I hope that the memory of this story, which, thinking it myself an extremely pretty one, I have given you, not only for a type of sincerity and simplicity, but for an illustration of obedience, may at all events quit you, for good and all, of the notion that the believers and witnesses of miracle were poetical persons.  Saying no more on the head of that allegation, I proceed to the Dean’s second one, which I cannot but interpret as also intended to be injurious,—­that they were artless and childish ones; and that because of this rudeness and puerility, their motives and opinions would not be shared by any statesmen of the present day.

It is perfectly true that Edward the Confessor was himself in many respects of really childish temperament; not therefore, perhaps, as I before suggested to you, less venerable.  But the age of which we are examining the progress, was by no means represented or governed by men of similar disposition.  It was eminently productive of—­it was altogether governed, guided, and instructed by—­men of the widest and most brilliant faculties, whether constructive or speculative, that the world till then had seen; men whose acts became the romance, whose thoughts the wisdom, and whose arts the treasure, of a thousand years of futurity.

I warned you at the close of last lecture against the too agreeable vanity of supposing that the Evangelization of the world began at St. Martin’s, Canterbury.  Again and again you will indeed find the stream of the Gospel contracting itself into narrow channels, and appearing, after long-concealed filtration, through veins of unmeasured rock, with the bright resilience of a mountain spring.  But you will find it the only candid, and therefore the only wise, way of research, to look in each era of Christendom for the minds of culminating power in all its brotherhood of nations; and, careless of local impulse, momentary zeal, picturesque incident, or vaunted miracle, to fasten your attention upon the force of character in the men, whom, over each newly-converted race, Heaven visibly sets for its shepherds and kings, to bring forth judgment unto victory.  Of these I will name to you, as messengers of God and masters of men, five monks and five kings; in whose arms during the range of swiftly gainful centuries which we are following, the life of the world lay as a nursling babe.  Remember, in their successive order,—­of monks, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Martin, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory; of kings,—­and your national vanity may be surely enough appeased in recognizing two of them for Saxon,—­Theodoric, Charlemagne, Alfred, Canute, and the Confessor.  I will read three passages to you, out of the literal words of three of these ten men, without saying whose they are, that you may compare them with the best and most exalted you have read expressing the philosophy, the religion, and the policy of to-day,—­from which I admit, with Dean Stanley, but with a far different meaning from his, that they are indeed separate for evermore.  I give you first, for an example of Philosophy, a single sentence, containing all—­so far as I can myself discern—­that it is possible for us to know, or well for us to believe, respecting the world and its laws.