No one at least will refuse to concede that, true or not, the facts related in those lives are always provocative of piety and redolent of faith. They certainly prove that at all periods of their existence the Irish have manifested a holy avidity for every thing supernatural and miraculous. Do they not know that our Lord has promised gifts of this description to his apostles and their successors? And what the acts of the Apostles and many acts of martyrs positively state as having happened at the very beginning of the Church, is not a whit less extraordinary or physically impossible than any thing related in the Irish legends. Every Christian soul naturally abhors the unbelief of a Strauss or of a Renan as to the former; is it not unnatural, then, for the same Christian soul to reject the latter because they fall under the easy sneer of "an Irish legend," and are not contained in Holy Writ? At all events, the faith of the Irish has never wavered in such matters, and to-day they hold the same confidence in the priests' power that meets us everywhere in the pages of Colgan and Ward. The reason is, that they admit Christianity without reserve; and in its entirety it is supernatural. The criticisms of human reason on holy things hold in their eyes something of the sacrilegious and blasphemous; such criticisms are for them open disrespect for divine things; and, inasmuch as divine things are, in fact, more real than any phenomena under natural laws can be, skepticism in the former case is always more unreasonable than in the latter, supposing always that the narrative of the Divine favors reposes on sufficient authority. It is clear, therefore, that since the preaching of Christianity in Ireland, the world showed itself to the inhabitants of that country in a different light to that in which other men beheld it. For them, Nature is never separated from its Maker; the hand of God is ever visible in all mundane affairs, and the frightful parting between the spiritual and material worlds, first originated by the Baconian philosophy, which culminates in our days in the almost open negation of the spiritual, and thus materializes all things, is with justice viewed by the children of St. Patrick with a holy horror as leading to atheism, if it be not atheism itself.