such and such a pious legend, or that one or other episode seems to him quite incredible. He values objective truth, seeks it, and never wilfully departs from it. Yet undoubtedly the main concern of his book is not literal accuracy nor the balancing of probabilities. As regards probabilities—his standpoint in the face of the worlds visible and invisible, spiritual and material, was that of a Christian who holds unquestioningly the doctrines of his faith. To his mind the world and the fulness thereof belong to God, whose power may at any moment exert itself in ways and by instruments and for purposes quite outside the normal course of natural forces and phenomena, and quite obscure to mere human intelligences. He would have rejected with amazement the notion of limiting Omnipotence within a scientist's table of causes and effects. As to accurate presentment of facts—we ought in the first place to remember that the task which confronted both of our hagiographers was a huge one: that to sift and judge continually the huge mass of hagiographical matter which they selected, not to speak of the incomparably greater mass out of which they selected, would have been a task far surpassing what could have been reasonably required from either busy man—the archbishop or the printer. In their different ways and degrees, they seem to have executed their task with all the care and discretion that could fairly have been expected.
They did even more than their mediæval readers required of them. For there is no doubt that among these (in the mass) there was a notable absence of
