chap, xxxvii] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 81 spiritual exploits of their lives. But the golden legend of their lives 74 was embellished by the artful credulity of their interested brethren ; and a believing age was easily persuaded that the slightest caprice of an Egyptian or a Syrian monk had been sufficient to interrupt the eternal laws of the universe. The favourites of Heaven were accustomed to cure inveterate diseases with a touch, a word, or a distant message ; and to expel the most obstinate daemons from the souls, or bodies, which they possessed. They familiarly accosted, or imperi- ously commanded, the lions and serpents of the desert ; infused vegetation into a sapless trunk ; suspended iron on the surface of the water ; passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile, and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace. These extravagant supersti-
- . . tion of the
tales, which display the fiction, without the genius, of poetry, age have seriously affected the reason, the faith, and the morals of the Christians. Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind ; they corrupted the evidence of history ; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science. Every mode of religious worship which had been practised by the saints, every mysterious doctrine which they believed, was fortified by the sanction of divine revelation, and all the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks. If it be possible to measure the interval between the philosophic writings of Cicero and the sacred legend of Theodoret, between the character of Cato and that of Simeon, we may appreciate the memorable revolution which was accomplished in the Eoman empire within a period of five hundred years. II. The progress of Christianity has been marked by two 11. con- glorious and decisive victories : over the learned and luxurious of the . . BARBA- citizens of the Eoman empire ; and over the warlike Barbarians eians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the empire, and em- braced the religion, of the Kornans. The Goths were the fore- most of these savage proselytes ; and the nation was indebted for its conversion to a countryman, or, at least, to a subject, 74 I know not how to select or specify the miracles contained in the Vitce Patrtim of Rosweyde, as the number very much exceeds the thousand pages of that voluminous work. An elegant specimen may be found in the Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus, and his life of St. Martin. He reveres the monks of Egypt ; yet he insults them with the remark that they never raised the dead ; whereas the bishop of Tours had restored three dead men to life. vol. iv. — 6
