Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This book should be pleasant to read, for it has been pleasant to write. It grew out of a perusal of Miss Arnold-Forster’s Studies in Church Dedications (3 vols., Skeffington, 1899). Of this the third volume is composed of statistics, and gives the first and only complete list of saints commemorated in the dedications of English churches. These include modern as well as mediaeval dedications. It seemed worth while to strip off all dedications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving only those of more ancient date. The next step was to arrange these earlier dedications in order of frequency of occurrence, as a key to the respective popularity or unpopularity of the various saints. The results, both as to popularity and unpopularity, were so surprising that it was hardly possible not to pursue the inquiry further, and endeavour to ascertain how the old churchmen came to have such very different ideas from our own as to the merits or demerits of the saints. The inquiry turned out not to be easy, as may be judged from the long list of books in the bibliography (see below) which it was necessary to read and digest. Then some sort of order or system of arrangement had to be devised. It would not have been very profitable to discuss haphazard, just as they happened to occur in order of frequency, saints of such diverse characteristics as S. Andrew, S. Nicholas, S. Margaret, S. Helena, S. Thomas of Canterbury, and the rest; it would be to compare chalk with cheese. It was necessary to divide them up into various categories. Of these evidently the first category was of those saints whose biography, or part of it, appears in the New Testament. Even here the results of the order of merit, if it may be so termed, of the Biblical saints required considerable inquiry and discussion. How did it come about, for instance, that SS. Andrew and Matthew should have such overwhelming popularity as against other apostles and evangelists?
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