After an acquaintance of now five-and-twenty years with this
wonderful treasury of early Christian mythology, to which all fairy
tales are dull and meagre, I am almost inclined to sympathise with
M. de Montalembert's questions,--"Who is so ignorant, or so
unfortunate, as not to have devoured these tales of the heroic age
of monachism? Who has not contemplated, if not with the eyes of
faith, at least with the admiration inspired by an incontrollable
greatness of soul, the struggles of these athletes of penitence? . .
. . Everything is to be found there--variety, pathos, the sublime
and simple epic of a race of men, naifs as children, and strong as
giants." In whatever else one may differ from M. de Montalembert--
and it is always painful to differ from one whose pen has been
always the faithful servant of virtue and piety, purity and
chivalry, loyalty and liberty, and whose generous appreciation of
England and the English is the more honourable to him, by reason of
an utter divergence in opinion, which in less wide and noble spirits
produces only antipathy--one must at least agree with him in his
estimate of the importance of these "Lives of the Fathers," not only
to the ecclesiologist, but to the psychologist and the historian.
Their influence, subtle, often transformed and modified again and
again, but still potent from its very subtleness, is being felt
around us in many a puzzle--educational, social, political; and
promises to be felt still more during the coming generation; and to
have studied thoroughly one of them--say the life of St. Antony by
St. Athanasius--is to have had in our hands (whether we knew it or
not) the key to many a lock, which just now refuses either to be
tampered with or burst open.

I have determined, therefore, to give a few of these lives,