It is from veneration of the early martyrs that the whole great business of the cult us of the saints in the Christian Church derives. Whatever the dignity and importance and interest of the saints whose festivals figure in the various calendars of the Church, those feasts must all, without exception, give place to the anniversary of the martyrs in point of antiquity. Already in the second century the annual commemoration of St Polycarp was celebrated in Smyrna from the time of his passion; from the begining of the third century such commemorations were becoming general.

There is nothing surprising about this. For the first three hundred years of their history Christians lived in an atmosphere of martyrdom, of witness by blood. ersecution was not continuous, and it varied in intensity from time to time and from place to place, but the possibility of being called on to die for the name of the Lord Christ was never far away; and that state of affairs, again at times and in places, has recurred ever since.

Legends are part of great events and if they help to keep I alive die memory of gallant self-sacrifice they serve their purpose.’ That is a quotation from Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember which describes the sinking of the Titanic when it struck an iceberg in 1912. The particular legend here referred to is that of the singing of ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’ as the ship went down. I have chosen it as an example with whicn begin this paper because it is a legend that I have been acquainte with personally and can vouch for as being in existence with four years of the event that it concerns; it was, in fact, curren very soon after the ship went down. It was totally untrue. If you examine this particular legend you will find that it contains all the elements of those popular legends connected with the saints including the fact of being untrue. There you have an example of the sort of problem confronting the writer of the lives of the saints.

In talking about lives of saints for children, I have divided the subject up into three sections according to age. This is arbitrary, but I had to divide it somehow. The first section is about children under seven, the second from seven to twelve, and the third from thirteen to sixteen or seventeen, or perhaps for boys a bit later. There are of course enormous changes withio these age ranges, but the great upheaval caused by the dawn ot reason and conscience, and the still greater changes that take place at puberty are some justification for this. It is clear that a lot oj what I say applies to all the groups, and that all such general divisions are to some extent misleading and annoying, but could see no way of avoiding them without chaos.

The interest of a child in saints can be said to begin only when he first asks ‘What is a saint?’. Children between four and seven are of an age to enjoy stories about saints in the same way that they enjoy stories about witches, princesses and dragons.

Christian art in its broad sense is generally taken to mean. any creative work done by an artist who is a ticul professing Christian. Today I wish to consider a particular aspect of Christian art, that is work carried out for, and applied to churches, chapels, or schools, with particular reference to images of the Saints.

In the first place let us consider the attitude of mind the artist should have in his approach to the problems of ecclesiastical art. It almost goes without saying that the Christian artist should have a sound knowledge of his Faith, and that he should be to some extent aware of contemporary Christian life and thought. In fact the visual arts must be part of this ever developing and active intellectual life of the Church, if they are to rise above the general level of the stagnant trade tawdriness of the work in many of our churches.