whole story has afforded copious matter for criticism. Mosheim (cent. iv. pt. ii. c. 3, § 8), Gibbon (c. xxvii.), Isaac Taylor (Ancient Christianity, Vol. ii. 242–272), consider the thing a trick got up by the contrivance and at the expense of St. Ambrose himself. Two distinct points demand attention: 1st, the finding of the bodies; 2nd, the reputed miracles. The discovery of the bodies may have been neither a miracle nor a trick. Churches were frequently built in cemeteries, and excavation might easily chance upon bodies. Some, moreover, have fixed Diocletian's persecution as the time of their martyrdom, and St. Ambrose, as the official custodian of the church records, might therefore have some knowledge of their resting-place, and in times of intense theological excitement men have often imputed to dreams or supernatural assistance that for which, under calmer circumstances, they would account in a more commonplace way. It is hardly possible to read through the epistle of St. Ambrose to his sister Marcellina (Ep. xxii.), in which he gives an account of the discovery, and still imagine that such genuine enthusiasm could go hand in hand with conscious knavery and deceit. There remains the question of the miracles to which St. Ambrose and St. Augustine testify (de Civit. Dei xxii. 8; Confess. ix. 7; Ser. 286 and 318). These were of two kinds: the restoration of demoniacs and the healing of a blind man. As to the demoniacs, we cannot decide. At times of religious excitement such cases have occurred, and can be accounted for on purely natural grounds. They belong to an obscure region of psychological phenomena. The case of the blind man, whose cure is reported by St. Augustine, then resident at Milan, as well as by St. Ambrose, stands on a different footing, and is the one really important point of the narrative with which Taylor fails effectively to grapple. We must observe, also, in favour of the miracle that St. Ambrose called immediate attention to it, and that no one seems to have challenged the fact of the blindness or the reality of restoration to sight; and further Severus devoted himself in consequence as a servant of the church wherein the relics were placed, and continued such for more than 20 years. On the other hand, we have no means of judging as to the nature of the disease in the man's eyes. He was not born blind, but had contracted the disease, being a butcher by trade. He might therefore have only been affected in some such way as powerful nervous excitement might cure, but for which he and St. Ambrose would naturally account by the miraculous power of the martyrs. In the Criterion of Miracles, by bp. Douglas (pp. 130–160, ed. 1803), there are many acute observations on similar reputed miracles in the 18th cent. Mart. Rom. Vet., Adon., Bedae, Usuard.; Kal. Carthag.; Kal. Front.; Tillem. Mém. ii. 78, 498; Fleury, H. E. viii. 49, xviii. 47; Ceill. v. 386, 490, ix. 340.
[G.T.S.]
Gildas (Gildasius, Gildus, Gillas), commemorated Jan. 29. In medieval Lives Gildas appears in a well-defined individuality, but a more critical view detects so many anachronisms and historical defects that it has been questioned, first, whether he ever lived, and secondly, whether there were more Gildases than one. Though he is mentioned by name, and his writings quoted from by Bede, Alcuin, William of Newburgh, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Giraldus Cambrensis, there is no memoir of him written within several centuries of his supposed date, and the two oldest, on which the others are based, are ordinary specimens of the unhistorical tone of mind of the 11th and 12th cents. To surmount the chronological and historical difficulties, Ussher, Ware, Bale, Pitseus, Golgan, and O'Conor have imagined at least two of the name, perhaps even four or six, about the 5th and 6th cents. These have received distinguishing designations, and thus have obtained a recognized position in history. But the more probable and more generally received opinion is that there is but one Gildas, who could not have lived earlier than about the end of the 5th cent. or later than that of the 6th. The oldest authority is Vita Gildae, auctore monacho Ruyensi anonymo, ed. by the Bollandists (Acts SS. Jan. 29, iii. 573 seq.), and attributed to the 11th cent. or earlier. The other was written by Caradoc of Llancarvan in the 12th cent. (Engl. Hist. Soc. 1838). (For pub. and MS. Lives see Hardy's Descript. Cat. i. pt. i. 151–156, pt. ii. 799.) With what seems more or less a common groundwork of fact, these Lives have much that is irreconcilable. "Nor need this seem so very strange," says O'Hanlon (Irish Saints, i. 473–474) "when both accounts had been drawn up several centuries after the lifetime of Gildas, and when they had been written in different centuries and in separate countries. The diversities of chronological events, and of persons hardly contemporaneous, will only enable us to infer that the sources of information were occasionally doubtful, while the various coincidences of narrative seem to warrant a conclusion that both tracts were intended to chronicle the life of one and the same person. It deserves remark, however, that" (quoting from Mon. Hist. Brit. i. pt. i. 59, n.) "both are said to have been born in Scotland. One was the son of Nau, the other of Cau: the eldest son [? brother] of one was Huel, of the other Cuil. Both lives have stories of a bell, both Gildases go to Ireland, both go to Rome, and both build churches. The monk of Ruys quotes several passages from Gildas's de Excidio, and assigns it to him: and Caradoc calls him 'Historiographus Britonum,' and say that he wrote Historiae de Regibus Britonum." Bp. Nicolson (Eng. Hist. Libr. 32, 3rd ed.) concludes that Gildas "was monk of Bangor about the middle of the 6th cent.; a sorrowful spectator of the miseries and almost utter ruin of his countrymen by a people under whose banner they had hoped for peace." Those who believe there was only one Gildas do not entirely agree as to his dates, one for his birth being sought between a.d. 484 and 520, and one for his death between a.d. 565 and 602. In his de Excidio Britanniae he says he was born in the year of "obsessionis Badonici montis" (c. 26). The Annales Cambriae place the "bellum Badonis" in 516, and the Annales Tigernachi Gildas's death in 570: these dues are probably nearest the truth. By
