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worshipper, is assured of the supernatural protection
to which he has established a claim. With the old
mythologies and genealogies of gods, of which they
serve after a certain fashion as corrol>orative evidence,
these tales may ]ye regarded as the theology of the peo-
ple. The guiding thoughts are in every case taken
from life; they deal with the fulfilment of the simple
wishes and expectations likely to arise in the minds of
men whose lives were spent in contest with the forces
and laws of nature.
Hellenism had already recognized this characteristic of the religious fable, and would thus have been obliged to free itself from it in the course of time, had not the competition with Christianity forced the champions of the ancient pol>i:heism to seek again in the ancient f al )les incidents to set against the miraculous power of Christ. In this w-ay popular illusions found tneir way from Hellenism to Christianity, whose struggles in the first three centuries certainly produced an abundance of heroes. The genuine Acts of the martyrs (cf ., for example, R. Knopf, " Ausgewilhlte MiirtjTeracten *', Tubingen, 1901; Ruinart, " Acta MartjTum sinoera", Paris, 1689, no longer sufficient for scientific research) have in them no popular miracles. After the persecu- tions, however, when, with the lapse of time, there was no longer any standard by which to measure the unex- ampled heroism of the martyrs, it l^ecame easy to transfer to the Christian mart>Ts the conceptions which the ancients held concerning their heroes. This transference was promoted by the numerous cases in which Christian saints l>ecame the successors of local deities, and Christian worship supplanted the ancient local worship. Tliis explains the great number of similiarities between gods and saints. For the often maintained metamorphosis of gods into saints no proof is to be found. The earliest Catholics of whom legends are told are therefore the martjTS. And from them the conceptions are then transferred to the con- fessors, as, after the days of persecution, the scene of the contest for salvation was changed from the rack and the amphitheatre to the human soul.
But how was the transference of legends to Chris- tianity consummatetl? The fact that the Talmud also uses the same ideas, with variations, proves that the guiding thou/i;hts of men during the period of the first spread of Christianity ran in general on parallel lines. There is no doubt, therefore, that these Chris- tian legends are to be traced to a common oral tradi- tion, which was unconsciously transferred from one subject of a legend to another. For the hypothesis of this literary transference, no proofs can be given. If St. Augustine (De cura pro mortuis gerenda, xii) and also St. Gregory the Great (Dialogues, IV, xxxvi) relate of a man, who died by an error of the Angel of Death and was again restored to life, the same story which is already given by Lucian in his " Philopseudes ", such an example at once shows that the literary style was not the model, but that the oral relation was. Augus- tine and Gregory received the story of the occurrence from those who claimed to have seen it. . To such an extent had certain imaginary conceptions l^ecome the common property of the people that they repeated themselves as auto-suggestions and dreams. There are ideas of so pronounced a peculiarity that they can be invented only once, and tneir successive reappear^ ances in new surroundings must, therefore, \>e due to oral transmission. Such is the characteristic tale of the impostor, who concealed the money he owed in a hollow stick, gave tliis stick to the creditor to hold, and then swore that he had given back the money; this tale is found in Conon the Grammarian (at Rome in Cajsar's time), in the Ilaggada of the Talmud (Xe- darim, 2r)a), and in the Christian legends of the thir- teentli century in Vincent of Beauvais. The leading ideas of t'.e legends were transferred individually, and appoan^( I hitf^r in literary form in the most varied com- binat ions. Not till the sixth century may the literaiy
type of martyr be considered as perfected, and we are
subsequently able to verify the Uterary associations of
ideas. This Cathohc type had indeed had models in
the distant past. The pre-Christian religious narra-
tive had already worked up the old motives into ro-
mances, and, starting from this example, there arose
in Gnostic circles after the second century the apocry-
phal accounts of the Uvea of the Apostles, indicating
dogmatic prepossessions. The Church combatted these
stories, but the opposition of centuries — ^the Decree
of Gelasius in 496 is well-known — was unable to pre-
vent the genuine narratives from becoming infected,
and the ideals of the common people from obtaining
preponderance over historical facts. The place of
origin and of dissemination of these mere legends was
the East. With the termination of the sixth century
the taste for them was transplanted to the West also,
owing to the active intercourse between Syria and
Gaul. Even Gregory of Tours (d. 594) was acquainted
with the apocryphal lives of the Apostles. At the be-
ginning of the seventh century we already find related
in Gaul (in the " Passio Tergeminorum " of Wamahar
of Langres), as an incident in the local history of
Langres, a story of martyrdom originating in Cappa-
docia.
The seventh century sees the literary form of legend •domiciled in the West. Bede's " Martyrology " and Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709) indicate a wide knowledge of this foreign literature. Ireland and England eagerly follow in the new direction. In the western part of the continent the taste changes accord- ing to the times. Rough times require more abun- dant consolations; thus the legends of the "saviour" make their appearance in the Merovingian seventh century up to the middle of the eighth; others in the time of the perils from the Northmen, of the religious wars, and the Crusades, and especially tow^ards the end of the Middle Ages with its social calamities. During the millenarian tenth century, the era of the Cluniacs and mysticism make the biographies of the saints sub- jective. The twelfth century brings with the new religious orders the contemplative legends of Mary. The thirteenth sees the development of the cities and the citizens, hand in hand with which goes the popu- larization of the legend by means of collections com- piled for the purposes of sermons, vita sanctorum^ ex- empla, or merely to give entertainment (Vincent of Beauvais, Caisarius of Heisterbach, James of Vitry, Thomas of Chantimpr^, *'Legenda Aurea"); in this cen- tury also arise the legends oif Mary and, in connexion with the new feast of Corpus Chnsti (1264), a strong interest in tales of miracles relating to the Host. In- deed it was in the very nature of the case that the new legend should appear otherwise than the old. Tran- substantiation is something specifically Christian. Still, we find only variations oi the old concepts of tnmsformation and apparitions, as in the innumerable stories which now circulated oi visible incarnation of the Divine Child or of the Crucified One, or of the mon- strance being suspended in the air. But the continu- ity of the concepts is quite evident in the case of the legend of Mary. If Mary considers herself as be- trothed to the priest who ser\'es her, the meaning of this is not far to seek; but nevertheless Callimachus (third century B.C.) had also treated this idea in a leg- end of Artemis, and Antoninus Liberalis and the Tad- mud have variations of it. And if, in this legend of Mary, the Blessed Virgin put a ring on the hand of her betrothed under quite characteristic circumstances, that is nothing else than the Roman local legend of the betrothal of Venus, as it has been preserved by Wil- liam of Malmesbury and the "Deutsche Kaiser- chronik " of the twelfth century.
Therefore: (1) the original reports of martyrdoms and lives do not present what is called '* legend"; (2) legends repeat the conceptions found in the pr»- Christian religious tales. From this it follows that w«
