Still more obvious and direct is the light which the hagiogra phers cast on European history when their subjects have borne a leading part in clerical or Christian movements. Biographies like those of St. Cyril and St. Martin, St. Patrick and St Boniface, are often our chief materials for understanding the conversion of north ern and western Europe to Christianity, surely one of the most memorable movements in human history. In the later ages it is in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic and St. Ignatius that we may best study, in their early development, those three orgam zations which have proved the most potent agencies foij maintaining vital Christianity in a world already nominally Christian. Of another variety are the lives or narratives of travelling saints, whose observations are among the chief materials for our knowledge of medieval geography.

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