The view taken of the alleged miracles performed by saints, especially in the earlier centuries, divided broadly the Roman Catholic from the Protestant Christians, the former still maintaining, defending, and believing in the existence of the power of working miracles, the latter ostentatiously and dogmatically denying such power. Guizot says that the Bollandist collection of Lives of Saints includes twenty-five thousand, and nearly all the saints there recorded occasionally worked miracles. It is true that many educated Roman Catholics admit that it is not necessary for them to believe all these records. Since the revival of learning and the Reformation incredulity has set in, and sapped and mined nearly all the miraculous feats recorded in the Lives of the Saints. Middleton in 1748 published his "Free Inquiry," and shook the faith of the moderns in any of these miracles subsequent to those recorded in the New Testament. As Lecky observes in his "History of Rationalism," the miracles of the New Testament were always characterised by dignity and solemnity; they always conveyed some spiritual lesson, and conferred some actual benefit, besides attesting the character of the worker. The mediæval miracles, on the contrary, were frequently trivial, purposeless, and unimpressive, constantly verging on the grotesque, and not unfrequently passing the border. LOCAL AND PATRON SAINTS. There were some universal saints of Christendom, such as the Apostles and early martyrs, the four great Fathers of the Latin Church--some few like St. Thomas à Becket, held up as a martyr of his order; St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order; and some founders of monastic institutes, as Dominic and Francis. Other saints had a more limited fame, and each kingdom of Christendom had its tutelar saint. France had three--St. Martin of Tours, St. Reine, St. Denys; Spain had the Apostle James, St. Jago of Compostella; Germany had Boniface; Scotland had St. Andrew; Ireland had St. Patrick; and England had St. George. Every city, town, or village also usually had its own saint. Female prophets were called Brides of Christ, and were thought to have constant personal intercourse with the saints, the Virgin, and our Lord Himself, like St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Bridget of Sweden. In later days Christian charity had its saints, as Vincent de Paul, St. Teresa, and St. Francis de Sales. Every one of the saints had his life of wonder, the legend of his virtues, his miracles, perhaps his martyrdom, his shrines, his reliques. The legend was the dominant universal poetry of the times. And the legend was perpetually confirmed, illustrated, and kept alive by reliques, shown either in the church or under the altar or upon the altar. It was a pious enterprise even to steal reliques. Clotaire II. cut off and stole an arm of St. Denys. The head of St. Andrew was once carried away by a king in his flight; kings vied for the purchase, and vast sums were offered for it.