The simple sooth is this.The martyrs were two: the Breton princess herself, falsely called British, and her maid, Onesimilla, which is a Greek name, Onesima, diminished.This some fool did mis-pronounce undecim mille, eleven thousand: loose tongue found credulous ears, and so one fool made many; eleven thousand of them, an' you will.And you charge me with credulity, Jerome? and bid me read the Lives of the Saints.Well, I have read them, and many a dear old Pagan acquaintance I found there.The best fictions in the book are Oriental, and are known to have been current in Persia and Arabia eight hundred years and more before the dates the Church assigns to them as facts.As for the true Western figments, they lack the Oriental plausibility.Think you Iam credulous enough to believe that St.Ida joined a decapitated head to its body? that Cuthbert's carcass directed his bearers where to go, and where to stop; that a city was eaten up of rats to punish one Hatto for comparing the poor to mice; that angels have a little horn in their foreheads, and that this was seen and recorded at the time by St.Veronica of Benasco, who never existed, and hath left us this information and a miraculous handkercher? For my part, I think the holiest woman the world ere saw must have an existence ere she can have a handkercher or an eye to take unicorns for angels.Think you I believe that a brace of lions turned sextons and helped Anthony bury Paul of Thebes?
that Patrick, a Scotch saint, stuck a goat's beard on all the descendants of one that offended him? that certain thieves, having stolen the convent ram, and denying it, St.Pol de Leon bade the ram bear witness, and straight the mutton bleated in the thief's belly? Would you have me give up the skilful figments of antiquity for such old wives' fables as these? The ancients lied about animals, too; but then they lied logically; we unreasonably.Do but compare Ephis and his lion, or, better still, Androcles and his lion, with Anthony and his two lions.Both the Pagan lions do what lions never did' but at the least they act in character.Alion with a bone in his throat, or a thorn in his foot, could not do better than be civil to a man.But Anthony's lions are asses in a lion's skin.What leonine motive could they have in turning sextons? A lion's business is to make corpses, not inter them." He added, with a sigh, "Our lies are as inferior to the lies of the ancients as our statues, and for the same reason; we do not study nature as they did.We are imitatores, servum pecus.Believe you 'the lives of the saints;' that Paul the Theban was the first hermit, and Anthony the first Caenobite? Why, Pythagoras was an Eremite, and under ground for seven years; and his daughter was an abbess.Monks and hermits were in the East long before Moses, and neither old Greece nor Rome was ever without them.As for St.
Francis and his snowballs, he did but mimic Diogenes, who, naked, embraced statues on which snow had fallen.The folly without the poetry.Ape of an ape - for Diogenes was but a mimic therein of the Brahmins and Indian gymnosophists.Natheless, the children of this Francis bid fair to pelt us out of the Church with their snowballs.Tell me now, Clement, what habit is lovelier than the vestments of our priests? Well, we owe them all to Numa Pompilius, except the girdle and the stole, which are judaical.As for the amice and the albe, they retain the very names they bore in Numa's day.The 'pelt' worn by the canons comes from primeval Paganism.
'Tis a relic of those rude times when the sacrificing priest wore the skins of the beasts with the fur outward.Strip off thy black gown, Jerome, thy girdle and cowl, for they come to us all three from the Pagan ladies.Let thy hair grow like Absolom's, Jerome!
