Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/688

670 to ask for the benefit of her prayers. On making her profession as a member of the Sœurs Grises at Ottawa she received the stigmata. Since then she had bled every Friday, suffered terribly, taken no nourishment, exhaled perfumes from her wounds, offered all her sufferings for souls in purgatory, is stout of body, and shows signs of perfect health.

Are the stigmata miraculous, or may they be accounted for on pathological principles? Two answers are given to this question. The first is purely theological, or rather ecclesiastical; the second is purely scientific. Mediæval ecclesiasticism affirms them to be miraculous; science maintains that they are natural. Roman Catholicism holds them to be miraculous, but does not make it an article of faith that all its adherents must believe. The Franciscan friars, and also the majority of Roman Catholics, fervently believed and stoutly insisted that the stigmatization of Francis Bernardone was miraculous. Dean Milman says that this almost became the creed of Christendom. "The declaration of Pope Alexander, the ardent protector of the mendicant friars, imposed it almost as an article of the belief." Nicholas IV, who was himself a Franciscan, asserted the stigmata of St. Francis; a papal bull in 1255 vindicated the claims of the miracle; and Pope Benedict XI set apart the 17th of September of each year as the feast of the Holy Stigmata. The Dominicans, irreconcilable rivals of the Franciscans, represented the whole affair as an imposture invented to raise the credit of their competitors for papal and popular favor. The Bishop of Olmutz denounced the alleged miracle as irrational. The Dominican, Jacob de Voragine, did not deny the fact of the stigmata, but assigned five causes for them. All resolve themselves into the first, which is imagination. Petrarch, Cornelius Agrippa, etc., attributed the stigmatization of Bernardone to his glowing fancy, or to an excited imagination acting on a body enfeebled by sickness and religious mortifications.

As for Palma d'Oria, after reading Dr. Hammond's relation of her absurd impostures, it is difficult not to conclude with him that she was syphilitic, strongly hysterical, the subject of purpura hæmorrhagica, and "a most unmitigated humbug and liar."

Neander adopts the theory of Voragine, and thinks that the story of the stigmata of Francis of Assisi sprang "from the self-deception of a fanatical bent of the imagination, and from fancied exaggeration," His language is that of the true philosophic scientist. The phenomena, whatever they were, in the case of St. Francis should be studied in the light of his character. As a youth he was vain, gay, and prodigal; of ethical education so neglected and perverse that after his reformation he did not scruple to steal from his father in order that he might repair the dilapidated church of St. Damian. Regarded alike by his neighbors and by