spirit of devotion to the Church. The Ministers had declared that "the ecclesiastical spirit ought to be done away with, whilst the religious spirit should remain :" they might and should have known that, for Catholics, the one cannot exist without the other.

In effect, the activity of this Ministry was destructive and pernicious in every direction. History will set its seal of truth to the admonition uttered by Reichensperger on the 5th of February, 1874: "It is my opinion that the present administrators of the power of the State have no intention of changing their course of action. I am convinced, therefore, that the one service they can now render to the country is to beg His Majesty to accept their resignation. The Ministers now in office have already thrown down the noblest pillar in our Constitutional edifice the right of religious liberty. If they would save the country from further confusion and misery, let them resign !"

The Ministry, however, did not resign. The work of devastation and destruction was to proceed still further.

ART. III.-A PROTESTANT LIFE OF ST. HUGH.

1. The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, with some Account of his Predecessors in the See of Lincoln. By GEORGE G. PERRY, M.A., Canon of Lincoln. Murray, 1879.

London :

2. Magna Vita S. Hugonis. Edited by Rev. J. F. DIMOCK, M.A. London: Longmans. 1860. (Rolls Series.)

CURIOUS change is taking place in the minds of many

A Anglicans. When Elizabeth first established her new

hierarchy its members little cared to claim descent from the previous occupants of ancient sees. Pilkington, the first Protestant Bishop of Durham, spoke with great contempt and in abusive language of St. Wilfrid, St. William, Lanfranc, St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and St. Edmund.* Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, considered it a sad but undeniable fact that they had all been drowned in damnable idolatry for eight centuries at least. And the rest expressed similar opinions. Now, on the contrary, Protestant Bishops take every opportunity of proclaiming themselves the legitimate representatives of the ancient ecclesiastical rulers of England. Canon Perry dedicates his *"Works," p. 587. Parker Soc. Ed.

VOL. XXXIV.—NO. II. [Third Series.]

B B

Life of St. Hugh, "To the Right Reverend Christopher Wordsworth, D.D., Bishop of Lincoln, the successor of St. Hugh, alike in his virtues as in his see." Is this repentance? Is it a turning of the hearts of the children to the fathers? No. The lives of the English saints, which have appeared of late years from the pens of Anglican clergymen, are very different from those which in 1840-45 foretold the issue of the Oxford movement in reconciliation with the Church. With an air of conscious superiority, intellectual and spiritual, recent authors have condescended to choose some men of ancient fame, to rescue them alike from the superstitious veneration of Catholics, and the unreasoning vituperation of Protestants, to mete out to them praise and blame, admiration and pity, in equal portions. The modern Anglican considers himself the patron, not the client, of the mediæval saint.

One of the most offensive examples of this species of writing is the recent Life of St. Hugh of Avalon. It contains, indeed, some interesting and well-written pages. Had Canon Perry not a real admiration for St. Hugh he would doubtless not have occupied himself with his biography. Yet, when he meets with anything that goes against his Protestant prejudices, it never occurs to him to pause, to consider for a moment that perhaps the man, whose virtues he has been relating, might be right, and he himself mistaken. He blames at once either the saint or the doctrines and influences that warped his otherwise fine character. But worse than this. His praise is coloured by Protestant prejudice quite as much as his blame. Having undertaken to write a life which as a whole is intended to be laudatory, he naturally does not like to find many facts contrary to his ideal, and is on the look-out for traits of character which may assimilate his hero, in some respects, to the admired Protestant type. Hence he has made several curious blunders, and attributed opinions and acts to St. Hugh, quite at variance with historic truth. Thus, having narrated St. Hugh's eagerness to obtain relics, as related by the saint's companion and biographer, Abbot Adam, Canon Perry thereupon makes the following reflections:

We wish we could think that it was of himself that he was writing rather than of Hugh, when he gives us so many and such disagreeable stories as to the Bishop's hunting after relics, his eagerness to possess the teeth or some bone of dead saints-an eagerness which occasionally led him into acts of positive dishonesty, as though any means were justifiable for one to obtain possession of these coveted, but somewhat nauseous, treasures. The caring for such things seems to exhibit the Bishop to us in a point of view which contradicts some of the most prominent and admirable parts of his character. He who

could despise reputed miracles, could rise superior to the superstition of the necessity of receiving the Holy Communion fasting, who showed in so many ways his superiority to the opinions of his age, is yet represented as running with puerile eagerness from one shrine to another, and striving by every possible means to add to his collection of the bones of the saints. We gladly turn from such matters to record some more agreeable incidents.*

Exactly so. But Canon Perry would have acted more wisely and consistently had he turned away altogether from "dead saints," like St. Hugh, to record matters where he would find less to blame, and whereon his praise would be more correctly bestowed, than it has been on the Catholic Bishop of Lincoln. If he is in search of a priest of the Middle Ages, who rose superior to his times by such strength of mind as is implied in making light of miracles, and breakfasting before communion, why does he not write the life of Wickliff rather than that of a canonized saint? I will show presently that St. Hugh neither " despised reputed miracles," nor "rose superior to the superstition of receiving Holy Communion fasting." So that if, in his modern biographer's judgment, these are "some of the most prominent and admirable parts of his character," since they have no existence except in the imagination of Canon Perry, he ought not to set them over against those other traits of character, which he truly describes, but which offend and disgust him.

I do not care to exonerate St. Hugh from the charge of setting great value on relics. He would no doubt have willingly pleaded guilty. What Canon Perry says about his "positive dishonesty" is another matter. In a note he gives as an example, how the saint being at Fescamp, cut open a silken covering of a relic of St. Mary Magdalen, and then bit off a portion of it.

The monks were horrified (says Canon Perry) at seeing the Bishop put the bone into his mouth and bite off a piece of it, which he slipped into the hand of his attendant chaplain, bidding him carefully preserve it. To the monks, who were greatly scandalized, he made a plausible excuse, but he kept the relics, which, even in a mercantile point of view, were most valuable property.

*Pp. 301, 302.

As Mr. Perry is not afraid to repeat the language of Vigilantius about the "bones of dead saints," and "nauseous treasures," we need not be afraid to address to him the language of St. Jerome's reply, "Thou lookest upon him as dead, and therefore blasphemest. Read the Gospel : 'God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Is it ill done then of the Bishop of Rome, that, over the venerable bones, as we think them, over vile dust as you think it, of the departed Peter and Paul, he offers sacrifice to the Lord, and accounts their tombs Christ's altars ?'” -Adv. Vigil.

P. 301.

Now the "mercantile point of view" does not seem to have occurred either to St. Hugh, to the monks, or to the writer of the saint's life, who was the very chaplain who received the relic. As Canon Perry omits to give the "plausible excuse,' it may be as well to state that the monks were scandalized, not at the theft of the relic, which was made quite openly, but at the apparent irreverence of biting it. St. Hugh's answer was this :

If we have so lately taken with our fingers, however unworthy, the Body of the Saint of saints, and after It has touched our teeth and lips, have even swallowed It, why may we not confidently handle the members of His saints, since we do it both for their veneration and our own protection? And why may we not, when we have a chance, make them our own, that we may preserve them with due honour?*

But we are not concerned to defend St. Hugh against Canon Perry's blame, so much as against his praise. He has been much struck with two passages in the life of St. Hugh as written by Adam, in which he thinks that he has discovered an anticipation of Protestantism-contempt of reputed miracles and irreverence towards the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Let us examine these two instances, though the result may be to lower the saint in the eyes of some who have just learnt from Canon Perry to admire him. The saint's contempt for miracles is thus related by Canon Perry :

A still greater proof of true courage, because it shows a moral courage very rare in the men of his generation, was the way in which Hugh behaved when invited to inspect an alleged miracle. A priest once called upon him to inspect a miraculous appearance in the chalice, where it was said that the actual conversion into flesh and blood of part of the Host could be seen with the bodily eyes. Hugh indignantly refused to look at it. "In the name of God," he said, "let them keep to themselves the signs of their want of faith." He wanted no material proof of the virtue of the Blessed Sacrament; neither would he suffer his attendants, who were eagerly curious to examine the prodigy, to inspect the chalice. To a man so far raised above the common level, the ignorance and materialism of the priests with whom he had to do must have been a constant source of annoyance.t

Before giving a correct version of this history I must explain what Mr. Perry means by the "materialism" of the priests, which he considers so annoying to St. Hugh. He evidently means their belief in transubstantiation; for, in a previous chapter, in analyzing a work of Giraldus Cambrensis, he says, "A great portion of his treatise is occupied with the many revolting details which spring naturally from the material view

*"Magna Vita," p. 318.

† P. 235.

of the Holy Sacrament;"* and, again, "So completely material is the view taken of the Eucharist, that it is held that certain material conditions, even under circumstances of the greatest necessity, are required for a valid sacrifice."+ Therefore, as against the material view of the priests of the Middle Ages, Canon Perry records that his patron-I beg his pardon, his client "Wanted no material proof of the virtue of the Blessed Sacrament." The point, then, of the anecdote is that St. Hugh believed in the virtue of our Lord's Body, while his attendants, unable to rise so high, believed in the Real Presence, with an ignorance and materialism which must have been very annoying to so enlightened a man.

We turn to the "Magna Vita" to examine this strange phenomenon, a Catholic canonized saint transformed into a halfCalvinist. Certainly, if Canon Perry's history is to be trusted, be has found a miracle little less wonderful than that of the Host partly converted into flesh. The story, however, as told by Adam reads very differently. St. Hugh was journeying from Paris to Troyes, in the year 1200, when he arrived at the little town of Joi. According to his custom he invited the parish priest to dine with him; but he, a very old man, absolutely refused this honour. He came to the saint in the afternoon to explain the cause of his refusal, which was his unworthiness, and to ask the saint's prayers. He was too overcome with shame to tell his story to the bishop himself, but to his attendants he gave the following narrative:-When he was a young priest, he said, he had committed a crime, and then dared to celebrate mass, without penance or confession. One day when his guilty conscience was reproving him in the very act of consecration, he was tempted by a thought of incredulity. He said to himself: "Can I believe that He who is the Splendour and the spotless Mirror of eternal light allows His Body and Blood to be really consecrated, handled and received, by such a filthy sinner as I am?" While he was revolving these stupid thoughts (stolida) in his mind, the moment came for dividing the sacred Host. He broke it, and blood began to drop from the division, and the particle in his hand took the appearance of flesh. In affright he let it fall into the chalice. He dared not touch it, but covered the chalice with the paten and finished the prayers. After the people were gone he went to the bishop, confessed his sin, and told of the miracle. Since that time the miraculous appearance in the chalice of the half of the Host converted into flesh and the blood which had flowed from it, had always continued, and "Magna Vita," p. 243.

*P. 146.

+ P. 147.