Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/180

154 the Angel succeeds in persuading him that the betrothed-elect is worthy of the Son; on which the Father gives his consent in these terms:

There is no doubt of the seriously devout intention of this treatise. It is only an instance of the degree of triviality entailed by unbridled exuberance of fancy.

Every saint, by the possession of a distinct and vivid outward shape, had his own marked individuality, quite contrary to the angels, who, with the exception of the three famous archangels, acquired no definite appearance. This individual character of each saint was still more strongly accentuated by the special functions attributed to many of them. Now this specialization of the kind of aid given by the various saints was apt to introduce a mechanical element into the veneration paid to them. If, for instance, Saint Roch is specially invoked against the plague, almost inevitably too much stress came to be laid on his part in the healing, and the idea required by sound doctrine, that the saint wrought the cure only by means of his intercession with God, came in danger of being lost sight of. This was especially so in the case of the “Holy Martyrs” (les saints auxiliaires), whose number is usually given as fourteen, and sometimes as five, eight, ten, fifteen. Their veneration arose and spread towards the end of the Middle Ages.