The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

www.freecatholicebooks.com
found on the shelf of every private person; and, for a long time after
the invention of printing, no work more often issued from the press.
After enjoying the highest degree of reputation, it lost much of its
celebrity, in consequence of the Lives of Saints published by
_Mombritius_ in two immense volumes, in folio, about the year 1480, from
manuscripts in the library of the church of St. John of Lateran and in
consequence of the Lives of Saints published by _Surius_, a Carthusian
monk. The first edition of Surius's work was published in 1570-75, in
six volumes; the second appeared in 1578, the third and most complete
was published, in twelve volumes, in 1615. That he frequently shows too
much credulity, and betrays a want of taste, must be admitted; but his
works are allowed to breathe a spirit of piety; his candor, and desire
to be accurate, are discernible in every part of his writings; and his
learning, for the age in which he lived, was considerable. In
_Ribadeneira_ the line of ancient Agiographists respectably finishes.
While candor and good taste must allow that, even in the Lest of the
compilations we have mentioned, there is a great want of critical
discernment, and that they are wholly deficient in elegance, and the
artificial beauties of composition, justice requires that their defects
should not be exaggerated. Still less should an intention to deceive,
even on the pretence of edification, be imputed to them. Whatever may
have been either the error or the criminality of some of her members,
the church herself, in this, as in every other instance, has always
inculcated the duty of sincerity and truth, and reprobated a deviation
from them, even on the specious pretence of producing good. On this
subject our author thus forcibly expresses himself, in one of his
letters on Mr. Bower's History of the Lives of the Popes: "It is very
unjust to charge the popes or the Catholic church with countenancing
knowingly false legends; seeing all the divines of that communion
unanimously condemn all such forgeries as lies in things of great
moment, and grievous sins; and all the councils, popes, and other
bishops, have always expressed the greatest horror of such villanies;
which no cause or circumstances whatever can authorize, and which, in
all things relating to religion, are always of the most heinous nature.
Hence the authors, when detected, have been always punished with the
utmost severity. Dr. Burnet himself says, that those who feigned a
revelation at Basil, of which he gives a long detail, with false
circumstances, in his letters on his travels, were all burnt at stakes
for it, which we read more exactly related by Surius in his Commentary
on his own times. The truth is, that many false legends of true martyrs
were forged by heretics, as were those of St. George, condemned by pope
Gelasius, as many false gospels were soon after the birth of
Christianity, of which we have the names of near fifty extant. Other
wicked or mistaken persons have sometimes been guilty of a like
imposture. A priest at Ephesus forged acts of St. Paul's voyages, out of