He justly regretted that amongst the Legends of the Saints current amongst the people there were many historical untruths and impossibilities. Many of his remarks on these stories do credit to his critical sense, particularly as in his time very few had as yet concerned themselves with the revision of these legends. It was far from advantageous to ecclesiastical literature, that, in spite of the well-grounded objections raised by Luther and by some Catholic scholars, deference to old-standing tradition allowed such fictions to be retained and even further enhanced. “It is the devil’s own plague,” Luther groans, “that we have no reliable legends of the Saints.... To correct them is an onerous task.” “The legend of St. Catherine,” he says on the same occasion to his friends, “is quite at variance with Roman history. Whoever concocted such a tale must now assuredly be sitting in the depths of hell.”[831] He goes, however, too far when he says that the inaccuracies were intentional, “infamous” lies devised by Popery, and adds: “We never dared to protest against them.”--As though such literary and often poetic outgrowths of a more childlike age were not to be regarded as merely harmless, and as though criticism had been prohibited by the Church. It is true, nevertheless, that criticism had not been sufficiently exercised, and if Luther’s undertaking and the controversies of the 16th century helped to arouse it, or, rather, to quicken the efforts already made in this direction, first in the field of Bible-study and Church-history and then, more gradually, in that of popular legendary and devotional literature, no wise man can see therein any cause for grief.