The _cross_ preceding Him who floats in air, The pictured Saviour! was to be seen in the processions of Augustin, and not the Virgin;[52] and in general her name but seldom occurs in the Ecclesiastical History of Bede; still even here some shadow of the glories that were coming upon her advance to meet us. Eadbald the son of Ethelbert, Augustin’s friend, is said to have founded a church after his extraordinary conversion (for he had not in early life walked in the ways of his father) to “the Holy Mother of God;”[53] and Bishop Wilfrid is declared by an angel (so the legend runs) to have been delivered from death by our Lord, at the prayers and tears of the Bishop’s disciples and brethren, and “the _intercession_ of his own blessed virgin-mother Mary.”[54] VI. But, indeed, the office of intercession was not confined to the Virgin.[55] The Saxon _saints_ were powerful both in heaven and earth; nothing was too great or too mean for their interference. They could recover a man from the brink of the grave, or cure a horse of the colic.[56] They could clear an island of evil spirits, though it had been over-run with them like a warren; and fill it with springs of water though it had been dry and desolate.[57] They could mend a fractured skull, and tell whether the party had been baptised imperfectly, ineffectually, or not at all, by the rate of the recovery.[58] A hair of their heads could cure a wen.[59] They could disperse an abscess on the arm (without recourse to surgery,) though large as a man’s two hands, and though it should have been occasioned by bleeding when the moon was four days’ old, which (it seems) was an act of incredible folly.[60] Nor was this all; they could unfold the secrets of the grave with the utmost minuteness. One could tell of his encounter with the soul of a sinner in the other world, which was flung at him red-hot and burnt his shoulder and cheek, though when relating his adventure, even if it were in the depth of winter, and however light might be his dress, the saint would sweat as if it were the dog-days.[61] Another could speak of a journey, under the safe conduct of a guardian angel to the same mysterious region; of his approach to the brink of the bottomless pit, through an atmosphere of insufferable stench and darkness; of the balls of fire which were shot upwards out of the abyss and fell into it again, scintillating with the spirits of the damned; of the sudden disappearance of his heavenly guide; of his hearing behind him in this joyless solitude the hollow shrieks of dead men’s souls, as they were led to the the pit’s mouth, mixed with the loud and jubilant laughter of the fiends who conducted them; of their plunge into the burning bottomless gulf; of the dolorous moanings and peals of merriment dying away as they went down into the deep together; of the legion of hideous forms which now encompassed him about threatening to seize him with their fiery pincers, but having no