And then, maybe, he has to stand in the glare of the great conflagration of the sixteenth century, and mark some pure soul passing unscathed through the fire, like the lamp in Abraham's vision. That one man can do justice to this task is not to be expected. When Bellarmine heard of the undertaking of Rosweydus, he asked "What is this man's age? does he expect to live two hundred years?" But for the work of the Bollandists, it would have been an impossibility for me to undertake this task. But even with this great storehouse open, the work to be got through is enormous. Bollandus began January with two folios in double columns, close print, of 1200 pages each. As he and his coadjutors proceeded, fresh materials came in, and February occupies three volumes. May swelled into seven folios, September into eight, and October into ten. It was begun in 1643, and the fifty-seventh volume appeared in 1861. The labour of reading, digesting, and selecting from this library is enormous. With so much material it is hard to decide what to omit, but such a decision must be made, for the two volumes of January have to be crushed into one, not a tenth of the size of one of Bollandus, and the ten volumes for October must suffer compression to an hundredth degree, so as to occupy the same dimensions. I had two courses open to me. One to give a brief outline, bare of incident, of the life of every Saint; the other to diminish the number of lives, and present them to the reader in greater fulness, and with some colour. I have adopted this latter course, but I have omitted no Saint of great historical interest. I have been compelled to put aside a great number of lesser known saintly religious, whose eventless lives flowed uniformly in prayer, vigil, and mortification. In writing the lives of the Saints, I have used my discretion, also, in relating only those miracles which are most remarkable, either for being fairly well authenticated, or for their intrinsic beauty or quaintness, or because they are often represented in art, and are therefore of interest to the archaeologist. That errors in judgment, and historical inaccuracies, have crept into this volume, and may find their way into those that succeed, is, I fear, inevitable. All I can promise is, that I have used my best endeavours to be accurate, having had recourse to all such modern critical works as have been accessible to me, for the determining of dates, and the estimation of authorities.