Hermit, and Patron of Stafford, towards A.D. 800
Bright luminaries in the heavens, which guide the traveller across the desert, are found, when viewed through a glass, to be double stars, not single, though each seems to be one. Suns which reign separately in their separate systems, far apart from each other, mingle their rays, as we see them, and blend their colours, and are called by one name. They are confused, yet they are used by the wayfaring man, who is not hurt by his mistake.
So it is with the beacon light which the seaman dimly discerns from afar. It has no definite outline, and occupies no distinct spot in the horizon; it cannot be located amid the haze and gloom, but it gives him direction and confidence.
So is it with his landmarks by day; one, two, three high trees are set on a hill—nay, when close, we can count a dozen, yet in the distance they look like one, nor can we persuade ourselves that they are many. What matters it to those who are tossing at sea so long as they remind them of the green home which they are approaching, and shape their course towards it?
And so with the herbs of the field. We call them simples, and we use them in medicine as such, and they do certainly put disease and pain to flight. Yet they are compounded of many elements, and some of these, not the whole plant, is the true restorative. Often we do not know that this is the case; but, even when we do, we are not nearer to the knowledge of what the healing element is, or how it may be detached and used separately. We cannot extract the true virtue of the medicine from the impure drug, and we think it better to administer it in combination with other elements which may be useless, or even inconvenient, than to wait till we can duly analyse it.
And to take a more sacred instance, and more closely connected with the subject to which these remarks are tending. It has before now happened that profane or fanatical violence has broken in upon the relics of the Saints, and scattered them over land and water, or mixed them with the dust of the earth, or even with the mouldering bones of common men, nay of heretics and sinners. Yet could it not destroy the virtue of the relics; it did but disperse and conceal them. They did more, they were seen less. What says St. Basil about the Forty Martyrs who were burned, and whose relics were cast into the river, in the Licinian persecution? “These are they who have taken occupation of this our country, as a chain of fortresses, and secure her against hostile invasion, not throwing themselves upon one point, but quartered upon many homes and the ornament of many places.”
And what the malice of foes has done to the bodies of the Saints, the inadvertence or ignorance of friends has too often done to their memories. Through the twilight of ages—in the mist of popular credulity or enthusiasm—amid the ambitious glare of modern lights, darkening what they would illustrate—the stars of the firmament gleam feebly and fitfully; and we see a something divine, yet we cannot say what it is: we cannot say what, or where, or how it is, without uttering a mistake. There is no room for the exercise of reason—we are in the region of faith. We must believe and act where we cannot discriminate; we must be content to take the history as sacred on the whole, and leave the verification of particulars as unnecessary for devotion, and for criticism impossible.
This applies of course in no small degree to the miraculous incidents which occur in the history of the Saints. “Since what is extraordinary,” says Bollandus, “usually strikes the mind and is impressed on the memory in an especial way, it follows that writers about the Saints at times have been able to collect together nothing but their miracles, their virtues and other heavenly endowments being altogether forgotten; and these miracles, often so exaggerated or deformed (as the way of men is) with various adjuncts and circumstances, that by some persons they are considered as nothing short of old women’s tales. Often the same miracles are given to various persons; and though God’s unbounded goodness and power certainly need not refuse the Saint the same favour which He has already bestowed upon that (for He applies the same chastisements and punishments to the sins of various persons), yet what happened to one has often in matter of fact been attributed to others, first by word of mouth, then in writing, through fault of the faculty of memory, which is but feeble and easily confused in the case of the many; so that when inquiries are made about a Saint, they attribute to him what they remember to have heard at some time of another, especially since the mind is less retentive of names than of things. In this way, then, while various writers at one and the same time have gone by popular fame, because there were no other means of information, it has come to pass that a story has been introduced into the history of various Saints which really belongs to one only, and to him perhaps not in the manner in which it is reported.