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In the annals of no other Christian nation do we see so many examples of the power of the ministers of God to punish the wicked and help and succor the good, as we do in the hagiography of Ireland.
In their body were concentrated the gifts of science, art, holiness, even miracles without number, unless we are to suppose that the hagiography of the island was intrusted to the care of idiots incapable of ascertaining current facts.
Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood carving, and the miniatures of the old missals.
To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But the perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent.
He was at once idiotic and sublime; in the hagiography he stands alone, and seems to figure there to furnish a proof that the soul is identified with Eternal Wisdom, rather by ignorance than by science. "He also loves animals," said Durtal to himself, as he looked at old Simeon; "and he too puts to flight the Evil One, and works cures by his sanctity.
In the seventeenth century French Brittany was completely permeated by Jesuitical customs and by the modes of piety common to the rest of the world. Up to that time the religion of the country had had features of its own, its special characteristic being the worship of saints. Among the many peculiarities for which Brittany is noteworthy, its local hagiography is assuredly the most remarkable.
Hagiography. St. i. 553-588; Z.f.r.P. ii. 438-459; Rom. xviii. 203. C. Wahlund, Die altfr. Anc. Krit. Studien zu Wace's Conception und Nicolas, 1878; life of St. Lang. Anc. Auban in Bezug auf Quelle," &c. Rom. Lit. xxiii. 436; Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1888, p. v; Wolter, Bibl. Lyric Poetry. The remaining songs are mostly of a religious character. Anc.
But since this happy reconciliation has been effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence, although the accounts of other "unclassed" supernormal marvels coming from the same lips with the same attestation are still brushed aside as traveller's tales, or as the puerilities of hagiography not worth a thought.
It was not a work of fancy to which their pens were devoted: A strong, feeling heart and an active imagination were certainly theirs; but of little service could either prove to them in the ungrateful task of collecting manuscripts, classifying, reading them through, ascertaining their age and authenticity, and finally using them for the purpose of preserving the annals and hagiography of the nation.
The Bollandists, accustomed as they were to meet with miracles of that kind, in the lives they published, found in Irish hagiography such a superabundance of them, that they refused to admit into their admirable compilation a great number already published or in manuscript.
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