The Book-Hunter
Deity are examined in respect of those events which are propitious to
His favourite, they should not also be examined with the same critical
pertinacity as to the greatly predominating collection of events which
are decidedly unpropitious to him, so as to bring out the reason why the
simpler course of saving him from all hardships and persecution had not
been followed, instead of the circuitous plan of launching heavy
calamities against him, and then issuing special miraculous powers to
save him from a small portion of these calamities. But such logic would
probably be unprofitably bestowed, and it is wiser to take the
narratives as they stand and make the best use of them. Whoever looks at
them with a cold scientific eye, will at once be struck by the close
analogy of Wodrow's vaticinations and miracles to those of other times
and places, and especially to those credited to the saints of the early
Catholic Church, to which many of them, indeed, bear a wonderfully exact
resemblance.
The Early Northern Saints.
Carried on by the power of association, we are thus brought to the door
of an exceedingly interesting department of book-club literature,--the
restoration of the true text of the early lives of the saints--a
species of literature now recognised and separated from others by the
title of Hagiology. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great
library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins
with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint
successively according to his day in the calendar. Ignorance is more
excusable on the question what constitutes saintship, and, supposing you
to have found your saint, on the criterion by which the day of his
festival should be adjusted in the calendar. Technically, to make a
saint, there should be an act of pontifical jurisdiction, all the more
solemn than any secular judicial act as the interests affected are more
momentous; but only a small number of the saints stand on record in the
proceedings of the Vatican. In fact, the great body of them were in the
enjoyment of their honours hundreds of years before the certifying
process was adopted, and to investigate all their credentials was far
too weighty a task to be attempted. It is taken for granted that they
have been canonised, and if it be difficult to prove that they have gone
through this ceremony, they hold their ground through the still greater
difficulty of proving that they have not. Some of those whose sanctity
is established by this kind of acclamation are so illustrious, that it
would be ludicrous to suppose even the Vatican capable of adding to
their eminence--more so, to imagine any process by which they could be
unsanctified; such are St Patrick, St George, and St Kentigern. But
there is a vast crowd of village or parochial saints firmly established
within their own narrow circles, but as unknown at the court of Rome as
any obscure curate working in some distant valley, or among the poor of
some great city. In such a crowd there will naturally be questionable
personages. St Valentine, St Fiacre, St Boniface, St Lupus, St Maccesso,
St Bobbio, St Fursy, and St Jingo, have names not endowed with a very
sanctimonious sound, but they are well-established respectable saints.
Even Alban Butler, however, has hard work in giving credit to St
Longinus, St Quirinus, St Mercurius, St Hermes, St Virgil, St Plutarch,
and St Bacchus. It is the occurrence of such names that makes Moreri
speak of the Bollandist selection as rather loose, since it contains
"vies des saintes bonnes, mediocres, mauvaises, vrayes, douteuses, et
fausses."
The saint's festival-day is generally the anniversary of his death, or
"deposition," as it is technically termed; but this is by no means an
absolute rule. Few compilers deserve more sympathy than those who try to
adjust saints' days by rule and chronology, since not only does one
saint differ from another in the way in which his feast is established,
but for the same saint there are different days in different countries,
and even in different ecclesiastical districts--the diocese of Paris
having, for instance, some special saints' days of its own, which differ
from the practice throughout the rest of Catholic Christendom. Some
saints, too, have been shifted about from day to day by authority. Queen
Margaret of Scotland, the wife of Malcolm, whose real source of
influence was that she represented the old Saxon line of England, had
two great days,--that of her deposition on July the 8th, and that of her
translation on July the 19th; but, by a papal ordinance immediately
after the Revolution, her festival was established upon the 10th of
June. This was rather a remarkable day in Britain, being that on which
the poor infant son of the last of the Jameses, afterwards known in
Parliamentary language as the Pretender, was born. The adjustment of
Queen Margaret's day to that event was a stroke of policy for the
purpose of rendering the poor child respectable, and removing all doubts
about warming-pans and other disagreeables; but it is not known that the
measure exercised the slightest influence on the British Parliament.
Bollandus, who was the first seriously to lay his hand to the great work
called after him, was a Belgian Jesuit. He had got through January and
February in five folio volumes, when he died in 1658. Under the auspices
of his successor, Daniel Papebroch, March appeared in 1668 and April in
1675, each in three volumes. So the great work crept on day by day and
year by year, absorbing the whole lives of many devoted labourers,
conspicuous among whom are the unmelodious names of Peter Bosch, John
Stilting, Constantine Suyskhen, Urban Sticken, Cornelius Bye, James Bue,
and Ignacius Hubens. In 1762, a hundred and four years after January,
September was completed. It filled eight volumes, for the work
accumulated like a snow-ball as it rolled, each month being larger than
its predecessor. Here the ordinary copies stop in forty-seven volumes,
for the evil days of the Jesuits were coming on, and the new literary
oligarchy, where Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D'Alembert held sway, had
not been propitious to hagiology. A part of October was accomplished
under the auspices of Maria Theresa, the Empress Queen, but for some
reason or other it came within the category of rare books, and was not
to be easily obtained until it was lately reprinted.
Whatever effect such a phenomenon may have on some denominations of the
religious world, it can afford nothing but pure satisfaction to all
historical investigators to know that this great work has been resumed
in this middle of the nineteenth century. I have before me the ninth
volume for October, embracing the twentieth and twenty-first days of
that month, and containing about as much matter as the five volumes of
Macaulay's History. On the 21st of October there is, to be sure, a very
heavy job to be got through in St Ursula and her eleven thousand
virgins, whose bones may be seen in musty presses in the Church of the
Ursulines in Cologne; but still as it moves forward, it is evident that
the mighty work continues to enlarge its proportions. The winter is
coming on too, a period crowded with the memorials of departed saints,
as being unpropitious to men of highly ascetic habits, so that those who
have undertaken the completion of the Bollandist enterprise have their
work before them.
There is a marvellous uniformity in all the arrangements of this array
of volumes which have thus appeared at intervals throughout two
centuries. They dealt with matter too sublimely separated from the
temporal doings of men to be affected by political events, yet could
they not entirely escape some slight touches from the convulsions that
had recast the whole order and conditions of society. When October was
begun, Belgium, where the work is published, was attached to the
Austrian Empire, and the French Revolution had not yet come. The
Jesuits, though not favourites among monarchs, profess a decorous
loyalty, and the earlier volumes of the month have portraits of the
Empress Queen, and others of the Imperial family, in the most elaborate
court costume of the days before the Revolution; while the later
volumes, still loyal, are illustrated by the family circle of the
Protestant King of constitutional Belgium, whose good-natured face and
plain broad-cloth coat are those doubtless of the right man, though one
cannot help imagining that he feels himself somehow in the wrong place.
The crowds of saints who come sometimes swarming in on a single day to
these teeming volumes, give one an almost oppressive notion of the
quantity of goodness that must have, after all, existed in this wicked
world. The labours of the Bollandists, not only in searching through all
available literature, but in a special correspondence established with
their Jesuit brethren throughout the world, are absolutely astounding.
Their conscientious minuteness is wonderful; and many a one who thinks
he is master of the ecclesiastical lore of his own parish, which he has
made his specialty, has been petrified to find what he thought his
discoveries all laid down with careful precision as matters of ordinary
knowledge in some corner of these mighty volumes. The Bollandists
obtained their information from the spot, and it is on the spot that
this kind of literature must be worked out. A thoroughly accomplished
antiquary, working within a limited district, will thus bring forth more
full and satisfactory results, so far as they go, than even the
Bollandists have achieved, and hence the great value of the services of
the book clubs to hagiology.
The writer of the letters bearing the signature "Veritas," in all the
newspapers, would, of course, specially object to the resuscitation of
this class of literature, "because it is full of fabulous accounts of
miracles and other supernatural events which can only minister to
credulity and superstition." But even in the extent and character of
this very element there is a great significance. The size of a current
falsehood is the measure of the size of the human belief that has
swallowed it, and is a component part of the history of man.
The best critical writers on ancient history have agreed not to throw
away the cosmogony and the hierology of Greece. It is part of Grecian
history that the creed of the people was filled with a love of embodied
fancies, so graceful and luxuriant. No less are the revel rout of
Valhalla part of the virtual history of the Scandinavian tribes. But the
lives of our saints, independently altogether of the momentous change in
human affairs and prospects which they ushered in, have a substantial
hold on history, of which neither the classical nor the northern
hierology can boast. Poseidon and Aphrodite, Odin and Freya, vanish into
the indefinite and undiscoverable at the approach of historical
criticism. But separately altogether from their miracles, Cuthbert and
Ninian, Columba and Kentigern, had actual existences. We know when they
lived and when they died. The closer that historical criticism dogs
their steps, the clearer it sees them, and the more it knows about their
actual lives and ways. Even if they were not the missionaries who
introduced Christianity among us,--as men who, in the old days before
Britain became populous and affluent in the fruits of advanced
civilisation, trod the soil that we tread, it would be interesting to
know about them--about the habitations they lodged in, the garments they
wore, the food they ate, the language they spoke, their method of social
intercourse among each other, and the sort of government under which
they lived.
That by investigation and critical inquiry we can know more of these