SAINTS.
TAKEN as a class, "saints" are very unattractive. A robust group of historical figures, apostles, statesmen, philosophers, and men of magnetic genius stand out from among the pallid throng. But the majority of Calendar saints, those whose memory has been preserved in legend and in art, are disappointing in the extreme. It would be a penance to most thoughtful men to have to read about them, and no modern man, we should think, was ever moved to join the Roman Church by a perusal of their biographies. Yet how reasonable it would seem if this were otherwise! It would surely be very natural that an educated Hindu or Moham- medan should approach the study of Roman Christianity by a study of the lives of the men whom the larger half of Christendom delights to honour, towards whom the Roman Church still encourages devotion, and who have been chosen by her to represent her ideal. The fact that many incidents in the lives of the saints are unhistorical is beside our present point. We can quite understand a student of the Christian religion saying to himself, " The accuracy of these tales is nothing to me. The very fact that they are inaccurate should make them more completely representative of the Church's moral and spiritual ideal." The man who thus studied Christianity would never,we fear, be convinced of its vital. truth.
It seems certain that the saints whose names have come down to us were not for the most part such as they are painted. No talk about the passed-away fascination of asceticism can explain their strange repellence. That men should have kept them in mind so long proves that they were less dull and cadaverous, less self-conscious, less ecclesiastical, less silly and inhuman than their portraits lead us to imagine. Those portraits have faded. Goodness is an elusive thing, very difficult to depict in words. It is not easy at any time to make a representation of a character, by means of praise alone, which will last beyond the moral fashion of the hour. Unmixed eulogy is a pigment which does not last. To take a modern instance of what we are saying, when a great man dies we read his biography in the newspapers with some interest. In nine cases out of ten such biographies consist of nothing but praise. If there is already a tendency in the public mind to make him an object of hero-worship, such biographies will momentarily accentuate the worship felt for his memory. But in ten years who would read them ? It is not that the man is forgotten—perhaps more is known about him than was known at the time of his death—but the portrait in praise has faded, and indeed we cannot see any outline at all.
But to return to the subject of saint-worship, or, to speak quite accurately, of the devotion to saints which is inculcated by the Roman Church. The idea is in essence a very fine one. That the good who leave this world retain an interest in it, and are allowed to keep some method of communication with their fellow men, is by no means an unnatural or unreasonable corollary to the dogma of immortality. Again, what could tend so much to the moral uplifting of the community as the daily contemplation of exemplary lives ? Auguste Comte showed his moral ardour when he borrowed this notion from Roman Catholicism. In intention the Roman Church offers a noble companionship to every lonely soul, and supplies a wholesome environment to everyone who is set among sinners. Unfortunately, the religions-minded student who seeks the society of canonized saints is sure to turn away in disgust. Nevertheless, these very saints, whose legendary lives excite the contempt of the Protestant and sceptical world, do still rouse in the hearts of devout Roman Catholics a very real devotion. Probably no explanation appealing altogether to reason is possible, at any rate to " those who are without." Occasionally one wonders if it is possible— or should we rather say thinkable ?—that the devotion of simple souls elicits some- response from the spirits of those who are so maligned by early historians and painters, and who, according to the hope of all the churches, are not dead but alive.
Anyhow, this devotion to the "saints" after it has become in a measure absurd, shows that it satisfies some constant desire of the human mind. After all, Christianity in every form is a living testimony to the desire of man- kind for the mediatorial idea. There are signs among Protestants of a renewal of the desire to pray for the dead, signs of regret, too, that we have so completely severed ourselves from the Roman interpretation of the "Com- munion of Saints." Such signs were unmistakable at the Church Congress, and came from high ecclesiastical circles. Outside the Church—and after all the Church is only part of the world—the same feeling is stirring. Men who would long ago have considered themselves sceptics eagerly watch for the pronouncements of the Society for Psychical Re- search. The central hope of Christianity has shifted a little. It is less entirely centred in the individual than it was. We desire to live again as keenly as our fathers desired, but we desire far more keenly than they did that other people should live too. We brush away as unbelievable the thought which hardly disturbed them, that a future life depends upon acquiescence in certain opinions. We do not absolutely despair of the hitherto forlorn hope of finding proof that the dead are alive. In fact, we want to clear away the mists behind us as well as before our faces. We want that there should be no death before—or behind us.
Will the Roman Church, we wonder, or will any church ever make a new Calendar P Will the fine idea of the Communion of Saints in a tangible sense ever be better expressed ? It seems possible, but not perhaps likely. The laity could never be satisfied by any choice made by the clergy. The day of authority is over. The Roman Church still retains power to add to the number of its saints ; still stretches back across the ages to canonize those who have already been sainted by the popular voice, insisting at the same time, with its strange delight in anachronism, that " proof " should be found of a power to work miracles. Absurd as this system of selection is, it is not easy to think of another. We cannot eleot saints! Nevertheless it is hardly to be doubted that when we Protestants suppressed the practice of devotion to the saints we suppressed something besides superstition. We lost something of that secret of consolation which the Romans preserve underneath what seems to us so much rubbish. The instinct to praise famous men is an instinct making for happiness, and to realize at the same time that they still exist is indeed "the medicine of immortality." The Church of England still retains All Saints' Day upon her list of feasts, thus leaving open a door through which she might return to an old custom. Much good might come from a revival in the study of religious biography, but the religious world just now is not so keenly set as it was half a century ago upon its own moral improvement. It seeks certainty. The Roman Calendar may be compared to the vision of dry bones which appeared before the eyes of the prophet, but she takes it for granted that these wretched remains of humanity still represent life—that is the only reason why mankind is attracted to look at them. Effigies of the dead dis- played in lifelike colours for our moral improvement by the Positivists leave us cold. We have no wish to improve our- selves by studying them. If it is truth only which satisfies the soul of man, and if, as the pragmatists would have us believe, the converse holds good and that which satisfies it best is true, it is plain that neither the Roman nor the Positivist system of devotion to the saints is perfect or is likely to be final. We may still hit upon a better expression ; one thing the failure of past years should teach us—we must not take our saints from a single type. Christ demanded of men one ideal—not conformity to a type. Each age must have its own saints. Neither St. Peter nor St. Paul belonged to what we may call the Christ-type. St. John may have belonged to it—it is plain that St. Thomas did not. Did " the Sons of Thunder "? The Mediaevalists chose another type from that which delighted the earliest Church, and here we cannot blame them. They had the highest possible precedent for the liberty they prac- tised—indeed, in this boldness we must imitate them if we would at last get free from their bonds.
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