Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/21

Rh These examples will serve to illustrate the process which in thousands of cases has gone on from the earliest days of the Church until a very recent period. Everywhere miraculous cures became the rule rather than the exception throughout Christendom.

So it was that, throughout antiquity, during the early history of the Church, throughout the middle ages, and indeed down to a comparatively recent period, testimony to miraculous interpositions which would now be laughed at by a school-boy was accepted by the leaders of thought. St. Augustine was certainly one of the strongest minds in the early Church, and yet we find him mentioning, with much seriousness, a story that sundry innkeepers of his time put a drug into cheese which metamorphosed travelers into domestic animals. With such a disposition regarding the wildest stories, it is not surprising that the assertion of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, during the second century, as to the cures wrought by the martyrs Cosmo and Damian, was echoed from all parts of Europe until every hamlet had its miracle-working saint or relic.

The literature regarding these miracles is simply endless. To take our own ancestors alone, no one can read the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, or Abbot Samson's Miracles of St. Edmund, or the accounts given by Eadmer and Osberne of the miracles of St. Dunstan, or the long lists of those wrought by Thomas a Becket, or by any other in the army of English saints, without seeing the perfect naturalness of this growth. This evolution of miracle in all parts of Europe came out of a vast preceding series of beliefs, extending not merely through the early Church, but far back into paganism. Just as formerly people were cured in the temples of Æsculapius, so now they were cured at the shrines of saints. Moreover, the miracles of the sacred books were taken as models, and each of those given by the sacred chroniclers was repeated during the early ages of the Church and through the medieval period with endless variations of circumstance, but still with curious fidelity to the original type.

It should be especially kept in mind that, while the vast majority of these were doubtless due to the myth-making faculty and to that development of legends which always goes on in ages ignorant of the relation between physical causes and effects, some of the miracles of healing may have had some basis in fact. We, in modern times, have seen too many cures performed through influences exercised upon the imagination, such as those of the Jansenists at the Cemetery of St. Médard, of the Ultramontanes at La Salette and Lourdes, and of various Protestant sects at Old Orchard and elsewhere, as well as at sundry camp-meetings, to doubt that some cures, more or less permanent, were wrought by