The Book-Hunter, John Hill Burton [essential reading TXT] 📗

Then the apparition, who the whole time spoke none, took an effectual way to raise the doctor. He carried back the candles to the table, and went to the fire, and with the tongs took down the kindled coals, and laid them on the deal chamber floor. The doctor then thought it time to rise and put on his clothes, in the time of which the spectre laid up the coals again in the chimney, and, going to the table, lifted the candles and went to the door, opened it, still looking to the Principal as he would have him following the candles, which he now, thinking there was something extraordinary in the case, after looking to God for direction, inclined to do. The apparition went down some steps with the candles, and carried them into a long trance, at the end of which there was a stair which carried down to a low room. This the spectre went down, and stooped, and set down the lights on the lowest step of the stair, and straight disappears."

The learned Principal, whose courage and coolness deserve the highest commendation, lighted himself back to bed with the candles, and took the remainder of his rest undisturbed. Being a man of great sagacity, on ruminating over his adventure, he informed the sheriff of the county "that he was much of the mind there was murder in the case." The stone whereon the candles were placed was raised, and there "the plain remains of a human body were found, and bones, to the conviction of all." It was supposed to be an old affair, however, and no traces could be got of the murderer. Rule undertook the functions of the detective, and pressed into the service the influence of his own profession. He preached a great sermon on the occasion, to which all the neighbouring people were summoned; and behold, "in the time of his sermon, an old man near eighty years was awakened, and fell a-weeping, and before all the whole company acknowledged that, at the building of that house, he was the murderer."

In Wodrow's note-book the devil often cuts a humiliating figure, and is treated with a deal of rude and boisterous jeering. A certain "exercised Christian," probably during a fit of indigestion, was subjected to a heavy wrestling with doubts and irreconcilable difficulties, which raised in his mind horrible suggestions. The devil took occasion to put in a word or two for the purpose of increasing the confusion, but it had the directly opposite effect, and called forth the remark that, "on the whole the devil is a great fool, and outshoots himself oft when he thinks he has poor believers on the haunch." On another occasion the devil performed a function of a very unusual kind, one would think. He is known to quote Scripture for his purposes, but who ever before heard of his writing a sermon—and, as it seems, a sound and orthodox one? There was, it appears, a youth in the University of St Andrews, preparing to undergo his trials as a licentiate, who had good reason to fear that he would be plucked. He found he could make nothing whatever of the trial sermon, and was wandering about by lonely ways, seeking in vain for inspiration. At last "there came up to him a stranger, in habit like a minister, in black coat and band, and who addressed the youth very courteously." He was mighty inquisitive, and at length wormed out the secret grief. "I have got a text from the Presbytery. I cannot for my life compose a discourse on it, so I shall be affronted." The stranger replied—"Sir, I am a minister; let me hear the text?" He told him. "Oh, then, I have an excellent sermon on that text in my pocket, which you may peruse and commit to your memory. I engage, after you have delivered it before the Presbytery, you will be greatly approven and applauded." The youth received it thankfully; but one good turn deserves another. The stranger had an eccentric fancy that he should have a written promise from the youth to do him afterwards any favour in his power; and there being no other liquid conveniently at hand for the signature of the document, a drop of the young man's blood was drawn for the purpose. Note now what followed. "Upon the Presbytery day the youth delivered an excellent sermon upon the text appointed him, which pleased and amazed the Presbytery to a degree; only Mr Blair smelt out something in it which made him call the youth aside to the corner of the church, and thus he began with him: 'Sir, you have delivered a nate sermon, every way well pointed. The matter was profound, or rather sublime; your style was fine and your method clear; and, no doubt, young men at the beginning must make use of helps, which I doubt not you have done.' So beginning, Blair, who was a man of mighty gifts and repute, pressed on so close with repeated questions that the awful truth at last came out." There was nothing for it but that the Presbytery must engage in special exercise for the penitent youth. They prayed each in succession to no purpose, till it came to Blair's turn. "In time of his prayer there came a violent rushing of wind upon the church—so great that they thought the church should have fallen down about their ears—and with that the youth's paper and covenant drops down from the roof of the church among the ministers."

A large proportion of Wodrow's special providences are performed for the benefit of the clergy, either to provide them with certain worldly necessaries of which they may happen to be in want, or to give effect to their pious indignation, or, as some might be tempted to call it, their vindictive spite, again those who revile them. Perhaps an interdicted pastor, wandering over the desolate moors where he and his hunted flock seek refuge, is sorely impeded by some small want of the flesh, and gives expression to his wishes concerning it; when forthwith he is miraculously supplied with a shoulder of mutton or a pair of trousers, according to the nature of his necessities. He encounters ridicule or personal insult, and instantly the blasphemer is struck dead, or idiotic, or dumb, after the example of those who mocked Elisha's bald head; and Wodrow generally winds up these judgments with an appropriate admonitory text, as, for instance, "Touch not His anointed, and do His prophets no harm." As the persons for whom these special miracles are performed generally happen to be sorely beset by worldly privations and dangers, which are at their climax at the very time when they are able to call in supernatural intervention, a logician might be inclined to ask why, if the operations, and, as it were, the very motives, of the Deity are examined in respect of those events which are propitious to His favourite, they should not also be examined with the same critical pertinacity as to the greatly predominating collection of events which are decidedly unpropitious to him, so as to bring out the reason why the simpler course of saving him from all hardships and persecution had not been followed, instead of the circuitous plan of launching heavy calamities against him, and then issuing special miraculous powers to save him from a small portion of these calamities. But such logic would probably be unprofitably bestowed, and it is wiser to take the narratives as they stand and make the best use of them. Whoever looks at them with a cold scientific eye, will at once be struck by the close analogy of Wodrow's vaticinations and miracles to those of other times and places, and especially to those credited to the saints of the early Catholic Church, to which many of them, indeed, bear a wonderfully exact resemblance.

The Early Northern Saints.

Carried on by the power of association, we are thus brought to the door of an exceedingly interesting department of book-club literature,—the restoration of the true text of the early lives of the saints—a species of literature now recognised and separated from others by the title of Hagiology. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint successively according to his day in the calendar. Ignorance is more excusable on the question what constitutes saintship, and, supposing you to have found your saint, on the criterion by which the day of his festival should be adjusted in the calendar. Technically, to make a saint, there should be an act of pontifical jurisdiction, all the more solemn than any secular judicial act as the interests affected are more momentous; but only a small number of the saints stand on record in the proceedings of the Vatican. In fact, the great body of them were in the enjoyment of their honours hundreds of years before the certifying process was adopted, and to investigate all their credentials was far too weighty a task to be attempted. It is taken for granted that they have been canonised, and if it be difficult to prove that they have gone through this ceremony, they hold their ground through the still greater difficulty of proving that they have not. Some of those whose sanctity is established by this kind of acclamation are so illustrious, that it would be ludicrous to suppose even the Vatican capable of adding to their eminence—more so, to imagine any process by which they could be unsanctified; such are St Patrick, St George, and St Kentigern. But there is a vast crowd of village or parochial saints firmly established within their own narrow circles, but as unknown at the court of Rome as any obscure curate working in some distant valley, or among the poor of some great city. In such a crowd there will naturally be questionable personages. St Valentine, St Fiacre, St Boniface, St Lupus, St Maccesso, St Bobbio, St Fursy, and St Jingo, have names not endowed with a very sanctimonious sound, but they are well-established respectable saints. Even Alban Butler, however, has hard work in giving credit to St Longinus, St Quirinus, St Mercurius, St Hermes, St Virgil, St Plutarch, and St Bacchus. It is the occurrence of such names that makes Moreri speak of the Bollandist selection as rather loose, since it contains "vies des saintes bonnes, médiocres, mauvaises, vrayes, douteuses, et fausses."

The saint's festival-day is generally the anniversary of his death, or "deposition," as it is technically termed; but this is by no means an absolute rule. Few compilers deserve more sympathy than those who try to adjust saints' days by rule and chronology, since not only does one saint differ from another in the way in which his feast is established, but for the same saint there are different days in different countries, and even in different ecclesiastical districts—the diocese of Paris having, for instance, some special saints' days of its own, which differ from the practice throughout the rest of Catholic Christendom. Some saints, too, have been shifted about from day to day by authority. Queen Margaret of Scotland, the wife of Malcolm, whose real source of influence was that she represented the old Saxon line of England, had two great days,—that of her deposition on July the 8th, and that of her translation on July the 19th; but, by a papal ordinance immediately after the Revolution, her festival was established upon the 10th of June. This was rather a remarkable day in Britain, being that on which the poor infant son of the last of the Jameses, afterwards known in Parliamentary language as the Pretender,