The Resurrection, from sculpture on chapel, Wakefield bridge 168 3. ACCOUNTS OF THE SAINTS WHOSE IMAGES ARE MOST FREQUENTLY MET WITH, OR WHO The four evangelistic symbols, from a Greek altar frontal, 10th cent. from sculpture, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford - from an altar-cloth at Steeple Aston, Oxfordshire ib. folding plate 6 It is a matter of considerable interest at the present era, when the principles of the Church are so anxiously scrutinised by friends and foes, to recollect how and in what manner our present kalendar of Festivals and Saints' days was formed. Our Reformers truly and reverently proceeded upon the principle of honouring antiquity. They found a number of dead men's names, not over-eminent in their lives either for sense or morals, crowding the kalendar, and jostling out the festivals of the saints and martyrs.' The medieval Church, as the Romanists still do, distinguished between the days of Obligation and days of Devotion. Now, under the Reformation only some of the former class, the Feasts of Obligation, were and are retained, being such as were dedicated to the memory of our Lord, or to those whose names are pre-eminent in the Gospels ;-the Blessed Virgin, the Apostles, the Baptist as the Precursor, and S. Stephen as the Proto-martyr: S. Mark and S. Luke as Evangelists: S. Paul and S. Barnabas on account of their extraordinary call: the Holy Innocents, as the earliest who suffered on Christ's account; the Feast of S. Michael and all Angels, to remind us of the benefits received by the ministry of angels; and All Saints, as the memorial of all those who have died in the faith. Surely no method could have been better devised than such a course for making time, as it passes, a perpetual memorial of the Head of the Church. The principle upon which certain festivals of Devotion still retained in the kalendar prefixed to the Common Prayer, and usually printed in italics, were selected from among the rest, is more obscure. Many of them evidently indicate names which had been peculiarly honoured of old in the Church of England; S. Alban, the proto-martyr of Britain; S. Augustine, the apostle of the English race; Venerable Bede, and King Edward the Confessor, the real patron of England, supplanted in the age of pseudochivalry, by the legendary S. George. Others must have been chosen for their high station in the earlier ages of the Church-S. Ambrose, S. Augustine, S. Martin, and S. Cyprian; others from their local celebrity. A third class are, Saints who are simply commemorated; and it is a very curious fact, and, as we believe, hitherto quite unnoticed, that these Saints'days, now considered as the distinctive badges of Romanism, continued to retain their stations in our popular Protestant English almanacks until the alteration of the style in 1752, when they were discon |