Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/375

Rh RELICS 357 a great donor of relics to the monastery at Exeter. A list occupying more than three columns is given in the Leofric missal. It includes fragments of the candle which the angel of the Lord lit in the tomb of Christ, of the burning bush whence Jehovah spoke to Moses, and of. one of the stones which slew the protomartyr Stephen. Edward the Confessor and Louis IX. of France may be named among the saintly patrons of a commerce which they at least con- sidered meritorious. The mention of this last name involves a reference to an event which, above all others of the Middle Ages, spread, fostered, and ultimately injured the veneration of relics. The crusades created a profound excitement in this matter. Pilgrims had already thought it a default to return from Palestine without some such evidence that they had actually visited the Holy Land. Relics, at first probably bought and sold in good faith, became multi- plied ; and rival possessions of most sacred memorials (as, for instance, the crown of thorns, exhibited both by the abbey of St Denys and by St Louis) were by no means uncommon. Even the crime of theft seems to have been condoned when a relic was in question, and mutilation of a saint's body to have been hardly thought irreverent. To swear by these relics became the most binding of oaths, as will be remembered by those who have read the life of King Robert II. of France, and the ruse practised on Harold by William, duke of Normandy. Marauding campaigns between monastery and monastery were by no means uncommon ; but these sink into insignificance com- pared with the spoliation exercised by the crusaders from the West who captured and sacked Constantinople in 1203-4. The shameful behaviour of the conquering army is admitted by the Latins themselves ; but the condemna- tion freely uttered against licence, brutality, and profane irreverence seems generally (though not quite universally) hushed when the spoliation concerns treasure in the way of relics. The fact of their abundance shows an agree- ment on this point, amidst their differences, between the Latin and Greek Churches ; but Constantinople must have been greatly impoverished by the immense supply of relics " that were scattered by this revolution over the churches of Europe." 1 The next two centuries saw no diminution of such zeal, and there grew up, it can hardly be doubted, an increase of lower motives and of fraud. By the time of the Reformation the condition of matters was such as in many respects to offer a mark for all assailants of the existing state of things, and a practical admission on the part of those in authority that it was to a large extent simply indefensible. Erasmus, on this as on so many other kindred subjects, is found leading the van of satirists. One of his Colloyuia, entitled Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo, contains within some thirty pages a mass of sarcasm against the abuses of. the age. The discharge of vows through an agent, the localism of particular favours, the earthly (and sometimes evil) character of the petitions offered to saints and specially to the Virgin Mother, the strange character of the relics, one of the most common and abundant being the " caeleste lac beatse Virginis," the enormous amount of wealth lying idle at the shrine of St Thomas a Becket these and similar topics are treated in this author's caustic and elegant Latinity. The Colloquia were published in 1522, and from this date a mass of similar literature in the vernacular tongue of various countries, of a coarser kind and more adapted to the popular taste, seems to have been circulated freely throughout Europe. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. Ix. sub fin. ; comp. Milman, Latin Christianity, bk. ix. chap. vii. Milman quotes from Gunther's words concerning the abbot Martin, one of the spoilers: "Indignum (lucens sacrileginm, nisi in re sacra, committere. " The reaction against the homage paid to relics was immense. A practice which has not only been extensively abused, but which appears from its very nature to involve a fatal facility of abuse, can never stand quite where it did after such an exposure as that to which reference has been made. Yet it seems doubtful whether the Reformers in all cases intended to dp more than check the prominent abuses connected with relics. Those who claimed Holy Scripture as the sole authority could not deny that it might please the Almighty to convey blessings through the instrumentality of such material things, as in the cases already referred to in the second book of Kings and the Acts of the Apostles. Even Luther seems rather to denounce mistakes concerning particular relics than the respect paid to recognized ones. In like manner the English Church, while using severe and contemptuous language in the Homilies with reference to such practices as those satirized by Erasmus, has preserved in its calendar, among minor festivals, the days respect- ively chosen by the earlier niediasval church for the discovery of the cross by St Helena (May 3rd) and its recovery by Heraclius (September 14th). Mosheim and other learned foreign Protestants also speak gently on such themes. Thus the devout Lutheran Neander, while mentioning in his Church History some cases of deliberate fraud, and holding that the superstition concerning saints and relics bordered nearly on paganism, is yet unable to approve of the extreme reaction which in some quarters arose out of it. As regards the Church of Rome, although in theory the events of the 16th century may have left its teaching untouched, yet it can hardly be questioned but that this is one of the many departments of religious life in which that great commotion, as De Maistre calls it, has in his words, even among Roman Catholics, opere une revolution tres sensible. The council of Trent, which must be regarded as, from its own point of view, a reforming council, treated the subject of relics in its twenty-fifth session, held in December 1563. It expressed its earnest desire for the removal of abuses, for the abolition of unworthy gain in the veneration of relics, and of revelry on occasion of their visitation. It forbade the acceptance by any church of new relics, without the approbation of the bishop, given after consultation with theologians and other devout men, and referred grave and difficult questions concerning the extirpation of abuses to the judgment of local councils, of metropolitans, and ulti- mately to the Roman see itself. By these steps a great change has been effected. We hear nothing more of the sale of relics (which had indeed been forbidden by the fourth Lateran council in 1215), of theft or of war in connexion with them. Some of those most strange memorials to which a passing allusion has been made above have seemingly disappeared from history. And, although leading writers of the Roman obedience in France and Italy do not often make concessions, the Freiburg Encyclopedia admits the non-authenticity of num- bers of relics brought home from the crusades, and from the conquest of Constantinople ; and Addis and Arnold (Roman Catholic Dictionary, 1884) say that "abuses no doubt have occurred in all ages with regard to relics." No shock less great than that caused by the Reformation would probably have effected so much as has been done. Still, however, the Church of Rome stands alone, we believe, in considering the possession of relics an indis- pensable condition of the performance of the highest acts of public Christian worship. Every altar used for the celebration of mass must, according to Roman Catholic rule, contain some authorized relics. These are inserted into a cavity prepared for their reception, called "the tomb,"