Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/76

68 far distant from the gardens of the Lord where they were planted ."We have to be on our guard against the proverbial exaggerations of biographers; we have to disentangle fable and legend from truth and fact. But the profit is worth the risk; the work will be its own reward. It is well known that, amidst the trials which beset Henry Martyn the missionary, on his voyage to India, the study in which he found his chief pleasure and profit was in the kindly notices of ancient saints which form the redeeming points of Milner's "History of the Church." "I love," (so he writes in his diary,) "to converse, as it were, with those holy bishops and martyrs, with whom I hope, through grace, to spend a happy eternity.… The example of the Christian saints in the early ages has been a source of sweet reflection to me.… The holy love and devout meditations of Augustine and Ambrose I delight to think of.… No uninspired sentence ever affected me so much as that of the historian, that to believe, to suffer, and to love, was the primitive taste ." What he so felt and expressed may be, and has been, felt by many others. Such biographies are the common, perhaps the only common, literature alike of rich and poor. Hearts, to whom even the Bible speaks in vain, have by such works been roused to a sense of duty and holiness. However cold the response of mankind has been to other portions of