NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE, u 



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 Christen- 

 dom. 



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 interpo- 

 sitions which would now be laughed at by a school-boy was ac- 

 cepted 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 inn- 

 keepers of his time put a drug into cheese which metamorphosed 

 travelers into domestic animals. With such a disposition regard- 

 ing 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-work- 

 ing 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 

 JEsculapius, 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 ma- 

 jority 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. Me'dard, 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 



