Rev. Mr. ---- preached in Falmouth Street Church on Sunday night on the Angels at Mons. I had seen in the papers that the Allies had seen three figures in the sky in the retreat from Mons and that although the Germans pursued them, they never could catch up with them. But I just thought it some Roman Catholic superstition. But Mr. ---- thought otherwise. He said reliable people on both sides had undoubtedly seen them, and he thought the age of miracles is not yet past and that if anyone had told him two years ago that he would have been preaching to justify this vision he would have thought him crazy. I really never heard a more wonderful sermon. Rev. Mr. ---- has enlisted and goes overseas with the 85th. The origin of such a miraculous tale and of others of the same kind, such as that of the “Comrade in White,” and the credence given in our own time, by critical, skeptical Protestants, enable one to understand the origin of earlier stories of the supernatural and how in less critical times general credence could be attached to stories to the unsympathetic now often seeming preposterous. [Illustration: Scenes from the Legend of St. Nicholas in the Stained Glass (thirteenth century) of Bourges Cathedral. Reproduced from Paul Lacroix, _Science and Art of the Middle Ages_.] The Church, too, in earlier times was not rigorous in the exclusion of extravagant features in the life history of its heroes. On the contrary it permitted the fancy to play freely about the objects of its veneration, was hospitable to the wonderful, the supernatural, element in story. By various means it aimed to keep ever alive the memory of the saints, not excluding the livelier details contributed by popular tradition. Legendary stories in Latin prose formed a part of the private reading of the clergy in their canonical hours, and in vernacular prose or verse were read before popular congregations in church on the days devoted to the honor of the particular saint. Sometimes they found a place in the story repertory of secular minstrels. Artists other than literary contributed their share toward the perpetuation of the legendary story. The separate scenes in the lives of the popular saints were presented in stained glass windows, particularly in France,[34] in series of pictures on canvas, in wall paintings adorning the chapels devoted to particular saints, especially in Italy, or in sculptured series, in low or in high relief, as architectural ornament or decorating the sides of baptismal fonts as in the case of the St. Nicholas scenes represented in the fonts at Winchester cathedral and elsewhere in England and on the continent. In even more effective ways the stories were kept alive when the principal scenes were reenacted in dramatic entertainments, by towns or guilds in honor of their particular patron saints, or by schoolboys in honor of their patron Saint Nicholas.