Note 6 — Chapter I · VORARLBERG.

Besides all this, have they not preserved to us, as in a registering mirror, the manners and habits of thought of the ages preceding ours? Have they not served to record as well as to mould the noblest aspirations of those who have gone before? ‘What are they,’ asks an elegant Italian writer of the present day,6 treating, however, only of the traditions of the earliest epoch of Christianity, ‘but narratives woven beside the chimney, under the tent, during the halt of the caravan, embodying as in a lively picture the popular customs of the apostolic ages, the interior life of the rising (nascente) Christian society? In them we have a delightful opportunity of seeing stereotyped the great transformation and the rich source of ideas and sentiments which the new belief opened up, to illuminate the common people in their huts no less than the patricians in their palaces. Those even who do not please to believe the facts they expose are afforded a genuine view of the habits of life, the manner of speaking and behaving—all that expresses and paints the erudition of those men and of those times. Thus, it may be affirmed, they comment beautifully on the Gospels, and in the midst of fables is grafted a great abundance of truth.