Incredible to you in the nature of things, wise reader, and too palpably a gloss of monkish folly on the older story? Be it so: yet in this fable of monkish folly, understood with the heart, would have been the chastisement and check of every form of the church's pride and sensuality, which in our day have literally sunk the service of God and His poor into the service of the clergyman and his rich; and changed what was once the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, into the spangling of Pantaloons in an ecclesiastical Masquerade. But one more legend,--and we have enough to show us the roots of this saint's strange and universal power over Christendom. "What peculiarly distinguished St. Martin was his sweet, serious, unfailing serenity; no one had ever seen him angry, or sad, or, gay; there was nothing in his heart but piety to God and pity for men. The Devil, who was particularly envious of his virtues, detested above all his exceeding charity, because it was the most inimical to his own power, and one day reproached him mockingly that he so soon received into favour the fallen and the repentant. But St. Martin answered him sorrowfully, saying, 'Oh most miserable that thou art! if _thou_ also couldst cease to persecute and seduce wretched men, if thou also couldst repent, thou also shouldst find mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.'"[7] [Footnote 7: Mrs. Jameson, Vol. II., p. 722.] In this gentleness was his strength; and the issue of it is best to be estimated by comparing its scope with that of the work of St. Firmin. The impatient missionary riots and rants about Amiens' streets--insults, exhorts, persuades, baptizes,--turns everything, as aforesaid, upside down for forty days: then gets his head cut off, and is never more named, _out_ of Amiens. St. Martin teazes nobody, spends not a breath in unpleasant exhortation, understands, by Christ's first lesson to himself, that undipped people may be as good as dipped if their hearts are clean; helps, forgives, and cheers, (companionable even to the loving-cup,) as readily the clown as the king; he is the patron of honest drinking; the stuffing of your Martinmas goose is fragrant in his nostrils, and sacred to him the last kindly rays of departing summer. And somehow--the idols totter before him far and near--the Pagan gods fade, _his_ Christ becomes all men's Christ--his name is named over new shrines innumerable in all lands; high on the Roman hills, lowly in English fields;--St. Augustine baptized his first English converts in St. Martin's church at Canterbury; and the Charing Cross station itself has not yet effaced wholly from London minds his memory or his name.