Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/75

III] about the nature of the sun's light till all were blinded by it, instead of thankfully using its aid to shew them the right path onward ."

Most true,—yet even in its very sadness containing grounds of hope and consolation.

For, first, though the course of Ecclesiastical History be thus dark, there is always a bright side to be found in Ecclesiastical Biography.

Study the lives, study the thoughts, and hymns, and prayers, study the death-beds, of good men, They are the salt not only of the world, but of the Church. They are the fruit of the Gospel, when it has failed everywhere else. In them we see close at hand, what on the public stage of history we see through every kind of distorted medium, and deceptive refraction. In them we can trace the history, if not of "the Catholic Church," at least of "the Communion of Saints." The Acta Sanctorum were literally, as a great French historian has observed, the only light, moral or intellectual, of what are properly called the dark ages : taken in their best and widest sense, they are the true lights—"the good deeds shining in the naughty world"—of all ages. "Their glories," it has been well said, "shine far beyond the limits of their daily walk in life; their odours are wafted across the boundaries of unfriendly societies; their spiritual seed is borne away, and takes root and bears manyfold in fields