[58] Bernard said in his preface: “I have been much struck by the accuracy of St. Silvia’s (Etheria’s) topographical descriptions; they are evidently those of a person who had seen the places described.” Of the document itself he wrote: “The manuscript is said to be written in an eleventh-century hand, and Gamurrini considers it tolerably certain that it was the work of a monk at Monte Casino.”
[59] See Valerius’s Life of St. Fructuosus, quoted by Montalembert. St. Isidore, according to Cuvier, was the first Christian who arranged for Christians the knowledge of antiquity; so we may call him the father of Ecclesiastical Archæology.
[60] Montalembert translated these and other stories about this saint from the Latin of Zepes. See his own note.
[61] Capilla parroquial de San Fructuoso.
[62] See Lopez Ferreiro, Hist. de la S. Iglesia de Santiago, vol. ii., 1899, and España Sagrada, vol. xxxiv. The Arab historians also tell this story.
[63] “Cette œuvre au texte si court et au chant si long; à l’écouter, à la lire avec recueillement cette magnifique exoration paraissait se décomposer en son ensemble, répresenter trois états différents d’âme, signifier la triple phase de l’humanité, pendant sa jeunesse, sa maturité et son déclin; elle était en un mot, l’essentiel resumé de la prière à tous les âges.” See Huysman’s En Route, where Durtal’s conversion is made to take place as he listens to the Salve Regina.
[64] España Sagrada, xix.
[65] Read before the Sixth Catholic Congress at Santiago, July 1902.
[66] St. Gregory the Great, who died about 604, was the first monk who became a pope. “It was he,” says Montalembert, “who inaugurated the Middle Ages, modern society, and Christian civilization. He was the first to collect the ancient melodies of the Church, in order to subject them to the rules of harmony, and to arrange them according to the requirements of Divine worship, ... he established at Rome the celebrated school of religious music, to which Gaul, Germany, England, all the Christian nations came in turn.”
[67] See Borrow’s Bible in Spain, ch. xxviii.