The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

To me it appears that the bestowal of this power on the Apostles was the highest testimonial of their ofificial character and authority."

Paton J. Gloag comments on Acts 8: 15-16 thus: "By the Holy

Ghost here is not to be understood the ordinary or sanctifying influences of the Spirit. The Samaritans, in the act of believing the gospel, received the Holy Ghost in this sense.... The miraculous influences of the Spirit, which are manifested by speaking with tongues and prophesyings, are here meant. As Calvin remarks, 'He speaks not in this place of the common grace of the Spirit, whereby God regenerates us that we may be His children, but of those singular gifts whereby God would have certain endowed, at the beginning of the Gospel, to beautify the Kingdom of Christ.' But the question arises. Why could not Philip bestow the Holy Ghost?... The common opinion appears to be the correct one — namely, that Philip could not bestow the Holy Ghost because he was not an Apostle. This, though not expressly stated, yet seems implied in the narrative. So Chrysostom and Epiphanius among the fathers, and Grotius, Lightfoot, DeWette, Baumgarten, Meyer, Olshausen, and Wordsworth among the moderns." John

Lightfoot holds that the charismata were not conferred indiscriminately on all but only on a select few, to endow them (a plurality in each church) for the office of "minister." But that these gifts were conferred only by laying on the Apostles' hands he is clear. Cf. Works, ed. Pittman, vol. IH, p. 30: "To give the Holy Ghost was a peculiar prerogative of the Apostles"; vol. Ill, p. 194, commenting on Acts 8: "Philip baptized Samaritans and did great wonders among them, but could not bestow the Holy Ghost upon them: that power belonged only to the Apostles; therefore Peter and John are sent thither for that purpose."

54. Institutes of the Christian Religion, E. T., by John Allen; ed. Philadelphia, 1909, vol. I, pp. 26 ff.: "Their requiring miracles of us is altogether unreasonable; for we forge no new Gospel, but retain the very same whose truth was confirmed by all the miracles ever wrought by Christ and the Apostles" — and so forth.

58. A Vindication of the Miractdous Powers which Subsisted in the Three First Centuries of the Christian Church, 1750. Chapman's Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church, 1752 (following up his

Discovery of the Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church, 1747) came too late to be included in Middleton's Vindication.

59. The literature of the subject has been intimated in the course of the lecture. By the side of Middleton's Free Inquiry may be placed J. Douglas, The Criterion; or rules by which the True Miracles recorded in the New Testament are distinguished from the Spurious miracles of Pagans and Papists, 1752, new edd. 1857, etc., 1867; and Isaac Taylor, Ancient Christianity, 1839; ^d. 4, 1844, vol. II, pp. 233-365. Cf. also Lecture VIII in J. B. Mozley, Eight Lectures on Miracles, 1865. Of J. H. Newman's Two Essays on Scripture Miracles and oji Ecclesiastical, some account will be given in the next lecture. By its side should be placed Horace Bushnell's eloquent argument for the continuation of miracles in the church in the fourteenth chapter of his Nature and the Supernatural (1858; ed. 4, 1859, pp. 446-492).

2. Gregory's Panegyric on Gregory Thaumaturgus is described and characterized, and its true character shown, by Th. Trede, Wunderglauhe im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1900, pp. 144 ff.: "Our declaimer attains the climax of rhetorical fire- works in his Christian Panegyric on Gregory Thaumaturgus." In this connection Trede makes some very illuminating remarks on the transference into the church of the bad traditions of the heathen rhetorical schools in which so many of the Christian leaders had their training.

4. The confidence which Augustine reposed in these narratives is perhaps most strongly shown in such an incidental remark as meets us in the City of God, 22: 28. He is speaking of Plato and Cornelius Labeo, and reporting what they say of resuscitations. He remarks: "But the resurrection which these writers instance resembles that of those persons whom we have ourselves known to rise again, and who came back indeed to this life, but not so as never to die again." Augustine supposes himself to have actually known people once dead to have come back to this life; he has no doubt of it at all.

5. Raising the dead, so common an occurrence in Augustine's day, seems later to have passed somewhat out of fashion. John of Salisbury, at ail events, when speaking of the miracles wrought at the tomb of Thomas a Becket (f 1170), includes this among them, but speaks of it as something new to experience: "And (a thing unheard of from the days of our fathers) the dead are raised" (E. A. Abbott, Si. Thomas of Canterbury, 1898, I, p. 227, cf. II, p. 17, and, in general, the Index stib voc, "Death, Restoration from"). Later, however, this miracle recovered its popularity. No less than fourteen instances of it are attributed to Francis Xavier — although he himself, unfortunately, died without knowledge of them. Andrew D. White {The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, ed. 1896, vol. II, p. 17) sums up the facts thus: "Al-

though during the lifetime of Xavier there is neither in his own writings, nor in any contemporary account any assertion of a resurrection from the dead wrought by him, we find that shortly after his death such stories began to appear. A simple statement of the growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of miraculous accounts generally. At first it was affirmed that some people at Cape Comorin said that he had raised one person; then it was said that he had raised two persons; then in various authors — ■ Emmanuel Acosta, in his commentaries written as an afterthought nearly twenty years after Xavier's death, De Quadros, and others — the story wavers between one and two cases; finally in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been developed. In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were mentioned; but by the time of Father Bonhours there were fourteen, all raised from the dead by Xavier himself during his lifetime, and the name, place, and circumstances are given with much detail in each case." The refer-

ences to Bonhours are given thus: The Life of St. Francis Xavier ^ by Father Dominic Bonhours, translated by James Dryden, Dublin, 1838, pp. 69, 82, 93, III, 218, 307, 316, 321. For the repeated occurrence of raisings of the dead in mediaeval legend, see H. Giinter, Die chfistliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, pp. 25, 32, 43, 47, 191; it is, in spite of John of Salisbury's ignorance of it, of common occurrence in the legends. An instructive instance is repeated to us by H. Delehaye, Les Legendes Hagiographiques, 1905, p. loi:

"When St. Bernard was preaching the crusade in the diocese of Constance, an archer in the following of the Duke of Zahringen jeered at his preaching and at the preacher himself, saying, 'He cannot work miracles any more than I can.' When the saint proceeded to lay his hands on the sick, the mocker saw it, and suddenly fell over as if dead; he remained a considerable time without consciousness. Alexander of Cologne adds: *I was close to him when the thing happened.... We called the Abbe, and this poor man could not get up until Bernard came, made a prayer and lifted him up.' No single eye-witness says a word which can make

us think of a resuscitation of a dead man. Yet, a century later, Herbert, author of a collection of the miracles of St. Bernard, Conrad, author of the Exordium, and Cesar of Heisterbach, affirm that the archer was dead and the saint restored him to life." Dele-

14. On Augustine's doctrine of miracles, see especially, Friedrich Nitzsch, Augustinus' Lehre vom Wunder, 1865; especially pp. 32-35 on the "Continuance of Miracles in the Church," and pp. 35-37, "Miracles outside the limits of the Revelation-history and the Church."

17. How little the abounding miracles of the lives of the saints were noted — or we should better say, known — in mediaeval times, we may learn from a remark of H. Giinter's {Legenden-Studien,

1906, pp. 176 f.): "For the proper estimate of these things we must bear in mind that contemporary profane history very essentially corrects the literature of the Lives: the very names which here seem to move the world, scarcely receive bare mention there: of the flood of miracles in the Lives there is not even a trace. The Chronicles and Annalists were nevertheless children of those times, and receptive enough for everything that was miraculous. The notion which might occur to one, that the Chronicles, the newspapers of the day, purposely left the domain of the saints to biography and romance, is clearly untenable. He who reads Widukind's History of the Saxons, the Continuatio Regionis, the Chronicle of Thietmar of Merceberg, will not fail to learn of the saints of the Saxon period. Thietmar's description of the saint-bishop and ascetic Eido of Meissen (VIII, c. 25) is a true classic. But saints in the same sense of the legend, these figures are not."

not improbable that he is presenting Martin's view, as well as his own, that to doubt these marvels of healing, etc., is to diminish the credibility of the gospel, 'for when the Lord Himself testified that such works as Martin did were to be done by all the faithful, he who does not believe Martin did them, does not believe Christ said so.' Perhaps the logic is not above suspicion, but it is clear that it was held Martin's miracles were proven no less by the words of the gospel than by ocular evidence." J. H. Newman had already

made much the same remark, Two Essays on Scriphire Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, p. 209: "Sulpicius almost grounds his defence of St. Martin's miracles on the antecedent force of this text." It would be a curious and not unprofitable study to ascertain how large a part this spurious text has had in producing spurious miracles in all ages of the church.

30. The Patristic citations in this paragraph have been taken largely, without verification, from Newman, op. cit., pp. 135 ff., 208, and W. Goode, The Modern Claims to the Possession of the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit, 1834, pp. 4 £f., 275 ff. Cf. also A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, I, pp. 35 fif. Such passages abound. H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 77 ff., very naturally raises the question whether the legends of the Middle Ages really wished to be believed, and whether they were believed. His conclusion is that there can be no doubt that they were put forth as literal facts, but that the credit accorded to them by men of independent mind left certainly something to be desired. "No one of the theologians of importance," he remarks (p. 82), "ever made an attempt to support scientific speculations by appeals to legendary tales as historical evidence, no matter how near at hand an illustration from them lay." Cf. what he says in Legenden-Studien, 1906, p.

132: "I think it is not by accident, when Cassian observes that the

monks of his time — he died in 435 — were no longer subjected to the power of the demons as the 'Fathers' were. Similarly Gregory the Great later finds that miracles do not manifest themselves now as in the past {Dial., I, c. 12). And the same reflection is repeated dozens of times in the literature of the Middle Ages. Is there not a sufficient suggestion in this?"

31. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Smith, 1887, vol. II, p. 180, note 81.

S^. Among the many anomalies of the legends of the saints, the question asks itself why the saints, many of whom had severe sufferings to undergo, many of whom were lifelong invalids, never rescued or healed themselves by the exercise of their miraculous powers? Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, when in extremities, needed to be saved from without — by the intervention of Mary, who gave him her breast. Christina Mirabilis, it is true, nourished herself with her own virgin milk; but this is an exception to the general rule. It is a proverb, "Physician, heal thyself"; yet even the most diseased of the saints did not do it — and all of them apparently died. That the Martyr-heroes of the Martyr-aretalogies ultimately succeeded in dying is a standing wonder. They are delivered apparently from every imaginable, and often unimaginable, peril, at the cost of every imaginable, and often unimaginable, miracle; fire will not burn them, nor steel cut their flesh; the sea will not drown them, nor will chains bind them. They bear a charmed life and walk unscathed through every conceivable danger. And then suddenly their heads are simply chopped off as if it were the most natural thing in the world — and they are dead. The reader catches his breath and cannot believe his eyes: the exceeding sang-froid with which the author kills at the end those whom nothing can harm in the meantime produces nothing less than an enormous anticlimax. Has the miracle-power of the martyr given suddenly out — been all used up in its wonderful action hitherto? Or is it merely that the invention of the author has been exhausted, and he has to close thus lamely because he can think of nothing else to say? We have something of the same feeling when we contemplate sick saints healing others with wonderful facility, while apparently wholly without power to heal themselves. Is it adequate to say with Percy Dearmer (Body and Soul, p. 133): "And often,

when they healed others they did not spare the strength to heal themselves; often they endured without thinking of themselves the infirmities which they could not bear to see unhelped in others. They thought so much of One of whom it is said, 'He saved others;

Himself He cannot save.'" The suggested comparison with Christ

is, of course, offensive. The sufferings of the saints are not expiatory sacrifices offered to God in behalf of a sinful world — although it must be sadly acknowledged that many of them {e. g., the Stigmatics) fancied they were. Christ could not save Himself, not because He lacked the power to do so, but because the work which He came to do was precisely suffering — to give His life a ransom for many. There was no more reason in the nature of things, on the other hand, why the saints should suffer than others. And the description which Dearmer gives of the saints is not true to life, in many instances at least. They do not seem to have borne their sufferings without thinking of them; they apparently thought a great deal of them, either to bewail them or, by a spiritual perversion, to glory in them as a mark of spiritual distinction. And how does it do to say in one sentence, "The saints have always seemed to regard their healing works as easy things, done by the way and out of compassion"; and then in the next, "They did not spare the strength to heal themselves"? If it cost them nothing to heal — if they did it with a passing wave of the hand — why should they have not healed themselves? The sicknesses of the saints is a standing puzzle.

35. Cf. H. Giinter, Die christliche Legends des Ahendlandes, 1910, p. 187, who cites the Vita of St. Gongolf at the end of the ninth century, and Gislebert of Sens, about 11 50, as declaring that in the absence of good merit miracles are nothing, since they are performed by many evil men; as also the archdeacon Robert of Ostrevand in his life of Aybert, of the same age, who remarks that the virtue of love which belongs to the good alone is of far more worth than the virtue of miracles which belongs alike to good and evil. Cf. also the like citation from Thomas of Reuil. Giinter refers on the general matter to L. Zopf, Das Eeilegen-Leben in 10 Jahrh. in "Beitrage z. Kulturgesch. des Mittelalters u. des Renaissance," herausgegeben von W. Gotz, Heft i (1908), pp. 62 f., pp. 181 ff.

36. This is of course the established doctrine; cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 351, where Benedict XIV is quoted (on Heroic Virtue, 1851, III, p. 130) to the effect that, since the gift of miracle-working is a grace gratis data, it is independent of the merit of the recipient; even bad men might be granted it (for God's own purposes) and good men denied it. It forms no ground of inference then to saintliness. But do not difficulties arise then with reference to the customs of "canonization"?

37. Vol. II, p. 2049. On miracles connected with the host, see very especially Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 191 2, pp. 120 ff., with the literature given on pp. 502 ff.

40. Smith and Cheatham, as cited.

41. Did. des Propheties et des Miracles (Migne), vol. I, p. 370. For the miracle of Bolsena and its significance in the historical development of the legends, see H. Giinter, Lege7iden-Sti<dicn, 1906, pp. 174 fif.; cf. Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 191 2, pp. 103 f.

43. Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, April, 1856, pp. 255-285, article on "Miracles and their Counterfeits."

47. This portion of Fleury's great Eistoire Ecclesiastique (Paris, 1691-1720, 20 vols., quarto), from 381 to 400 A. D., translated by Herbert (London, 1828), was republished in three volumes, Oxford, 1842, in a text carefully revised by Newman, and supplied with this introduction.

49. Nor indeed can John T. Driscoll writing as late as 191 1 {The Catholic Encyclopedia, X, p. 346). If we may judge from reports of cases in the public press, modern surgery provides numerous similar instances. We have happened to clip the following two examples. The New York Tribune for May 6, 1901: "William H.

Crampton, the lecturer, who some time ago had the greater part of his tongue cut out on account of a cancerous growth, is now able to articulate slowly so that he can make himself understood.... Crampton, who for some years has made his living by lecturing, just before the operation was performed, spent two days in delivering his lectures into a phonograph. His idea was that when he left the hospital, bereft of speech, as he anticipated, he would still be able to earn a living by giving phonograph lectures.... Doctor L. S. Pitcher, of the staff of the Seney Hospital, who performed the operation, has asked Mr. Crampton to appear before the next meeting of the Brooklyn Surgical Society in order that its members may get a thorough understanding of the case. Mr. Crampton will have his phonograph records with him to show the effects of the operation upon his speech." The Lexington (Ky.)

Jan'y 10. — Frederick Power, actor and stage-manager, who had his tongue cut from his mouth in an operation for cancer five weeks

ago, is again able to talk so as to be understood. The case is said by physicians to be a remarkable triumph for surgery. All of Mr. Power's tongue and part of the root had to be removed in the operation. With his tongue gone, he is able to articulate, uttering some words quite distinctly. For several days Mr. Power has been attempting to sing, and the hospital attendants say that while the efforts were not entirely successful, they have encouraged the patient and made him quite hopeful. There is still some paralysis in Mr. Power's lower lip, due to the operation, and there is a heavy gold bridge in his mouth. His jaw is still held in a heavy plaster cast, and when these impediments are removed it is believed he will be able to articulate fairly well."

50. Philomythus: An Antidote against Credulity. A Discussion of Cardinal Newman's Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles. By Edwin A. Abbott, 1891. Second edition, 1891.

57. Pp. 81 f. On the integrity of the present text of the Life of Eilarion, see H. Gunter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, p. 130, note 3.

58. Th. Trede, in the chapter on "Monchtum," in his Wunderglaube im Heidentiim und in der alien Kirche, 1901, has some very useful remarks (pp. 213 ff.) on Athanasius's Life of Antony and its relation to the miracle-love of the times. "As apostle of Monasti-

cism," he says, "Athanasius becomes a rhetorician, with reference to whom we ask. Where does fancy stop and where does reality begin? When the great doctor of the church assures us that he has throughout looked only to the truth, his idea of the truth was not different from that which we have found among other leaders of the church and permitted him such means to reach his purpose as were looked upon as self-evident in the heathen notions of the time."

With an appeal, then, to Lucian's exposition of the different laws which govern history and panegyrics {The Way to Write History, 7 and 8: "The panegyrist has only one concern — to commend and gratify his living theme some way or other; if misrepresentation will serve his purpose, he has no objection to that. History, on the other hand, abhors the intrusion of any least scruple of falsehood..."), he continues: "The Life of Antony by Athanasius is a panegyric, just such as Gregory of Nyssa wrote about Gregory

Thaumaturgus...." When Gregory of Nazianzus describes Athanasius as setting forth in this book " iv irXda-ziari. of a narrative, the laws of the monastic life" {Oration XXI, 5, Post-Nicene Fathers, p. 270), does he not really suggest that it is fiction, in part at least? Trede discusses in a similar spirit Jerome's Lives of Paul and Hilarion. On the Vita Pauli, see Weingarten, PRE?, X, 760, and Griitzmacher PRE^, XIII, 217. The reality of Paul's existence is defended by Butler, The Lausiac History, I, 231, and Workman, The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal, 1913, p. 96, both of whom defend also the historicity of the Life of Antony, I, 178 and 354 respectively. The Lausiac History is interpreted as a mere romance also by Lucius and Amelineau, but defended as history by Butler, I, 257 flf. There is a good brief statement of Athanasius's relation to miracle-working in the Vita Antonii and elsewhere, in A. Robertson's preface to the English translation of the Vita Antonii printed in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II, n, p. 192.

61. See Acts of Peter and Andrew, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers,

Am. ed., vol. VIII, p. 527: "Peter says to him: One thing I say unto thee: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to go into the kingdom of heaven. When Onesiphorus heard this, he was still more filled with rage and anger,... saying,... If thou wilt show me this miracle, I wUl believe in thy God,... but if not thou shalt be grievously punished.... The Saviour appeared... and he says to them, Be courageous and tremble not, my chosen disciples, for I am with you always: let the needle and camel be brought.... And there was a certain merchant in the city, who had believed in the Lord,... and,... he ran and searched for a needle with a big eye, to do a fiavour to the Apostles. When Peter learned this, he said, My son, do not search for a big needle, for nothing is impossible with God: rather bring us a small needle. And after the needle had been brought... Peter looked up and saw a camel coming.,.. Then he fixed the needle in the ground, and cried out with a loud voice, saying. In the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, I order thee, O camel, to go through the eye of the needle. Then the eye of the needle was opened like a gate, and the camel went through it, and all the multitude saw it. And Peter says to the camel: Go again through the needle. And the camel went through the second time." Even this is not enough.

Onesiphorus now provides a needle and a camel of his own, and sets a woman on the camel — and the same thing is done. Is not the conception here, mere magic?

67. Inquisit. in verit. Miraculor. F. de Paris, sec. i, as cited by Newman, op. cit., p. 90, note 1. On the Jansenist miracles cf. the excellent criticism of A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1839, I, pp. 133-148; he mentions the chief sources of information, among which cf. especially Carre de Montgeron, La Verite des Miracles Operes par llntercession de M. de Paris et Autres Appelans, Cologne, 1747, with the comments on it by J. M. Charcot in The New Review, January, 1893, vol. VIII, pp. 25 ff., and the comment on Charcot's use of this book by G. Bertrin, Lourdes, E. T., 1908, pp. 138 fT. On the use made of these miracles by Hume, see James Orr, Hume, p. 215, who refers us for the real facts to Campbell and Leland.

69. The first of the ten miracles which Montgeron discusses at large was wrought on a young Spaniard, who was stone blind in one eye and saw but dimly with the other. Only the better eye was healed, and the famous oculist Gendron told him that he ought to be content with that, since the restoration of the other eye, in which many parts were absolutely destroyed, would require a miracle of creation comparable to giving a cripple two new legs, and no one ever heard of such a miracle. Yet Charlotte Laborde, we are told, who on the certificate of two surgeons had no legs at all, recovered a serviceable pair by one of these Jansenist miracles. Here is a miracle which overtops all other miracles — even that of the famous Pierre de Rudder at Lourdes, who only had an old fracture of the leg mended. Compare pp. 118 ff.

70. The literature of the subject is sufficiently intimated in the course of the lecture. The following may be profitably consulted: E. Lucius (ed. G. Anrich), Die Anfdnge des Heiligenkults in der christlichen Kirche, 1904; H. Achelis, "Die Martyrologien, ihre Ge-

Naturally the same infection from heathenism which produced the Christian miracles of these ages, showed itself also among the Jews. For the earliest period, see P. Fiebig, Judische Wundergeschichten des neutestamentl. Zeitalters, 191 1 (original texts in same author's Rabbinische W under ges. d. N. T. Zeitalters, 191 1). S. Schechter {Jewish Quarterly Review, April, 1900, pp. 431-432)

writes: "Again our knowledge of the spiritual history of the Jews during the first centuries of our era might be enriched by a chapter on Miracles. Starting from the principle that miracles can only be explained by more miracles, an attempt was made some years ago by a student to draw up a list of the wonder- workings of the Rabbis recorded in the Talmud and the Midrashim. He applied himself to the reading of these works, but his reading was only cursory. The list, therefore, is not complete. Still it yielded a harvest of not less than two hundred and fifty miracles. They cover all classes of supernatural workings recorded in the Bible, but occur with much greater frequency." As the Christians did not think

of denying the reality of the heathen miracles, but had their own way of accounting for their occurrence (see the interesting discussion in Augustine, City of God, X, 16), so the Jews. P. J. Hershon (Genesis with a Talmudic Commentary, E. T., p. 284) quotes from the Avoda-zarah, fol. 51, col. i, as follows: "Zonan once said to Rabbi

Akiva: Both I and thou know that an idol has nothing in it, and yet we see men who go to it lame and return sound; how dost thou account for it? He replied: I will tell thee a parable. There was a faithful man with whom his townspeople deposited their goods, without the presence of witnesses. One man did so likewise, but was careful to bring witnesses with him. Once, however, he deposited something with him when no one else was present. Oh, said his wife, after his departure, let us keep that deposit for ourselves. What! replied the husband, because the fool acted improperly shall we forfeit our faith? So also when chastisements are sent on men, they (the chastisements) are adjured not to leave them before a certain day, a certain hour, and then only by a certain medicament. It happens that the heathen man repairs to the heathen temple at that very time. The chastisements then say: By right we should not depart just now; but, on reflection, they add: Because that fool acts improperly, shall we violate our oath?" Where the Christians invoked demons, Akiva fell back

3. The sense of this continuity is very strong among Romanist writers; e.g., R. H. Benson, Lourdes, 1914, P- 59: '"These signs

shall follow them that believe,' He said Himself; and the history of the Catholic Church is an exact fulfillment of the words. It was so, St. Augustine tells us, at the tombs of the martyrs; five hundred miracles were reported at Canterbury within a few years of St. Thomas' martyrdom. And now here is Lourdes, as it has been for fifty years, in this little corner of France."

4. The same general point of view finds expression sometimes in non-Romanist quarters. For example, J. Arthur Hill, The Hihbcrt Journal, October, 1906, vol. V, p. 118, writes as follows:

"Christ's miracles and resurrection were objective phenomena, and Christianity w^as based upon them.... But belief in Christianity has gradually crumbled away because there has been no continuance of well-attested cognate facts. The Catholic miracles and ecstasies make belief easier for one section of Christianity; but Protestantism — which cuts off miracles at the end of the Apostolic Times — has committed suicide; by making unique events of its basic phenomena it has made continued belief in them impossible." On this view no man can believe in miracles who has

not himself witnessed miracles. Testimony is discredited out of hand; man believes only what he has seen. Must we not go further on this ground? Can a man continue to believe in miracles unless he continues to see them? Is not memory itself a kind of testimony? Must not there be a continuous miracle in order to support continuous faith? We cannot thus chop up the continuity of life, whether of the individual or of the race, in the interests of continuous miracle. Granted that one or the other must be continuous, life or miracle; but both need not be.

7. Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alien Kirche, 1901,

20. Eusebius, The Preparation for the Gospel, 11: 37 (E. T. by E. H. Gifford, vol. Ill, pp. 610 f.), quotes it from Plutarch's treatise On the Soul. Plutarch is speaking of his friend Antyllus. He

writes: "For he was ill not long ago, and the physician thought that he could not live; but having recovered a little from a slight collapse, though he neither did nor said anything else showing derangement, he declared that he had died and had been set free again, and was not going to die at all of that present illness, but that those who had carried him away were seriously reproved by their Lord; for, having been sent for Nicandas, they had brought him back instead of the other. Now, Nicandas was a shoe-maker, besides being one of those who frequent the palustrae, and familiar and well-known to many. Wherefore the young men used to come and mock him, as having run away from his fate, and as having bribed the officers sent from the other world. It was evident, however, that he was himself at first a little disturbed and disquieted; and at last he was attacked by a fever and died suddenly the third day. But this Antyllus came to life again, and is alive and well, and one of our most agreeable friends."

23a. Erasmus has some very sensible remarks on the matter

(Lucian's Philopseudes] teaches us the folly of superstition, which creeps in under the name of religion. When lies are told us Lucian bids us not disturb ourselves, however complete the authority which may be produced for them. Even Augustine, an honest old man and a lover of truth, can repeat a tale as authentic which Lucian had ridiculed under other names so many years before Augustine was born. What wonder, therefore, that fools can be found to listen to the legends of the saints or to stories about hell, such as frighten cowards or old women. There is not a martyr, there is not a virgin, whose biographies have not been disfigured by these monstrous absurdities. Augustine says that lies when exposed always injure the truth. One might fancy they were invented by knaves or unbelievers to destroy the credibility of Christianity itself." Miracles, according to Erasmus,, did not happen

in his time — though they were said to happen. "I have spoken of miracles," he writes (Froude, p. 351). "The Christian religion nowadays does not require miracles, and there are none; but you know that lying stories are set about by crafty knaves." He describes with his biting satire what happened (and did not happen) when the Protestants took over Basle. "Smiths and carpenters

were sent to remove the images from the churches. The roods and the unfortunate saints were cruelly handled. Strange that none of them worked a miracle to avenge their dignity, when before they had worked so many at the slightest provocation" (p. 359). "No blood was shed; but there was a cruel assault on altars, images, and pictures. We are told that St. Francis used to resent light remarks about his five wounds, and several other saints are said to have shown displeasure on similar occasions. It was strange that at Basle not a saint stirred a finger. I am not so much surprised at the patience of Christ and the Virgin Mary" (p. 360). As to relics and relic-worship: "What would Jerome say could he see the Virgin's milk exhibited for money; with as much honor paid to it as to the consecrated body of Christ; the miraculous oil; the portions of the true cross, enough if they were collected to freight a large ship? Here we have the head of St. Francis, there our Lady's petticoat or St. Anne's cowl, or St. Thomas of Canterbury's shoes; not presented as innocent aids to religion, but as the substance of religion itself — and all through the avarice of priests and the hypocrisy of monks playing on the credulity of the people. Even bishops play their parts in these fantastic shows, and approve and dwell on them in their rescripts" (pp. 121 f.).

30. On the miracles, especially of healing, of classical antiquity, see E. Thraner, art., "Health and Gods of Healing," in Hastings's ERE, vol. VI, pp. 540-566; Otto Weinreich, Antike Heilungswunder, 1909; R. Lembert, Die W under glauhe der Romer und Griechen, 1905; and Antike Wunderkuren, 191 1; G. von Rittersheim, Der medizin. Wunderglauben und die Incubation im Altertum, 1878; L. Deubner, De Incubatione, 1900; M. Hamilton, Incubation, 1906. On the transference of the heathen customs to Christianity, see Deubner and Hamilton, and especially E. Lucius, Die Anfdnge des Eeiligenkults in der christliche Kirche, 1904; Th. Trede, Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1901, and Das Heidenium in der Romishen Kirche, 4 vols., 1889-1891; P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907. With respect to the mediaeval miracles, see especially P. Toldo of Turin, who began in 1901 in the Studien der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte a "scientific classification" of the mediaeval miracles, in a series of articles entitled, "Lives and Miracles of the Saints in the Middle Ages"; see also Koch's Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, vol. XIV (1901), pp. 267 ff., where Toldo prints the Introduction to these studies. The bizarre character of these miracles is fairly illustrated by a brief but brightly written review of them in R, A. Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics,^ 1903, vol. II, pp. 218-222.

31. Heinrich Giinter, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 191 1, p. 229, singles the stigmata out from other miraculous manifestations as "an especially Christian manifestation"; all the rest have heathen parallels.

924: "In the absolute sense in which it has been until recently thought to be such, Francis of Assisi does not begin the long list. It is, on the contrary, possible to show that at the least the idea of imitating the stigmata, as a consequence of longing after the sufferings of the Lord, was active for the period of the opening thirteenth century when not only was reverence for the sufferings of Christ fostered by the crusades, but more still self-mortifications of all sorts were set on foot by the growing call to repentance and

amendment. Consult the self-mutilations of the Belgian Beguine Marie of Oignies (f 1213), of the religious fanatic condemned by the Oxford Synod of 1222, further of the Marquis Robert of Montferrand, about 1226, of the Dutch hermit Dodon von Hasha

Francis was not only the first of the stigmatics in both time and importance, but presented the stigmata in a form which has remained peculiar to himself. The contemporary accounts agree in describing the marks on his hands and feet as blackish, fleshy excrescences, recalling in form and color the nails with which the hands and feet of Jesus were pierced. Only the mark in the side was a wound, whence at times exuded a little blood. No bloody exudation took place except at the side. (Cf. Paul Sabatier, Life of Francis of Assisi, E. T., 1894, p. 296, note, and p. 435). Francis's stigmatization consisted, then, not of five bleeding wounds but of the imitation of the four nails and the spear thrust in the side. The description given of them by Brother Elias (Sabatier, p. 436) in his letters as Vicar of the Order to the brothers, sent out after Francis's death, describes them as follows: "For (or Not) a

long time before his death our Brother and Father appeared as crucified, having in his body five wounds, which are truly the stigmata of Christ, for his hands and his feet bore marks as of nails without and within, forming a sort of scars; while at the side he was as if pierced with a lance, and often a little blood oozed from it." Joseph von Gorres, Die christliche Mystik, ed. of 1836, vol.

II, p. 422, puts together a very detailed description of the wounds

on the hands and the feet: "The wounds of notable extent opened in the centre of the extremities. In the middle of them had grown out of the flesh and cellular tissue nails like iron; black, hard, fixed, with heads above, below pointed and as if clinched, so that a finger could be inserted between them and the skin. They were movable from side to side, and if drawn out to one side, were correspondingly drawn in on the other but could not be extracted; as St. Clara discovered when she tried to extract them after his death, and could not do it. The fingers remained, moreover, flexible as before, and the hands performed their service; neither did the feet fail, although walking had become more difficult to him, and he therefore rode thereafter in his journeying through the neighborhood." A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1839, I, pp.

105 f., points out the defects in the testimony: "In the case of all

other saints the legend speaks only of wound scars, and the portraits of Francis present him only with the scars; the old reporters nevertheless describe them in a peculiar way as if there had grown

nails of flesh, with the color of fresh iron and with clinched points. Nevertheless perfect clearness is lacking in the reports. The report of the ires socii says: nails of flesh were seen et ferri quoque nigredinent. Celano says: No?i clavorum quidem puncturas, sed ipsos clavos in eis impositos, ex ferri recenti nigredine; the last words yield no sense, and the editors conjecture: ex ferri recentis nigredinem. The matter is spoken of still less clearly in a letter of Francis's immediate successor in the generalship of the Minorites (in Wadding, ad annum 1226, no. 45). Here we read: Nam manus ejus et pedes, quasi puncturas clavorum habuerunt ex utraque parte confixas, reservantes cicatrices, et clavorum nigredinem ostendentes. According to this also nails were present." For recent discussions see the works

mentioned at the close of the article on the "Stigmatics" in Schiele and Zscharnack, as cited, pp. 433-443.

23. Gorres, as cited, pp. 426-428: cf. Margaret Roberts, Saini Catherine of Sienna and Her Times'^, 1907, p. 103: "Catherine spent long hours in the Church of St. Cristina, and it was there that to her inner consciousness she received the stigmata, invisible to human eyes, but to her awfully real." On her bloody sweat and weeping with bloody tears, see Augusta T. Drane, The History of St. Catherine of Siena^, 1899, vol. I, p. 52.

34. Germano di Stanislao, Gemma Galgati, German version by P. Leo Schlegel, 1913; W. F. Ludwig, Gemma Galgati, eine Studie aus jUngste Zeit, 1912. The most well-known instance of stigmatization of the later years of the nineteenth c^tury was probably Louise Lateau. Her case is discussed by William A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 350-362; on page 350 an extended bibliography is given which may be supplemented from that at the end of the article, "Stigmatization," in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. XI, pp. 96-97. A. Rohling's Louise Lateau, nach authentischen medizinischen und theologischen Documenten, 1874, was translated and printed in The Catholic Review, and afterward in a pamphlet entitled Louise Lateau, Her Stigmas and Ecstasy, New York, Hickey & Co., 1891. The following accoimt is drawn from this pamphlet.

Louise Lateau was born a peasant girl, in a Belgian village, on the 30th of January, 1850. Her early life was passed in poverty and sickness. In the spring of 1867 she fell into a violent illness, and remained in a dying condition for a year, suffering from abscesses and hemorrhages, until she was miraculously cured, arising at once from her bed, on the 20th of April, 1868. "Three days later," says Rohling, "Louise received the stigmas of our

Saviour, Jesus Christ" (p. 8). Here is the account given by Doctor Rohling:

"We have seen that she was suddenly restored to health on the 20 April, 1868. During the two following days she continued perfectly well, the thought of receiving the stigmas of the Passion never of course entering her mind. Indeed at that time, she had never even heard of God's having bestowed this wonderful favor either on St. Francis, or upon any other of his faithful servants. On the 24th of April, however, she experienced a return of those excruciating pains, from which she had been enduring a martyrdom of suffering since the beginning of the preceding year. And on the same day, which was Friday, the first trace of the stigmas appeared. On that occasion, however, blood flowed only from the left side. Next day the bleeding had entirely ceased, and all the pain had disappeared. Louise, thinking that it was some transient form of her late illness, remained silent about what had occurred. But on the following Friday, the ist of May, the stigmas again appeared; and the blood now flowed not only from the side, as in the previous week, but also from the upper surface of both feet. Filled with anxiety and embarrassment, Louise still kept the matter a profound secret, speaking of it only to her confessor... (who)... made nothing of what had occurred.... On the next Friday, the 8th of May, blood came as in the previous weeks, and, in addition, about nine o'clock in the morning it began to flow copiously from the palms and backs of both hands."... "Since then the bleeding is accustomed to return on Fridays." "On the 25th September, 1868, blood flowed for the first time from the forehead and from a number of points around the head — a striking memorial of our Lord's crown of thorns — and this has also occurred regularly ever since. On the 26th April, 1873, an additional wound of large dimensions appeared on Louise's right shoulder, such as our Lord received in carrying the cross to Calvary. The blood usually begins to flow from the stigmas about midnight on Thursdays; occasionally the bleeding from the left side does not begin until somewhat later. Sometimes blood flows only from either the upper or lower surface of the feet, and from either the palms or backs of the hands; but frequently the bleeding takes place from both. Nor is the time uniform, during which the bleeding continues... but invariably the blood ceases to flow before midnight Friday. The first symptom of the commencement of the bleeding is the formation of blisters on the hands and feet.... When they are fully developed, the blisters burst, the watery liquid passes off, and blood immediately begins to flow from the true skin

beneath.... During the rest of the week, the position of the stigmas can be discerned by a reddish tinge, and a glassy appearance of the skin, the epidermis is intact, exhibiting no trace of wound or scar, and beneath it with the aid of a good lens (with a magnifying power of 20) the skin may be observed in its normal condition.... During the ecstasy Louise has no consciousness of material occurrences around her.... The stigmas are the seat of acute pain."

35. Les Stigmatisees, Louise Lateau, etc., Paris, 1873; La Stigmatization, Vecstasie divine, et les miracles de Lourdes, Paris, 1894. We are drawing, however, directly from The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 294. Two American cases are described incidentally in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp. 341 and 345.

36. Migne, Dictionnaire des Propheties et des Miracles, p. 1069.

42. A. Poulain, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 295: "It seems historically certain that ecstatics alone have the stigmata."

43. It is the judgment of a sympathetic critic that "trances, losses of consciousness, automatisms, visions of lights, audition of voices, 'stigmata,' and such like experiences, are evidences of hysteria, and they are not in themselves evidences of divine influence or of divine presence." — Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 1909, p. xxviii. Compare what he says more at large, when speaking of Francis of Assisi (p. 165): "The modern interpreter, unlike the mediaeval disciple, finds this event, if it is admitted, a point of weakness rather than a point of strength. Instead of proving to be the marks of a saint, the stigmata are the marks of emotional and physical abnormality." In a like spirit, Baron von Hugel, The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. II, p. 42, declares generally that "the downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and normal constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization." On the Stigmata and Stigmatics, see especially F. W. H. Myers, Personality, Human and Divine, vol. I, pp. 492 fi.

44. Die chrisiliche Mystik, new ed., 1836, vol. II, pp. 407-468: "Die Ecstase im unterem Leben, und die durch sie gewirkte Transformation der Leiblichkeit." English translation of this section under the title of The Stigmata: A History of Various Cases, London, 1883.

45. A. M. Koniger, in Schiele and Zscharnack, as cited, col. 924: "Their bearers are predominantly women and simple people. In the immaturity of their understanding they have not yet reached stability...."

50. We are reminded by Mrs. E. Herman, however (The Meaning and Value of Mysticism, 1915, p. 159), that in one element of the faith of those "moderns" whom she represents, there is a return to this desire to help Christ save the world. Commenting on some remarks of Angela de Foligno, she says: "To those unac-"" quainted with mediaeval religious literature this seems curiously modern in its implied insistence upon our obligation to ask a humble share in the atoning suffering, instead of acquiescing in a doctrine which would make a passive acceptance of Christ's sufferings on our behalf sufficient for the remission of sins." No sharing in Christ's atoning sufferings can be described as humble. It is not the "acceptance of Christ's sufferings" which is represented by the Scriptures and understood from them by evangelicals as "sufficient for the remission of sins." It is Christ's sufferings themselves which are all-sufficient, and the trail of the serpent is seen in any suggestions that they need or admit of supplementing.

cited: "The analogous cases of suggestion from without (local congestion of blood, slight blood-sweating, formation of blisters, and marks of burning) lie so far from the real stigmata, connected with lesion of the walls of the blood vessels (hemorrhages), that medical science knows as yet nothing else to do but to class this among the 'obscure neuropathic bleedings.'"

Dublin, Humanitarian, 1905: "It is not so well known but it is nevertheless a fact, that utterly startling physiological changes can be produced in a hypnotized subject merely by conscious or unconscious mental suggestion. Thus a red scar or a painful burn, or even a figure of definite shape, such as a cross or an initial, can be caused to appear on the body of the entranced subject solely through suggesting the idea. By creating some local disturbance of the blood-vessels in the skin, the unconscious self has done what it would be impossible for the conscious self to perform. And so in the well-attested cases of stigmata, where a close resemblance to the wounds on the body of the crucified Saviour appears on the body of the ecstatic. This is a case of unconscious 5f//- suggestion, arising from the intent and adoring gaze of the ecstatic upon the bleeding figure on the crucifix. With the abeyance of the conscious self the hidden powers emerge, whilst the trance and mimicry of the wounds are strictly parallel to the experimental cases previously referred to."

53. These cases, with others of the same kind, are cited by F. W. A. Myers, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp. 337fif., who introduces them with the following

remarks: "The subliminal consciousness, it will be seen, was able to turn out to order the most complicated novelty in the way of hysterical freaks of circulation. Let us turn to an equally marked disturbance of the inflammatory type, the production namely, of suppurating blisters by a word of command. This phenomenon has a peculiar interest, since, from the accident of a strong emotional association with the idea of the stigmata in the hands and feet, this special organic effect has been anticipated by the introverted broodings of a line of mystics from St. Francis of Assisi to Louise Lateau." Cf. the similar cases cited by G. Dumas, as cited,

55. Letter to Thomas de Gardo, a Florentine physician, printed in the Eighth Book of his Correspondence — as cited by Dumas, as cited, p. 213.

56. Traite de I' Amour de Dieu. Book IV, chap, xv (E. T. in Methuen's "Library of Devotion," On the Love of God, 1902, p. 196). Cf. Dumas, as cited, who, however, quotes more at large, including certain phrases (not found in the E. T.) which withdraw somewhat from the purity of the naturalistic explanation.

57. The literature of Stigmatization is very large and varied; a guide to it may be found in the bibliographies attached to the appropriate articles in Herzog-Hauck, the New Schafif-Herzog, Schiele and Zscharnack and The Catholic Encyclopedia. The essay by Dumas in the Revue des Deux Mondes for May i, 1907, is exceptionally instructive. With it may be consulted the older discussions by A. Maury, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1854, vol. IV, and in the Annates Medico-Psychologiques (edited by Baillarger, Cerise, and Longet), 1855; and the more recent studies by R. Virchow, "Ueber Wunder und Medizin," in the Deutsche Zeitschrift fur practische Medizin, 1872, pp. 335-339; Paul Janet, "Une Ecstatique," in the Bulletin de r Institute psychologique for July, 1901, and The Mental State of Hysiericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata, New York, 1901; and Maurice Apte, Les Stigmatises, 1903; cf. also W. A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 329-362, and the short note in W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1874, pp. 689-690. No general description is better than Gorres's, as cited; and no general discussion supersedes Tholuck's, as cited. 0. StoU, Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Volker-psychologie^, 1904, pp. 520 ff., is chiefly useful for the setting in which the subject is placed.

59. L. Deubner, De Incubatione: "The religion of Christians had and has its own demi-gods and heroes; that is to say, its saints and martyrs"; G. Wobbermin, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien, 1896, p. 18: "The saints of the Christian Churches, and especially those of the Greek Church, present a straightforward development of the Greek hero-cult. The saints are the heroes of the Ancients." Cf. P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907, and especially Lucius, as cited; also M. Hamilton, as cited.

62. Cf. Saintyves, as cited, pp. 33 ff. We are told that many of the bones of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs displayed at the Church of St. Ursula at Cologne are bones of men (A. D. White, Warfare, etc., vol. II, p. 29).

63. A. D. White records that Frank Buckland noted that the relics of St. Rosalia at Palermo are really the bones of a goat (Gordon's Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96); and yet they cure diseases and ward off epidemics.

67. Henri Etienne, Apologie pour Eerodote, ou Traite de la Conformite des Merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ed. le Duchat, 1735, chaps, xxix-xxvni, as cited by P. Saintyves, as cited, p. 46, who may be consulted (pp. 44-48) on the general subject.

69. On Mary's milk, see the whole chapter on "Le Saint Lait d'Evron," in Paul Parfait, as cited, pp. 135-144. On what may lie in the background of this whole series of legends, see article "MUk," in Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, pp. 633-637.

71. These words are Mechthild's; and Hirn adds: "The idea

that the Madonna gives milk to all believers appears finely in a poem in the Swedish collection of Latin hymns, Pi(B Caniiones, p. 161:

' Super vinum et unguentum the mamme dant fomentum, fove, lacta parvulos.'"

73. He gives a series of references to instances.

76. Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 165 f. Compare Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, p. 43: "That the legend [of Mary] praises the Mother of Pity also as the succorer of the sick is a matter of course. But the mysticism of the Mary-legend brought a new means of healing, in that it makes Mary give her breast to the sick." Cf. the curious details on p. 85. In the notes accompanying the passage quoted from the Legenden-Studien, Giinter shows how wide-spread and how full of variants such legends were. In one MS. the motive is varied in a threefold way: a cleric in his illness had bitten off his tongue and lips, and was suddenly healed by Mary's milk; a monk thought already dead was healed; another monk had his experience only in a dream, but with the same effect. Noting that the milk with which Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, was sprinkled and healed, is said in one MS. to have been gathered up and saved as a relic, Giinter infers that the milk-relics date from this epoch. This is how the story of Fulbert is told in Sablon, Histoire et Description de la Cathedrale de

Chartres: "St. Fulbert, Bishop and Restorer of this Church, having been visited by God with an incurable fire which parched him and consumed his tongue, and seized with an insupportable pain

which permitted him no rest through the night, saw as it were a noble lady who commanded him to open his mouth, and when he had obeyed her she at once ejected from her sacred breasts a flood of celestial and savory milk which quenched the fire at once and made his tongue more well than ever. Some drops had fallen on his cheeks, and these were afterwards put into a vial and kept in the treasury."

80. Ibid., p. 107; cf. the list of others of similar character in Th. Trede, Das Heidentum in der Romischen Kirche, I, 1889, pp.

much of this: "A miracle which belongs peculiarly to them, wrought not by but on the holy bodies, is their incorruptibility through the centuries. No doubt this incorruptibility can in many cases be explained by purely natural causes; but in many cases the miracle is obvious. It is especially evident when a portion only of the holy body remains uncorrupted, particularly that portion which was peculiarly placed at the service of God during life, as the tongue of St. John of Neponac, the arm of St. Stephen of Hungary, the heart of St. Teresa, etc. And especially when, with the preservation of the body there is connected a pleasant fragrance instead of the necessarily following penetrating corpse-odor, or when everything was done, as there was done with the body of St. Francis Xavier, to bring about a speedy corruption." It is aston-

ishing what stress is laid on this incorruptibility of the body of the saints. Thus Herbert Thurston (Hastings's ERE, VIII, 149) thinks it worth while, in a very condensed article on Lourdes, to record, of Bernadette Soubirous: "It is noteworthy that, though her body at the time of death (1879) was covered with tumors and sores, it was found, when the remains were officially examined in 1909, thirty years afterwards, entire and free from corruption (see Carriere, Uistoire de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, p. 243)." On this matter see A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1896, II, pp. 10, 11, who sets it in its right light, and mentions similar instances — of those who were not saints.

says: "For the greater part of Christian history faith-healing was mainly centered in relics, so that probably more people have benefited in this way than in any other." Speaking particularly no doubt of the ancient church, but in terms which would apply to every age, Heinrich {op. cit., X, p. 796) observes: "Now, however, these miracles are regularly wrought at the graves, in the churches, and often precisely by the relics of the saints," and he is led to add two pages further on (p. 798): "There is scarcely another doctrine of the church which has been so approved, established by God Himself, as the veneration of the saints and relics" — that is to say by miracvdous attestation.

85. For the literature of pilgrimages, see the bibliography attached to the article "Wallfahrt und Wallfahrtsorten," in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion.

86. Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, pp. 684 f. It is a refreshing note that Meister Eckhard strikes, proving that common sense was not quite dead even in the opening years of the fourteenth century, when he asks, "What is the good of the dead bones of saints? The dead can neither give nor take."

87. W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, 1889, p. 262 and note 2, is prepared to maintain that "a degraded form" of fetichism is exhibited in much else in modern Roman Catholicism than its relicworship. He finds it exhibited, for example, "by the so-called neo-mystical school of modern France, and in the baser t5rpes of Roman Catholicism everywhere." He adduces in illustration Huysmans two "mystical" novels. En Route and La Cathedrale,

and comments as follows: "The naked fetichism of the latter book almost passes belief. We have a Madonna who is good-natured at Lourdes and cross-grained at La Salette; who likes 'pretty speeches and little coaxing ways' in 'paying court' to her, and who at the end is apostrophised as 'our Lady of the PiUar,' 'our Lady of the Crypt.' It may, perhaps, be excusable to resort to such expedients as these in the conversion of savages" (Query: Is it?); "but there is something singularly repulsive in the picture (drawn apparently from life) of a profligate man of letters seeking salvation in a Christianity which has lowered itself far beneath educated paganism." "Our Lady of the Pillar," "Our Lady of the Crypt,"

are two images of Mary venerated at the cathedral at Chartres, information concerning which is given in the article entitled "The oldest of our Lady's Shrines: St. Mary's Under-Earth," in The Dolphin, vol. VI (July-December, 1904), pp. 377-399. On Mary's shrines in general, see below. Those who have read Huysmans's La Cathedrale should read also Blasco Ibanes's La Catedral, and perhaps Evelyn Underbill's The Lost Word, that the lascinations of cathedral symbolism may be viewed from several angles.

88. Op. cit., vol. X, p. 799. Yet it is not merely God who is venerated in the saints, he says; there is an honor due to the saints in themselves, and accordingly Alexander VIII condemned the proposition: The honor that is offered to Mary as Mary is vain. On the other hand it is said that it is merely the saint and through him God that is venerated in the relic, according to the explanation of Thomas Aquinas: "We do not adore the sensible body on its own account, but on account of the soul which was united with it, which is now in the enjoyment of God, and on account of God, whose ministers they were." Why then continue to adore the body when it is no longer united with the soul, on account of its union with which alone it is adored?

91. What Pfister says, p. 610, although not free from exaggerations, is in its main assertion true. In the Christian religion, he says, the presence in the relics of a supernatural, in a certain degree magical, power is accustomed to be emphasized even more than it is in the heathen. For, according to the Greek belief, the graves were thought of chiefly as the protection of the heroes, without the bones themselves being thought able to work miracles — for they rest in the grave; the miracle, the help, comes in general from the hero himself, not from an anonymous, impersonal, magical power which dwells in the relics. According to the Christian belief the relics themselves, on the other hand, can perform miracles, and the power residing in them can by contact be directly transferred and produce effects. Thus artificial relics can be produced by contact with genuine ones. The habit of relic-partition is connected with this: a part of the object filled with magical power may act like the whole. Compare Him, p. 490, note 2: "We deliberately leave

out of consideration here the assertion of educated Catholics that in the relics was really worshipped the saint in the same way that God is worshipped in a picture or a symbol (cf. Esser, art., 'Reliquien,' in Wetzer-Welte, Kirchenlexicon). It cannot be doubted that relic worship — for the earlier Christians as for the mass of believers to-day — was based on utilitarian ideas of the help that might be had from the sacred remains."

92. See the characterization of the Catholic world-view, by E. Schmidt in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 1736.

"As churches built over the tombs of martyrs came to be regarded with peculiar sanctity, the possession of the relics of some saint came to be looked upon as absolutely essential to the sacredness of the building, and the deposition of such relics in or below the altar henceforward formed the central portion of the consecration rite."

The succeeding account of the ritual of the consecration should be read.

96. The literature of relics and relic-veneration is sufficiently indicated in the bibliographies attached to the articles on the subject in the encyclopedias: Herzog-Hauck, New Schaff-Herzog, Schiele-Zscharnack. The exhibition of the Holy Coat at Treves from August 20 to October 3, 1891, with the immense crowd of pilgrims which it brought to Treves, created an equally immense literature, a catalogue of which may be derived from the Theologischer J ahresbericht of the time, and a survey of which will give an insight into the whole subject of the veneration of relics in the nineteenth century.

97. The recent history of relic-miracles in the United States is chiefly connected with the veneration of relics of St. Ann. Certain relics of St. Anthony venerated in the Troy Hill Church at Allegheny, Pa., have indeed won large fame for the miracles of healing wrought by their means, and doubtless the additional relic of the same saint deposited in the Italian Church of St. Peter, on Webster Avenue, Pittsburgh, has taken its share in these works. But St. Ann seems to promise to be the peculiar wonder-worker of the United States. The Church of St. Anne de Beaupre has, within recent years, become the most popular place of pilgrimage in Canada; until 1875 not over 12,000 annually visited this shrine, but now they are counted by the hundred thousand; in 1905 the number was 168,000. A large relic of St. Ann's finger-bone has been in the possession of this shrine since 1670; three other fragments of her arm have been acquired since, and it was in connection with the acquisition of one of these, in 1892, that the cult and its accompanying miracles of healing were transferred to New York. St. Ann seems to be one of those numerous saints too much of whom has been preserved in the form of relics. Her body is said to have been brought from the Holy Land to Constantinople, in 710; and it is said to have been still in the Church of St. Sophia in 1333. It was also, it is said, brought by Lazarus to Gaul, during the persecution of the Jewish Christians in Palestine under Herod Agrippa, and finally found a resting-place at Apt. Lost to sight through many years, it was rediscovered there in the eighth century, and has been in continuous possession of the church at Apt ever since. Yet the head of St. Ann was at Mainz up to 1516, when it was stolen and carried to Diiren in the Rhineland, and her head, "almost complete" — doubtless derived from Apt — is preserved also at Chiry, the heir of the Abbey of Ourscamp. Churches in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and in several towns in France "flatter themselves that they possess more or less considerable portions of the same head, or the entire head" (Paul Parfait, Le Foire aux Reliques, p. 94, in an essay on "The Head of St. Ann at Chiry"). Despite all this European history, a relic of St. Ann was again brought from Palestine in the thirteenth century, and it was this that was given to St. Anne d'Auray in Brittany in the early half of the seventeenth century by Ann of Austria and Louis XIII. The origin of the pilgrimages and healings at St. Anne d'Auray was not in this relic, however, but antedated its possession, taking their start from apparitions of St. Ann (1624-1626). The relics which have been recently brought to this country are said to derive ultimately from Apt. Thence the Pope obtained an arm of the saint which was intrusted to the keeping of the Benedictine monks of St. Pauloutside-the-Wall, Rome. From them, through the kind offices of Leo XIII, Cardinal Taschereau obtained the "great relic" which was presented to St. Anne de Beaupre in 1892; and from thence also came the relic, obtained by Prince Cardinal Odeschalchi, and presented to the Church of St. Jean Baptiste in East Seventy-sixth Street, New York, the same year (July 15, 1892). Another fragment was received by the Church of St. Jean Baptiste on August 6, 1893; and some years later still another fragment was deposited in the Church of St. Ann in Fall River, Mass., whence it was stolen on the night of December i, 1901.

The "Great Relic" — a piece of the wrist-bone of St. Ann, four inches in length — was brought from Rome by Monsignor Marquis; and, on his way to Quebec, he stopped in New York with it. Monsignor O'Reilly has given us an enthusiastic account of the effect of its exposition at the Church of St. Jean Baptiste during the first twenty days of May of that year (see the Ave Maria of August 6, 1892; and The Catholic Review of the same date). Something like two or three hundred thousand people venerated the relic; cures were wrought, though apparently not very many. When Monsignor Marquis returned on July 15 with the fragment which was to remain at St. Jean Baptiste, the enthusiasm was redoubled, and St. Ann did not let her feast-day (July 26) pass "without giving some signal proof of her love to her children." Since then a novena and an exposition of the relics are held during the latter part of each July, in conjunction with St. Ann's feast-day, and many miracles have been wrought. In 1901 a new marble crypt was completed at the church, and used for the first time for this novena and exposition, and public attention was very particularly called to it. The public press was filled with letters pointing out abuses, or defending the quality of the cures, which were numerous and striking (see a short summary note in The Presbyteriaji Banner, August 8, 1 901). On the whole Monsignor O'Reilly's hope that the depositing of the relics of St. Ann in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste will result in " the founding here in New York of what will become a great national shrine of St. Anne" — to be signalized, the editor of the Ave Maria adds, "by such marvels as have rendered the sanctuaries of St. Anne de Beaupre and St. Anne d'Auray famous throughout Christendom" — seems in a fair way to be fulfilled. The following is a typical instance of what is happening there. It was reported in The Catholic Telegraph. It is the case of a young man aged nineteen, of New Haven, Conn.: "Two years ago young

Maloney, who was working at the time in a New Haven factory, fell and injured his hip. Every doctor consulted said he would be a cripple for life. When he walked he was obliged to use crutches. Until recently he has been under the care of the ablest physicians in the city, yet all declared him incurable. Hearing of several cures wrought at St. Anne's shrine. New York, he started thither, making a retreat on arriving. After several days spent in prayer, he visited the shrine of St. Anne. The morning of his visit he received holy communion, and then the relic of the saint was applied, and the sufferer anointed with consecrated oil. Almost instantly he felt better. Another visit and he was able to walk without crutches, leaving the latter before the shrine in which the relics are kept. He was well, quite well, and thus returned to New Haven, to the astonishment of all who knew him." It is worth noting

that the Cincinnati Enquirer of July 28 and the Lexington (Ky.) Leader of July 29, 1902, record the sudden cure of a deaf woman in St. Anne's Church, West Covington, Ky., on St. Ann's feastday. "She said she had heard the key in the tabernacle, which contains a relic of St. Ann, click as the priest turned it" — and after that she heard everything.

The following extract from The New York Tribune for August 13, 1906, will be not uninteresting in this connection: "Two

thousand quarts of water from the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, in France, arrived here in huge sealed casks on Saturday, consigned

to the Fathers of Mercy, who have charge of the American shrine of that name, at Broadway and Aberdeen Street, Brooklyn. The water will be distributed to thousands of physically afflicted men, women and children from all parts of the country next Wednesday afternoon and the following Sunday. Next Wednesday in the Catholic calendar is known as the Feast of the Assumption. It is the titular day of the French shrine, and is kept with equal solemnity by the Fathers of Mercy at the American shrine. The water comes to this country under the seal of the clergy in charge of the French shrine, who guarantee it to be undiluted. Father Porcile, rector of the Brooklyn church, said yesterday that only two ounces would be given to each person applying. The celebration of the festival will begin at [blurred] o'clock on Wednesday morning with a solemn mass. In the afternoon at 3.30 o'clock the pilgrimage to the shrine, which has stood for years on the grounds of the church, will take place. Father Porcile, who has been at the French shrine several times, says the French Government will not attempt to carry out the threatened abandonment of Lourdes on the charge that it is a menace to public health. *I read about French pathologists holding that the piscina in which the afflicted bathe is unhealthy,* he said. 'Anybody who has seen the piscina knows better. It is not a pool, but a cavity, which is fflled with running water. If the pool were stagnant, it might be argued, with some show of truth, that it was unhealthful.'" It is only right to suppose that the re-

porter misunderstood his collocutor with regard to the piscinas — whether their formation or their fflth. Their filth is not glossed by, say, Robert Hugh Benson {Lourdes, 1914, PP- 5^ ff-), who bathed in one of them: "That water," says he, "had better not be described."

99. This string of epithets is taken from the Roman Breviary, Antiphon to the Magnificat. If we wish to know the extravagances to which the prevalent Mariolatry can carry people, we may go to Liguori's Le Glorie di Maria, a book which a J. H. Newman could defend {Letter to Pusey on the Eirenicon, 1866, pp. 105 ff.)-

"The way of salvation is open to none otherwise than through Mary." " Whoever expects to obtain graces otherwise than through Mary, endeavors to fly without wings." "Go to Mary, for God has decreed that He will grant no grace otherwise than by the hands of Mary." "All power is granted to thee (Mary) in heaven and on earth, and nothing is impossible to thee." "You, oh Holy Virgin, have over God the authority of a Mother, and hence can obtain pardon for the most obdurate of sinners." Here is the way

J. K. Huysmans represents her as thought of by her votaries, doubtless drawing from the life {La Cathedrale, ed. 1903, p. 9): "He meditated on the Virgin whose watchful attentions had so often preserved him from unforeseen danger, easy mistakes, great falls. Was she not" — but we must preserve the French here — "le Puits de la Bonte sans fond, la Collatrice des dons de la bonne Patience, la Touriere des coeurs sees et clos; was she not above aU the active and beneficent Mother?"

100. Compare Lachenmann in Schiele and Zscharnack's Re-

ligion, etc., vol. V, col. 1837: "Belief in miracles is the chief motive of the favorite places of pilgrimage and the climax is reached in the innumerable localities where the grace of Mary is sought. The origin of these lies not in the region of veneration of relics since the Catholic church knows neither the grave of Mary nor relics of her body, but goes back to stories of visible appearances or of inner revelations of the Mother of God at particular localities which she herself has thus indicated for her special worship, or as places of grace (La Salette, Lourdes); or else to vows made to Mary by individuals, or by whole communities, in times of need; or finally to the miraculous activities of an image of Mary."

loi. A full account of it is given by Leon Marillier in The Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. VH (1891-1892), pp.

102. "Our Lady of Pellevoisin," reprinted in The Catholic Review (New York) for July 30, 1892, from the Liverpool Catholic Times.

103. In J. K. Huysmans's La Cathedrale we are given a highly picturesque meditation on the several manners in which Mary has revealed herself. She owes something to sinners, it seems, for had it not been for their sin she could never have been the immaculate mother of God. She has tried hard, however, to pay her debt, and has appeared in the most diverse places and in the most diverse fashions — though of late it looks as if she had deserted all her old haunts for Lourdes. She appeared at La Salette as the Madonna of Tears. Twelve years later, when people had got tired of climbing to La Salette (the greatest miracle about which was that people could be got to go there), she appeared at Lourdes, no longer as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, but as the Madonna of Smiles, the Tenant of the glorious Joys. How everything has been changed! The special aspect in which Mary is worshipped at Chartres, it is added, is under the traits of a child or a young mother, much more as the Virgin of the Nativity than as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.

The old artists of the Middle Ages, working here, have taken care not to sadden her by recalling too many painful memories, and have wished to show, by this discretion, their gratitude to her who has constantly shown herself in their sanctuary the Dispensatrice of benefits, the Chatelaine of graces.

107. A sufiicient outline of these scandals is given in the article on La Salette in The Catholic Encyclopedia, which also mentions the chief literature. It was said that "the beautiful lady" seen by the children was a young woman named Lamerliere; suits for slander were brought; and A. D. White is able to say (Warfare, etc., II, pp. 21-22, note) that the shrine "preserves its healing powers in spite of the fact that the miracle which gave rise to them has twice been pronounced fraudulent by the French courts." The whole matter is involved in inextricable confusion. A sympathetic account of La Salette may be read in J. S. Northcote, Celebrated Sanctuaries of the Madonna, 1868, pp. 178 ff. Gustave Droz's first novel, Autour dhine Source, 1869, seems to have drawn part of its inspiration from the story of La Salette; it is extravagantly praised by A. D. White {Warfare, II, p. 44) as "one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction"; and not quite accurately described as "showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous powers at a fashionable spring in France." It does show how easily such things may be even innocently invented. On the question whether the visions of Bernadette may not have been the result of ecclesiastical arrangement, see J. de Bonnefon, Lourdes et ses Tenanciers, Paris, without date, and, on the other side, G. Bertrin, Lourdes, un document apocryphe, in the Revue practique d'Apologetique, April 15, 1908, pp. 125-133.

109. J. K. Huysmans, in his La Cathedrale, suggests that two rules seem to govern the appearances of Mary. First, she manifests herself only to the poor and humble. Secondly, she accommodates herself to their intelligence and shows herself under the poor images which these lowly people love. " She accepts the white

and blue robes, the crowns and garlands of roses, the jewels and chaplets, the appointments of the first communion, the ugliest of attire. The peasants who have seen her, in a word, have had no other examples by which to describe her (except under the appearance of a 'fine lady') but the traits of an altar Virgin of the village, of a Madonna of the Saint-Sulpice quarter, of a Queen of the streetcorner."

114. In the contrast which he draws between La Salette and Lourdes, in his La Cathedrale, J. K. Huysmans does not neglect

this one. "And God who imposed La Salette, without having recourse to the methods of worldly publicity, has changed His tactics and, with Lourdes, puffing comes into play. This is very confounding— Jesus resigning Himself to employ the miserable artifices of human commerce, accepting the repulsive stratagems of which we make use in pushing a product or a business!"

115. Lourdes (the first of the triad on "the cities," Lourdes, Rome, Paris) was published in 1894; E. T. same year, by Vizetelly, and often since. Cf. a critical article on it in The Edinburgh Review, 1903, No. 103. The secret of Lourdes, says Zola, is that it offers to suffering humanity " the delicious bread of hope, for which humanity ever hungers with a hunger that nothing will ever appease"; it proposes to meet "humanity's insatiable yearning for happiness." Since its publication Catholic writers on Lourdes have, as is natural, concerned themselves very much with Zola's book; G. Bertrin's work (Histoire critique des evenements de Lourdes) which reached its 37th edition in 1913, and which Herbert Thurston pronounces "undoubtedly the best general work on Lourdes" (Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, p. 150), would not be unfairly described as a formal reply to Zola.

116. Edward Berdoe, "A Medical View of the Miracles at Lourdes," in The Nineteenth Century, October, 1895, pp. 614 ff. Doctor Berdoe was a Uberal-minded Catholic in faith; see Herbert Thurston's remarks in The Month for November, 1895, and his citation of Doctor Berdoe's own representations in The Spectator, July, 1895. {Cf. Public Opinion, November 28, 1895, p. 108.)

118. The details are given by Benson, p. 32.

119. A curious fact emerges from Bertrin's tables in his appendix (E. T., p. 292); more physicians visit Lourdes every year to look on at the cures than there are cures made for them to observe. For the fourteen years from 1890 to 1903, inclusive, 2,530 physicians visited the Medical Office there, an average of i8o yearly. During these fourteen years 2,130 cures were registered at that office, an average of 152 yearly.

120. A. D. White, Warfare, etc.,2 vol. II, p. 24: E. Berdoe, as cited, p. 615. Other estimates of the proportion of the cured to patients may be found in Dearmer, Body and Soul,^ 1912, p. 315, and in Rouby, La Verite sur Lourdes, 1910, p. 272. Rouby thinks that about five out of every thousand patients are cured, that is, about one-half of one per cent; Dearmer can arrive at no more than one per cent from the figures given, and remarks that even if five per cent be allowed, as is asserted by some, the proportion is much smaller than under regular psychotherapeutical treatment.

122. A rather favorable opportunity for estimating the proportion of cures to patients seems to be afforded by the figures given concerning the patients from ViUepinte, a private asylum for consumptive girls, near Paris. Bertrin (E. T., pp. 98 flf.) tells us that for the three years 1896-1898 inclusive, 58 of these girls were sent to Lourdes, of whom 20 were cured. Rouby (pp. 163 ff.) derives from Boissarie a report also for three years (apparently just preceding those given by Bertrin, but not explicitly identified) during which 58 girls were sent to Lourdes, of whom 24 were cured or ameliorated, the cure being maintained with two or three exceptions. Rouby says he investigated the facts for one of these years, 1894, in which out of 24 girls who were sent, 14 were reported cured or ameliorated; he found that 10 of those so reported afterwards relapsed, leaving only 4 benefited. He went to ViUepinte, he says, and investigated personally the facts for 1902, finding that 30 girls had been sent, and all 30 had come back unbenefited; and he quotes Ludovic Naudeau as having investigated the facts for 1901 with the same result — none were benefited. We gather from Bertrin, p. loi, that the same thing was true for 1903. Here, apparently, then, are three consecutive years, 1901-1903, in which no cures at J all were wrought in the ViUepinte delegation. *

124. We find Doctor E. Mackey, Dublin Review, October, 1880, pp. 396 f., very properly dissenting when Pere Bonniot (Le Miracle, etc., p. 89) lays stress thus on suddenness as a proof of miraculousness in a cure. "Mere suddenness of cure," he says, "is not decisive... the power of imagination is very great." Cures just as remarkable and just as sudden as those of Lourdes constantly occur in the ordinary experience of physicians. Doctor J. Burney Yeo quite incidentally records two such sudden cases, in an article on a subject remote from Lourdes, in The Nineteenth Century for August, 1888, vol. XXIV, pp. 196-197 — one of blindness and the

other of lameness. "A gentleman," says he, "the subject of serious disease, who had shown a tendency to the development of somewhat startling subjective symptoms, suddenly declared that he was blind. He was carefully examined by the writer and by an eminent oculist, and although no particular optical defect could be found in his eyes, to all the tests it was possible to apply, he appeared to be blind. A few days afterwards, and without any apparent or sufficient cause or reason for the change, and almost without comment, he asked for the Times newspaper, which he proceeded to read in bed without any difficulty!" "The next instance," he continues, "is perhaps still more remarkable. A young woman presented herself at a London Hospital, supporting herself on crutches, and declared she was losing the use of her legs. After one or two questions, and after noticing the awkward manner in which the crutches were used, the writer took from her both crutches, and ordered her, in a firm manner, to walk away without them, which she did! Some years afterwards he was sent for into a distant suburb to see this person's father, having himself quite forgotten the preceding incident, when this same young woman came forward and reminded him that he 'had cured her of lameness' many years ago! Now, although no curative agency whatever, in the ordinary sense, was introduced or applied, in either of these instances, yet one of them might have said, 'whereas I was blind, now I see,' and the other, 'whereas I was lame, now I walk.'" Pro-

fessor Charles (or George?) Buchanan, "a distinguished Professor of Surgery in Glasgow" "visited Lourdes in the autumn of 1883, and was much interested in the undoubted benefit that some of the pilgrims received." He published some notes in the Lancet of Jane 25, 1885, from which Doctor A. T. Myers and F. W. H. Myers extract the following account of an instantaneous cure in which he was an actor {Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1893-1894, pp. 191 ff.). "With regard," he writes, "to persons

who have been lame and decrepit and known as such to their friends, the fact of their leaving their crutches and walking away without help does seem astonishing and miraculous, and it is cases such as these which make the greatest impression." "I believe that the simple visit to the grotto by persons who believe in it, and the whole surroundings of the place, might have such an effect on the mind that a sudden change in the nerve condition might result in immediate improvement in cases where there is no real change of structure, but where the malady is a functional imitation of organic disease. Such cases are frequent and familiar to all medical men, and are the most intractable they have to deal with, the disorder being in the imagination and not in the part.... It is rather a remarkable coincidence that on October 2, 1883, within three weeks of my visit to Lourdes, I received a letter from Mrs. F., reminding me that some years before I had performed in her case a cure, instantaneous, and to all appearances miraculous, and which she properly attributed to undoubting faith in my word. It is a very good illustration of the kind of case to which I have been alluding, and of the power of mind over mind, and of the effect of imagination in simulating real disease. Mr. F. called on me in October, 1875, and requested me to visit his wife, who had been confined to bed for many months with a painful affection of the spine. When I went into the house I found Mrs. F., a woman of about thirty-one years of age, lying in bed on her left side, and her knees crouched up, that being the position that afforded most relief. She was thin and weak-looking, with a countenance indicative of great suffering. I was informed that for many months she had been in the same condition. She was unable to move her limbs, any attempt being attended with pain, and practically she was paralytic. She was not able to alter her position in bed without help, and this always gave so much trouble that she would have remained constantly in the same position if the attendants had not insisted on moving her to allow of the bed-clothes being changed and arranged. She had altogether lost appetite, and had become dreadfully emaciated, and only took what was almost forced on her by her husband and friends. She had given up all hope of recovery, but had expressed a strong desire to be visited by me in consequence of something she had heard from her husband in connection with a health lecture he had been present at many years before. When I entered her bedroom something in the way she earnestly looked at me suggested the idea that I might have some influence over her supposing it to be a case of hysterical spine simulating real spine irritation and sympathetic paralysis. The story I got was not that of real disease of spine or cord or limbs, and I at once resolved to act on the supposition that it was subjective or functional, and not dependent on actual molecular change or disintegration. I went to her bedside and said suddenly: 'I cannot do you any good unless you allow me to examine your back.' In an instant she moved slightly round, and I examined her spine, running my finger over it at first lightly, then very firmly, without her wincing at all. I then said:

'Get out of bed at once.' She declared she could not move. I said: 'You can move quite well; come out of bed,' and gave her my hand, when, to the surprise of her husband and sister, who looked perfectly thunderstruck, she came out of bed almost with no help at all, and stood alone. I said: 'Walk across the floor now,' and without demur, she walked without assistance, saying: *I can walk quite well; I knew you would cure me; my pains are gone.' She then went to bed with very little assistance, lay on her back, and declared she was perfectly comfortable. She was given a glass of milk which she took with relish, and I left the house having performed a cure which to the bystanders looked nothing short of a miracle. For many years I heard nothing of Mrs. F., when on October 2, 1883, I got her letter referred to, and shortly after the patient herself called at my house. In February, 1885, she again called on me. She is at present in fair health, not robust, but cheerful and contented. She says she never altogether regained her full strength; but as an evidence that she is not feeble or unable for a good deal of exertion, I may state that she now lives about five miles from my house, and she made her way alone, partly by omnibus, partly by tramway, and the rest on foot."

Compare the curiously parallel case, happening half a century earlier, described in note 26 to Lecture IV, on the "Irvingite Gifts."

132. On the case of Frau Ruchel, see the report in the Deutschevangelische Korrespondenz for August 11, 1908. The facts are brought out in the brochure of Doctor Aigner of Mimich, Die V/ahrheit iiber eine Wunderheilung in Lourdes.

134. Zola, wishing to express these limitations in a word, said he would not ask very much — only let some one take a knife and cut his finger and immerse it in the water, and if it came out cured he would say nothing more. Charcot puts it in a higher form: " Faithcure has never availed to restore an amputated limb" (as cited, p. 19). Percy Dearmer, having theories of his own, makes merry over such statements. There is no such thing as the supernatural, he says; all that God does is natural. But that carries with it that it is not unnatural. The only limit to such cures as we see at

Lourdes, then, is that nothing unnatural can happen there. Of course, then, faith cannot grow a new leg. But that is only because we are men and not crabs, and cannot be expected to act in a crustacean manner. Grace can turn a sick man into a well one, but it cannot turn a man into an apple-tree or a cactus. God must act on the lines of nature; the supernatural is not the unnatural {Body and Soul,^ pp. go ff.). All this is, of course, pure absurdity. It is to be noted, not obscured, that there are limitations to such cures; that a lost member cannot be restored by them, not even a lost tooth. It is only to dodge the question to say that such things are out of the question; they are not out of the question but very much in it — when it is a question of miracle. It is easy to say, "Better far to hop about on crutches than to have the soul of a crab," but it is better simply to acknowledge that there are physical disabilities which Lourdes cannot repair, and that the reason is that they are above the power of nature to repair. It should be noted in passing that Lourdes does not admit that there are any physical disabilities which she cannot repair, and that the reason is that she, unlike Dearmer, believes in the supernatural, and believes that she wields it.

tients return from the shrines now in vogue who had been sent thither with my consent, owing to my own inability to inspire the operation of the faith-cure. I have examined the limbs affected with paralysis or contraction some days before, and have seen the gradual disappearance of the local sensitive spots which always remain for some time after the cure of the actual disease — paralysis or contraction."

137. The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, E. T., 1908, p. 72: A patient, "whose neck and jaw had been immobilized for years, and who had undergone unsuccessfully medical and surgical treatment from the most renowned clinicians, found sudden cure in the piscina at Lourdes." Yet Dubois does not think well of Lourdes (p. 211); that is to say, after experience with it. His expectations had been good, and he was disillusioned only by experience. "The cures there," he says, "are in fact rare." Superstition goes all lengths, and — well, "Lourdes is not very far from Tarascon."

139. Jean de Bonnefon has accumulated at the end of his trenchant pamphlet, Faut-il fermer Lourdes? 1906 — in which he argues that Lourdes should be abolished by the state — a number of opinions from French physicians to whom a questionnaire was sent, asking whether they thought the enterprise of Lourdes useful or injurious to the sick, whether they thought the piscinas were dangerous, on account of the chill or the filth, whether the long pilgrimages of the sick across France were or were not a menace to the country, and whether they thought the laws of hygiene were observed at Lourdes. The opinions of the physicians vary greatly: many are thoroughly hostile, a few are wholly favorable. What is noticeable is that a considerable number believe it is useful and ought to be sustained, although they have no belief whatever in the supernaturalness of the cures wrought there. One physician, for example, writes: "For a great number of sick people, and particularly women, Lourdes is a benefit.... Free from all religious opinions, I never hesitate to send to Lourdes sick people who are in the particular mental condition to receive benefit from it, and I have often had occasion to congratulate myself on having done so" (p. 51). Another writes in a less genial spirit (p. 51): "The enterprise of Lourdes is useful for feeble-minded people, and there are legions of these in our fine land of France.... I know Lourdes, and it seems to me that they are as filthy there — in the medical sense of the word— as they are everywhere else in France."

140. W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1824, p. 684, is engaged in pointing out the physical effects which may be wrought by "expectant attention." He says: "That the confident

expectation of a cure is the most potent means of bringing it about, doing that which no medical treatment can accomplish, may be affirmed as the generalized result of experiences of the most varied kind, extending through a long series of ages. For it is this which is common to methods of the most diverse character; some of them — as the Metallic Tractors, Mesmerism, and Homoeopathy — pretending to some physical power; whilst to others, as to the invocations of Prince Hohenlohe, and the commands of Doctor Vernon, or the Zouave Jacob, some miraculous influence was attributed. It has been customary, on the part of those who do not accept the 'physical' or the 'miraculous' hypothesis as to the interpretation of these facts, to refer the effects either to the 'imagination' or to 'faith' — two mental states apparently incongruous, and neither of them rightly expressing the condition on which they depend. For although there can be no doubt that in a great number of cases the patients have believed themselves to be cured, when no real amelioration of their condition had taken place, yet there is a large body of testimony and evidence that permanent amendment of a kind perfectly obvious to others has shown itself in a great variety of

local maladies, when the patients have been sufficiently possessed by the expectation of benefit, and hy faith in the efficacy of the means employed."

142. A writer in The Edinburgh Review for January, 1903, p. 154, has this to say of the use of "suggestion" at Lourdes: "What

is so painful and so repulsive in Lourdes and similar centres of popular devotion, is not so much the fanaticism of the pilgrims, the commercial element inseparable from the necessity of providing transport and lodging for the multitude of strangers, or even the incongruous emergence of those lower passions never wholly absent when men are met together, and separated by so small an interval from overwrought emotion, whatever its source, as the deliberate organization of hysteria, the training of suggestion, the exploitation of disease. Everything in the pilgrimage is calculated to disturb the equilibrium of the faculties, to stimulate, to excite, to strain. The unsanitary condition under which the journey is made, the hurry, the crowding, the insufficient food and sleep, the incessant religious exercises, the acute tension of every sense and power, all work up to a calculated climax."

146. Ibid., p. v; cf. also Herbert Thurston, Hastings's ERE, vol. Vni, p. 150. This is apparently also what J. A. MacCuUoch means when he says (Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, p. 682): "Occasionally miracles at Lourdes are also wrought on more than neurotic diseases," and "they suggest an influx of healing power from without."

151. We take the account as given by A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1, p. 139.

152. The shortcomings of the authorities at Lourdes in their reports of the cures may be read in The Dublin Review, October, 1908, pp. 416 ff., apropos of Doctor Boissarie's L'CEuvre de Lourdes, new ed., 1908. Cf. Paul Dubois, The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, p. 211: "I have detected in the physicians of the bureau of statistics, in spite of their evident good faith, a mentality of such a nature that their observations lose all value in my eyes."

153. Sir Francis Champneys, M.D., F.R.C.P., in The Church Quarterly Review, April, 1917, p. 44, says justly: "It is not safe to define a Miracle as something which cannot be understood; for, at that rate, what can be understood?"

161. The bibliography at the end of Herbert Thurston's article "Lourdes," in Hastings's ERE, is a model list, and contains all that the student need concern himself about. The English reader has at his disposal: H. Lasserre, Miraculous Episodes of Lourdes, 1884; R. F. Clarke, Lourdes, and its Miracles, 1888; G. Bertrin, Lourdes; a History of its Apparitions and Cures, 1908; R. H. Benson, Lourdes, 1914; together with such illuminating articles as that of Professor George Buchanan in the Lancet of June 25, 1885; of a series of British physicians and surgeons in the British Medical Journal for June 18, 1910; of J. M. Charcot ("The Faith Cure") in The New Review, January, 1893, vol. VIII, pp. 18-31; and of Doctor A. T. Myers, and F. W. H. Myers ("Mind Cure, Faith Cure and the Miracles of Lourdes") in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1893-1894, pp. 160-209. There are also three excellent articles by Catholic physicians accessible: Doctor E. Mac;key, Dublin Review, October, 1880, pp. 386-398; Doctor J. R. Gasquet, Dublin Review, October, 1894, pp. 342-357; Doctor E. Berdoe, Nineteenth Century, October, 1895, pp. 614-618.