whom I trust will protect me: and if not, I have still the
everlasting life of heaven, which this world cannot give or take
away. So go your ways, fight and devour one another, the victims of
your own lusts. I am minded to be a good man; and to be that, I will
give up--as you have made all other methods impossible for me--all
which seems to make life worth having'? Oh! instead of finding fault
with such men; instead of, with vulturine beak, picking out the
elements of Manichaeism, of conceit, of discontent, of what not human
frailty and ignorance, which may have been in them, let us honour the
enormous moral force which enabled them so to bear witness that not
the mortal animal, but the immortal spirit, is the Man; and that when
all which outward circumstance can give is cast away, the Man still
lives for ever, by God, and in God.

And they did teach that lesson. They were good, while other men were
bad; and men saw the beauty of goodness, and felt the strength of it,
and worshipped it in blind savage admiration. Read Roswede's Vitae
Patrum Eremiticorum; read the legends of the hermits of the German
forests; read Colgan's Lives of the Irish Saints; and see whether,
amid all fantastic, incredible, sometimes immoral myths, the goodness
of life of some one or other is not the historic nucleus, round which
the myths, and the worship of the saint, have crystallized and
developed.

Take, for instance, the exquisite hymn of St. Bridget, which Colgan
attributes to the sixth century: though it is probably much later;
that has nothing to do with the argument:-


'Bridget, the victorious, she loved not the world;