In another chapel of the crypts is the altar of St. Simon and St. Jude, containing their relics. It was consecrated by Pope Calixtus II. Old legends tell us that these apostles were two of the shepherds of Bethlehem, who first heard the _Gloria in Excelsis_. One loves to believe that they who were encircled by the brightness of God, to whom angels talked, and who were first at the manger, should afterward be called to follow our Saviour and preach the glad tidings, which they had heard from angelic tongues, to the nations afar off. They _could_ not have lost sight of him who was so miraculously revealed to them. They _must_ have hastened to join him as soon as he entered upon his public life. In a niche, close by the chapel of St. Simon and St. Jude, is the entire body of St. Gilles, to whom the old counts of Toulouse had a particular devotion, especially Raymond IV., who is invariably styled in history Raymond de St. Gilles. This saint was very popular, not only in France, but in England and Scotland. A large hospital for lepers was built by the queen of Henry I. outside the city of London, which has given its name to a large district of that city; and St. Giles is the patron saint of Edinburgh, where a church was built under his invocation not later then 1359. This renders his shrine a place of interest to all who speak the English tongue. St. Sernin possesses, too, the body of one of England's sainted kings and that of her patron saint. St. Gilles, or St. Giles, was an Athenian of royal blood, who, fearing the admiration excited by his talents, went to France, and became a hermit in a cave near the mouth of the Rhone. {107} He subsisted on the produce of the woods and the milk of a tame hind. After his death a magnificent monastery, and then a city, rose round his tomb, and gave his name to the counts of Languedoc. In a large portable _châsse_ is the head of the glorious St. Thomas Aquinas, the author of the profound _Summa Theologiae_ and the sublime Office of the Blessed Sacrament, worthy of the tongues of angels. This great doctor of the middle ages is not dead. His voice is still heard in the office of the church, "now with a single antiphon unlocking whole abysses of Scripture, and now in almost supernatural melody, more like the echoes of heaven than mere poetry of earth," says Faber. One should listen to this grand office resounding in the arches of the church where its author is enshrined, when thousands of tapers, around the enthroned ostensorium, light up the brilliant shrine of St. Sernin! It is a foretaste of the song of the redeemed!