ascetics of his time a gluttonous man,
and a wine-bibber: whereas these monks were
not (as I have said elsewhere) in their right minds
at all.
