CURRENT LITE RAT URE.
Lives of the Saints. By the Rev. S. Baring-Gould. July. 2 vols. (Hodges.)—Mr. Baring-Gould pursues with diligence a task which he finds, it is to be hoped, interesting as well as edifying. He is scarcely the ideal biographer of saints. An irrepressible spirit of criticism, shows itself in him from time to time. If the evidence of antiquity in any particular acta is not forthcoming, he says so plainly and directly,. and refuses his assent. He is equally candid when the internal evi- dence of a story is not satisfactory. He finds, for instance, "somewhat of a Renaissance ring" in the hexameters which were discovered on the lid of a sarcophagus supposed to contain the bones of S. Trophima, V.M., who must have suffered some time in the course of the first three cen- turies. He offers, again, a decidedly rationalistic explanation of the story, so common in these legends, of a cloak, or glove, or hood having been hung on a sunbeam. Radius means, he tells us, a beam of wood, and was easily transmuted by a marvel-loving age into a beam of light. And he sometimes ventures on such a flippant remark as to say, a propos of some hagiologist's story of how two men who had eaten nothing up to noonday became "miraculously hungry,' that "it would seem more miraculous if they had not been hungry." Nor does his faith accept the marvel of an almost endless multiplication of some relic that Would seem necessarily finite in quantity. There are some to whom it does not seem more marvellous that these things should be multiplied than that they should have been preserved. On the other hand, he has a very energetic hatred of Protestants, and a quite unquestioning belief in their cruelty and falsehood. The most interesting lives in this portion of the work—July seems to be a favourite month, and has to be allotted two volumes—are those of S. Otto, the Evangeliser of Pomerania (A.D. 1189); S. Bonaventuriq S. Henry (Emperor of Germany), whose dealings with his chaplain, Bishop Meinwerk, are very entertaining ; S. Vincent of Paul, and S. Olaf of Norway, of whom his biographer very properly says that he must not be measured by Christian men of another or other lands. Stories like, this make an oasis in what we cannot but think a weary desert. We should like to know, by the way, whether Mr. Baring-Gould thinks that Rome only can canonise martyrs, or whether a Church out of com- munion with her cannot produce them. Surely there must be some- thing wrong about the tree which never does, and what is more, never can produce the very best fruit?
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