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During the persecution of the Jansenists in 1782 a deacon, named Pâris, died and was canonised by the popular voice. Miracles were said to have been wrought at his sepulchre in the cemetery of St. Médard; fanatics flung themselves down on the tomb and writhed in horrible convulsions.
Monulphe's little chapel had given way to a mighty church dedicated to the canonised Bishop Lambert. The ecclesiastical state became almost autonomous, the episcopal authority being restricted without the walls only by the distant emperor and still more distant pope. Within the walls, the same authority had by no means a perfectly free hand.
"Had we been as free of all sins as gluttony and drunkenness," says Smith, "we might have been canonised as saints, our wheat having fried some twenty-six weeks in the ship's hold, contained as many worms as grains, so that we might truly call it rather so much bran than corn. Our drink was water, our lodging castles in the air." There was fish enough in the river, game enough in the woods.
Pachymius was speedily deposited at the mouth of his cavern, where he received the visits of the neighbouring anchorites, who came to congratulate him on the constancy with which he had sustained his fiery, or rather watery trial. He spent most of his remaining days in the society of the devil, on which account he was canonised at his death.
If he had erected a little gold statue to him, it might have proved the sincerity of this assertion; but to make a martyr and a patron saint of a man, and to dig up 'his canonised bones' in order to expose them as objects of devotion to the rabble's gaze, asks something that has more life and spirit in it, more mind and vivifying soul, than has to do with any calculation of pounds, shillings, and pence!
Were it nothing else, the pains he spent on the growth of the life of grace in his own soul, that would have canonised him among the saintliest of those saintly men. He would have set the Question on many a Communion Friday, and the Question in his hands would not have concerned itself with surface matters.
How shall I describe Rasputin? My pen fails me. He was one of a few great charlatans of saintly presence and of specious words, fascinators of women, and domineerers of men, who have been sent to the world at intervals through all the ages. Had he lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century of our era he would no doubt have been canonised.
A classic, according to the usual definition, is an old author canonised by admiration, and an authority in his particular style. The word classic was first used in this sense by the Romans. With them not all the citizens of the different classes were properly called classici, but only those of the chief class, those who possessed an income of a certain fixed sum.
I never met but one real minister, that is a man who ministers to the poor, and he died in a London slum before he was thirty. I believe he was a saint; and if he had lived in the days of the early Church, he would certainly have been canonised. He would have been Saint William his name was William. But he was only one William, I've seen hundreds of them."
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