[Footnote: Thus a letter professing to be of Pope Anacletus the First
in the first century, but really belonging to the ninth: Apostolica
Sedes _cardo_ et caput omnium Ecclesiarum a Domino est constituta; et
sicut _cardine_ ostium regitur, sic hujus S. Sedis auctoritate omnes
Ecclesiae reguntur. And we have 'cardinal' put in relation with this
'cardo' in a genuine letter of Pope Leo IX.: Clerici summae Sedis
_Cardinales_ dicuntur, _cardini_ utique illi quo cetera moventur,
vicinius adhaerentes.]
'Legend' is a word with an instructive history. We all have some notion
of what at this day a 'legend' means. It is a tale which is _not_ true,
which, however historic in form, is not historic in fact, claims no
serious belief for itself. It was quite otherwise once. By this name of
'legends' the annual commemorations of the faith and patience of God's
saints in persecution and death were originally called; these legends
in this title which they bore proclaiming that they were worthy to be
read, and from this worthiness deriving their name. At a later day, as
corruptions spread through the Church, these 'legends' grew, in
Hooker's words, 'to be nothing else but heaps of frivolous and
scandalous vanities,' having been 'even with disdain thrown out, the
very nests which bred them abhorring them.' How steeped in falsehood,
and to what an extent, according to Luther's indignant turn of the word,
the 'legends' (legende) must have become 'lyings' (luegende), we can
best guess, when we measure the moral forces which must have been at
work, before that which was accepted at the first as 'worthy to be
read,' should have been felt by this very name to announce itself as
most unworthy, as belonging at best to the region of fable, if not to
that of actual untruth.
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