Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/344

274 was a blacksmith from the Thebaid, who left Egypt and settled here. His bones were carried off in the twelfth century to San Remo, and thence later to Genoa. The fête of S. Ampelio is on May I4th. The chapel was enlarged and restored in 1852. The transfer of the relics of S. Ampelio to San Remo exhibits a curious feature of mediæval enthusiasm. In 1140 the citizens of San Remo, at war with Ventimiglia, took a number of the townsmen prisoners. They would release them on one condition only, that they should reveal where were secreted the bones of S. Ampelio. The Ventimiglians, to obtain their liberty, betrayed the secret; the old hermit had been laid in the grotto he had inhabited during his life. Thereupon the people of San Remo carried off his body. What is the peculiar fancy for possessing a few pounds of phosphate of lime? Whence comes the devotion to relics?

S. Chrysostom tells us of pilgrims travelling from the ends of the earth to Arabia to see Job's dunghill, and he says that they drew "much profit and philosophy" from the sight. One can understand how that certain churches should be greedy to possess relics, and steal, or even invent them, because the possession brought money into their coffers; but the money would not have come had there not been, deep-seated in the hearts of the people, a conviction that there was something supernatural, a divine power surrounding and emanating from these relics.

For my own part I think it is a survival of the worship of ancestors that existed among the prehistoric races of Europe. We know that to them the sepulchre,