Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/689

Rh Innocent III as a madman, and undoubtedly half-crazy and fanatical, lie pretended to the gifts of prophecy and miracles. Beggar and nurse of lepers, pious and beneficent, he was still so deficient in moral sense as to set filial duty and parental authority at defiance, and to lure three imaginative sisters of rank and fortune into a life similar to his own. Ascetic, unnatural, and a devotee, he approached so near to utter insanity that the Mohammedan Sultan of Egypt, whom he essayed to convert to his Christianity, was fully warranted in tenderly dismissing him as a lunatic. Blameless, gentle, loving, and fondly pantheistic in sentiment, his energies were wholly consecrated to the support of the endangered papacy, and the establishment of its claims against all dissenters. Such a miracle as that he affirmed would, in a grossly superstitious age, be a patent aid to him in his work. Great good and no small evil were blended in one and the same man; good that voiced itself in many memorable sayings, and induced him to conceal what he himself seems to have doubted—the marks on his hands by covering them with his habit, and on his feet by wearing shoes and stockings. There is no known limit to human credulity, and particularly in an age so illiterate and unscientific. The ecclesiastics had an adequate motive in their claim to complete dominance over the human race for bolstering up his pretensions, and for elevating the abnormal experiences of a kindly monomaniac to the rank of a miracle. Not less powerful is the motive that Belgian ecclesiastics have for upholding the claims of Louise Lateau, whose personal reward is in notoriety, rich presents, and the lavish praises of wily or superstitious advisers.

Modern medical science asserts the naturalness of the stigmata. In harmony with Neander's suggestion, it looks upon the story of St. Francis, of Lateau, and of others, as one "with regard to which it still needs and deserves inquiry to what extent, in certain eccentric states of the system, a markedly overexcited fancy might react on the bodily organism." The closest attention has been paid to Louise Lateau. M. Warlomont, commissioned by the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium to examine her, accompanied by several friends, made a careful examination of her person. The subject went through her regular programme. At six o'clock on Friday morning blood was freely flowing from all the stigmata. Then, as also at other times, there was no apparent external excitation of the hæmorrhage. The blood effused was of normal character, excepting the excessive amount of white corpuscles. So far, all seemed to be genuine. She did, however, when closely questioned, confess to short periods of forgetfulness at night. A cupboard in her room contained bread and fruit, and her chamber communicated directly with the yard at the back of the house. M. Warlomont concluded that the ecstasies and