ART. IV.-1. Lingard's History of England: St. Thomas of Canterbury. Vols. 1-3. Sixth Edition. London: Dolman.* 1855.

2. Roger of Wendover's Chronicles. London: Bohn. 1853.

THE

HERE is a grandeur in heroic characters which conquers time. They tower above the ordinary level of history, like massive cathedrals, which, visible for miles of intervening country, seem, by their very greatness, despite of distance, to be brought near. After all the mutations of ages, the mind is fixed upon the few rare men who made the age in which they lived, and left an influence which lives in every age. This is true, indeed, in its greatest degree only of those who have laid down their lives for truth and principle: in other words, for God: and whose lives have been one long sacrifice and struggle, upon which death set the seal. The grave has no power over such great ones; and the tomb only is their triumph. There is, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, for the sake of Godlike constancy to God, a grand vitality which survives in memory. We speak of course of saints, the only true heroes-saints, who never die. Even in their ashes live their wonted fires, and from age to age they are green in an immortal youth; they grow in veneration, and vigour, and influence, and attract deeper and deeper interest as the stream of time flows on, bearing on its surface all things of an earthly origin

*It is superfluous to say anything as to the value of this great work: which Mr. Dolman has so wisely reproduced in a form at once elegant, convenient, and economical. Its general truthfulness and integrity as a history; the purity and lucidity of its style as a composition; the extent and accuracy of its citations of contemporary authorities, and the great amount of learning embodied in the notes, have long rendered it a standard work, among Protestants not less than Catholics. And if on the part of many Catholics we protest against being bound by all the opinions expressed, and still less against being supposed to sympathize or be satisfied with the tone of the writer on particular passages of our history, as, for instance, with reference to St. Thomas-these at the utmost are but blemishes in a great work, and we should even desire to differ from it without any disrespect towards its venerable author. regards the present edition it is excellent in every respect, and reflects great credit on the publishers.

As

into oblivion. The current of events only brings forward fresh proofs of the truth of their principles, and the depth of their supernatural wisdom; as the world grows older they seem to become younger. Despite the lapse of ages, ties of sympathy, as they are better understood, and as our circumstances come to resemble theirs-draw us nearer; and they attain a more engrossing interest, and exercise a more attracting influence. Preeminently is this so of those who have been martyrs for principles contested in our own days. The duration of the controversy gives a more intense interest to the contest, and carries us back to the age when it commenced; and brings vividly before us the character of those who in its first struggles were champions and victims, And thus it is, that ever and anon by the topics and the struggles of the present age, we are taken back to the earlier eras of our English history, and there, high above dynasties of petty princes and miserable monarchs, slaves of passion and dupes of vice, at once tyrants and servants, rises the grand heroic form of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

He has been brought before us of late years in many ways we have seen the See of St. Peter assailed with vehemence for establishing, under the auspices of a Preate who is known to entertain for the Saint a special veneration, a Catholic Hierarchy, in lieu of that of which the Head was, in the days of St. Thomas, the See of Canterbury-before, in the age of Henry VIII., it fell under the slavery of that royal supremacy, against which he struggled in the age of Henry II. The establishment, by His Holiness, of the new Catholic Hierarchy, was an emphatic protest on the part of the Papacy against that very principle. And very recently, a distinguished ecclesiastic of the Anglican Church, (following the example of a long list of others,) left her, avowedly, on the ground of his not being able to reconcile that supremacy with the clear teaching of the Catholic Church in all former ages,-that very teaching for which St. Thomas shed his blood. And now the republication of the great Catholic History of England brings before us, in its two first volumes, that very controversy which for eight centuries has troubled England, and in which St. Thomas won his crown of Martyrdom.

* Archdeacon Wilberforce.

Men like him, who were martyrs to principle, are emphatically for all time. They are not more for the day in which they lived than for our own: for principles are eternal it is only circumstances that change. The idea is pressed too far, sometimes, as to saints being raised up for a particular period, or peculiarly fitted for it; as if saints were not fitted for all times; or as if, under the same circumstances, saints would not all act in the same way. There is another and a kindred error as to saints having peculiar virtues, or degrees of certain virtues. Saints have all virtues, and have them all in an heroic degree otherwise they would not be saints. But they are called upon at different periods to display different virtues; and hence, the manifestation of the virtue being mistaken for its existence, some have become more remarkable for particular virtues than others. That the error, however obvious, is deep-seated, we can easily demonstrate. And the demonstration shall be illustration. We are perfectly persuaded that most persons have an idea, for instance, that Dunstan was a very different kind of saint from Bede; and St. Thomas from St. Anselm; or, to come to later times, St. Ignatius from St. Philip, or St. Francis de Sales. Of course whether they were naturally different, we deem wholly immaterial; since it is the characteristic of saints to merge the natural in the supernatural, and lose their own characters in an assimilation to their Lord's. So that as the character of Christ is one and entire, and heroic sanctity is in identity with it-there must be an essential and substantial identity between the characters of all saints, in all countries, and in every age: varied and diversified by personal traits, so far as mere form is concerned, but in substance the same; and not so varied as that if they were placed in the same circumstances they would not act substantially in the same way; in the same spirit, on the same principles; for the same purpose, with the same motive, aim, end, and object; upon the same ideas and views; and influenced by the same convictions, feelings, and affections. How could it be otherwise? all inspired by the same Divine Spirit-the spirit of Wisdom and of Love, of whose gifts of Counsel and Prudence they could never be deprived, and by whom they must ever be guided? This may seem to some so plain that it could rarely be disputed, who yet would be

startled if it were said, not only that Dunstan acted only as Bede would have done had Bede been in his place, but that St. Frances de Sales would have done what Dunstau did, had he lived in his day; and that St. Ignatius, or St. Philip, would have taken the same course as St. Thomas of Canterbury, had either of them been Primate of England under Henry II. We are satisfied this statement would startle many a one who conceives of Bede as of a good, mild, Bible-reading Christian, but has somewhat a dread of Dunstan ; who is charmed with the sweetness of St. Francis or St. Philip, and has an exalted idea of the prudence of St. Ignatius, but cannot divest himself of an idea that St. Thomas was fervent indeed, but, perhaps, not equally prudent. It would be hard to satisfy them that St. Thomas had the sweetness of St. Francis, and the prudence of St. Ignatius. Yet if not, would he have been a saint? Would he have been canonized for heroic sanctity? Is that consistent with the absence of an heroic degree of any virtue-be it charity, prudence, sweetness, or fortitude? We are not at all forgetful that the Church, in canonizing saints, often calls attention to particular virtues in their characters, as the sweetness of St. Francis de Sales, and the martyr-firmness of St. Thomas. But this, as we have already explained, is attributable to the special manifestation of the particular virtue, not its possession. And as the same voice that said to the roaring waves and winds, "Peace! be still;" and to the corpses of the dead "Arise!"-also said to the weeping penitent, "Go in peace;" as the same eye that looked around on a throng of sceptic sinners, "being grieved for the hardness of their hearts," did with its gentle eloquence move the recreant Apostle to tears; as the same lips that quivered with holy anger as they poured forth denunciations upon the hypocrisy of the Pharisee, spoke with sweet tenderness to the Samaritan woman-so it was the same sanctity which in Dunstan rebuked the brutal lust of the Saxon kings, and in Bede pored over the pages of scripture in the peaceful recesses of a monastery; which in St. Thomas grappled with the sacrilegious spirit of a Norman sovereign, and in St. Francis softened even the embittered enmity of heretics. And as it is a question not of the possession but of the manifestation of particular virtues, so there is an obvious liability to mistake, by reason either of the selection of some features in the

character of a saint for special attention, or of the absence of sufficient record of the exhibition of others. The first source of mistake is made the more serious on account of our tendency to fasten attention on such traits in the character of a person whom we know, as are either opposed to or similar to our own: and the other cause of misapprehension is partly a consequence of the former, which as it of course applies preeminently to a man's contemporaries, so induces them to record rather such acts or traits of the leading characters of their age as happened to arrest most attention, or cause most excitement in their own times. Hence from the combination of these causes it may often happen that it is no easy thing to get at a correct idea of the entirety of a saint's character, and we run a great risk of being misled by particular manifestations of certain traits in it which we may take for the whole, or at least the principal of those which composed it: whereas these were either such only as were called forth by the circumstances of the times in which he lived, or were those which it occurred to his contemporaries more carefully to record. And the distinction between him and other saints is not that he possessed certain traits of character, or certain virtues, which they did not; that he was superior to them or they inferior to him in any of the attributes of heroic sanctity; but that he was called upon to exercise certain of them in a greater degree than others, either of the same or of another age. And these observations are particularly applicable to such saints as have been engaged in great struggles with the powers of the world; in whom as the grander and more heroic traits of the saintly character were more prominently called out, the milder and sweeter traits are in danger of being overlooked. Yet this kind of error is as unfounded in theology as it is in fact. For after all there is a closer affinity between these two classes of virtues than at a loose glance one might imagine. Scripture teaches us that greater is he who ruleth his speech than he that taketh a city, and the history of the world is full of instances of heroes (so called) who could rule others, but could not rule themselves; who could conquer countries but were slaves to themselves. This shows that after all, the greatest field for Christian heroism is a man's own heart; where is the soil whence all virtues must, by the aid of grace, spring forth. And hence it must follow that the control of self