over the entire believing mind of the catholic world.  Wherever church was founded, or soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and remembrance of God, there rested the memory of some apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for his Master’s sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the angels were believed to have ascended and descended.  It is not a phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the history of Christianity.  From the time when the first preachers of the faith passed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to grow.  Those who had once known them, who had drawn from their lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather together what fragments they could find of their stories.  Rumours blew in from all the winds.  They had been seen here, had been seen there, in the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering, prevailing.  Affection did not stay to scrutinize.  As when some member of a family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, on some dangerous expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us altogether—­fallen perhaps in battle—­and when the story of his end can be collected but fitfully from strangers who only knew his name, but had heard him nobly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at; reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to love strong grounds of confidence, and “trifles light as air” establish themselves as certainties;—­so, in those first Christian communities, travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome and seen Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him from the wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown to its full size in a single night, making merchandize of the precious relic out of the credulity of the believers.  So the legends grew, and were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow moral on the impostures and credulities of the early catholic.  An atheist could not wish us to say more; if we can really believe that the