which even all through her irregular life was her charm, made her say at the end of it: “All the world tells me that I have less cause to speak ill of time than other people. However that may be, could anybody have proposed to me beforehand the life I have had, I would have hanged myself.” That, I say, is the testimony of the most lucid children of this world, as the testimony of Plato, Sophocles and Goethe is the testimony of the loftiest spirits, to the natural obligation and necessity of the essentially Christian virtue of pureness. So when legend represents the founder of Christianity and great exemplar of this virtue as born of a virgin, thus doing homage to pureness, it does homage to what has natural worth and necessity. But we have further to ask to what extent the recipients of the legend showed themselves afterwards capable, while firmly believing the legend and delighting in it, of penetrating to that virtue which it honored, and of showing their sense that accompanying the legend went the glorification of that virtue. Here the Collects of the Church which have come down to us from Catholic antiquity—from the times when all legend was most unhesitatingly received, most fondly loved, most delighted in for its own sake—are the best testimony. Jesus was manifested, says one of the Epiphany Collects, “to make us the sons of God and heirs of eternal life,” and we, having this hope, are to “purify ourselves even as he is pure.” And the Collect for Christmas-day itself—that very day on which the miracle of the Incarnation is commemorated, and on which we might expect the legend’s miraculous side to be altogether dominant—firmly seizes the homage to pureness and renovation which is at the heart of the legend, and holds it steadily before us all Christmas-time. “Almighty God,” so the Collect runs, “who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin, grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit.” The miracle is amply and impressively stated, but the stress is laid upon the work of regeneration and inward renewal, whereby we are to be made sons of God, like to that supreme Son whose pureness was expressed through his being born of a pure Virgin. It is as, in celebrating at Easter the miracle of the Resurrection, the Church, following here St. Paul, seizes and elevates in the Collect for Easter Eve that great “secret of Jesus” which underlies the whole miraculous legend of the Resurrection, and which only through materializing itself in that legend could arrive at the general heart of mankind.