Very powerful to attract wild animals must have been
the good hermits' habit of sitting motionless for hours, till (as
with St. Guthlac) the swallows sat and sang upon his knee; and of
moving slowly and gently at his work, till (as with St. Karilef,
while he pruned his vines) the robin came and built in his hood as
it hung upon a tree: very powerful his freedom from anger, and, yet
more important, from fear, which always calls out rage in wild
beasts, while a calm and bold front awes them: and most powerful of
all, the kindliness of heart, the love of companionship, which
brought the wild bison to feed by St. Karilef's side as he prayed
upon the lawn; and the hind to nourish St. Giles with her milk in
the jungles of the Bouches du Rhone. There was no miracle; save the
moral miracle that, in ages of cruelty and slaughter, these men had
learned (surely by the inspiration of God) how--
"He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast;
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."
After all, let these old Lives of the Fathers tell their own tale.
By their own merits let them stand or fall; and stand they will in
one sense: for whatsoever else they are not, this they are--the
histories of good men. Their physical science and their daemonology
may have been on a par with those of the world around them: but
they possessed what the world did not possess, faith in the utterly
good and self-sacrificing God, and an ideal of virtue and purity
such as had never been seen since the first Whitsuntide.
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