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interesting to know that among the men thus contemptuously
characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton.

Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted
many years, and was especially shown on both sides of the
Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where theology
was dominant. Down to a period within the memory of men still in
active life, students in the sciences, not only at Oxford and
Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were considered a doubtful if
not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually and socially--to
be relegated to different instructors and buildings, and to
receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different
ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature. To
the State University of Michigan, among the greater American
institutions of learning which have never possessed or been
possessed by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of
first breaking down this wall of separation.

But from the middle years of the century chemical science
progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen,
Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the
century, led up to the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by
which chemistry has become predictive, as astronomy had become
predictive by the calculations of Newton, and biology by the
discoveries of Darwin.

While one succession of strong men were thus developing
chemistry out of one form of magic, another succession were
developing physics out of another form.

First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line of
thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical laws--a
line extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton to Ohm and
Faraday and Joule and Helmholtz. These, by revealing more and
more clearly the reign of law, steadily undermined the older
theological view of arbitrary influence in nature. Next should
be mentioned the line of profound observers, from Galileo and
Torricelli to Kelvin. These have as thoroughly undermined the
old theologic substitution of phrases for facts. When Galileo
dropped the differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he
began the end of Aristotelian authority in physics. When
Torricelli balanced a column of mercury against a column of
water and each of these against a column of air, he ended the
theologic phrase that "nature abhors a vacuum." When Newton
approximately determined the velocity of sound, he ended the
theologic argument that we see the flash before we hear the roar
because "sight is nobler than hearing." When Franklin showed
that lightning is caused by electricity, and Ohm and Faraday
proved that electricity obeys ascertained laws, they ended the
theological idea of a divinity seated above the clouds and
casting thunderbolts.

Resulting from the labour of both these branches of physical
science, we have the establishment of the great laws of the
indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and
chemical affinity. Thereby is ended, with various other sacred
traditions, the theological theory of a visible universe created
out of nothing, so firmly imbedded in the theological thought of
the Middle Ages and in the Westminster Catechism.[408]

In our own time some attempt has been made to renew this war
against the physical sciences. Joseph de Maistre, uttering his
hatred of them, declaring that mankind has paid too dearly for
them, asserting that they must be subjected to theology,
likening them to fire--good when confined and dangerous when
scattered about--has been one of the main leaders among those
who can not relinquish the idea that our body of sacred
literature should be kept a controlling text-book of science.
The only effect of such teachings has been to weaken the
legitimate hold of religion upon men.

In Catholic countries exertion has of late years been mainly
confined to excluding science or diluting it in university
teachings. Early in the present century a great effort was made
by Ferdinand VII of Spain. He simply dismissed the scientific
professors from the University of Salamanca, and until a recent
period there has been general exclusion from Spanish
universities of professors holding to the Newtonian physics. So,
too, the contemporary Emperor of Austria attempted indirectly
something of the same sort; and at a still later period Popes
Gregory XVI and Pius IX discouraged, if they did not forbid, the
meetings of scientific associations in Italy. In France, war
between theology and science, which had long been smouldering,
came in the years 1867 and 1868 to an outbreak. Toward the end
of the last century, after the Church had held possession of
advanced instruction for more than a thousand years, and had, so
far as it was able, kept experimental science in
servitude--after it had humiliated Buffon in natural science,
thrown its weight against Newton in the physical sciences, and
wrecked Turgot's noble plans for a system of public
instruction--the French nation decreed the establishment of the
most thorough and complete system of higher instruction in
science ever known. It was kept under lay control and became one
of the glories of France; but, emboldened by the restoration of
the Bourbons in 1815, the Church began to undermine this hated
system, and in 1868 had made such progress that all was ready
for the final assault.

Foremost among the leaders of the besieging party was the Bishop
of Orleans, Dupanloup, a man of many winning characteristics and
of great oratorical power. In various ways, and especially in an
open letter, he had fought the "materialism" of science at
Paris, and especially were his attacks levelled at Profs.
Vulpian and See and the Minister of Public instruction, Duruy,
a man of great merit, whose only crime was devotion to the
improvement of education and to the promotion of the highest
research in science.[409]

The main attack was made rather upon biological science than
upon physics and chemistry, yet it was clear that all were
involved together.

The first onslaught was made in the French Senate, and the
storming party in that body was led by a venerable and
conscientious prelate, Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop of
Rouen. It was charged by him and his party that the tendencies
of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to
religion and morality. Heavy missiles were hurled--such phrases
as "sapping the foundations," "breaking down the bulwarks,"
and the like; and, withal, a new missile was used with much
effect--the epithet "materialist."

The results can be easily guessed: crowds came to the
lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room
of Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation.

A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was sent by the
cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy. Having heard
one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that
seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party: he
brought a terrible statement--one that seemed enough to
overwhelm See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of
public instruction in France--the statement that See had denied
the existence of the human soul.

Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at once. Rising
in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent
invective against the Minister of State who could protect such
a fortress of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a
climax, he asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof.
See's lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his
lecture of the day before, that so long as he had the honour to
hold his professorship he would combat the false idea of the
existence of the soul. The weapon seemed resistless and the
wound fatal, but M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard.

His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary
proofs that Prof. See never made such a declaration. He held the
notes used by Prof. See in his lecture. Prof. See, it appeared,
belonged to a school in medical science which combated certain
ideas regarding medicine as an _art_. The inflamed imagination of
the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the
lecture-notes proved, led him to mistake the word "_art_" for
"ame," and to exhibit Prof. See as treating a theological when
he was discussing a purely scientific question. Of the existence
of the soul the professor had said nothing.

The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated
in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet,
dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors
by Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their discomfiture.
Thus a well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in
bringing ridicule on religion, and in thrusting still deeper
into the minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all
mistaken ideas: the conviction that religion and science are
enemies.[410]

But justice forbids raising an outcry against Roman Catholicism
for this. In 1864 a number of excellent men in England drew up
a declaration to be signed by students in the natural sciences,
expressing "sincere regret that researches into scientific
truth are perverted by some in our time into occasion for
casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy
Scriptures." Nine tenths of the leading scientific men of
England refused to sign it; nor was this all: Sir John Herschel,
Sir John Bowring, and Sir W. R. Hamilton administered, through
the press, castigations which roused general indignation against
the proposers of the circular, and Prof. De Morgan, by a parody,
covered memorial and memorialists with ridicule. It was the old
mistake, and the old result followed in the minds of multitudes
of thoughtful young men.[411]

And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake was
made. In 1868 several excellent churchmen in Prussia thought it
their duty to meet for the denunciation of "science falsely so
called." Two results followed: upon the great majority of these
really self-sacrificing men--whose first utterances showed
complete ignorance of the theories they attacked--there came
quiet and widespread contempt; upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth
and proclaimed views of the universe which he thought
scriptural, but which most schoolboys knew to be childish, came
a burst of good-natured derision from every quarter of the
German nation.[411b]

But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind,
after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more
and more futile. While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less
conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe and America
continued to insist that advanced education, not only in
literature but in science, should be kept under careful control
in their own sectarian universities and colleges, wretchedly
one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while
Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all
professors holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and
Italy all holding unsafe views regarding the Immaculate
Conception, and while Protestant clerical authorities in Great
Britain and America were keeping out of professorships men
holding unsatisfactory views regarding the Incarnation, or
Infant Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or Ordination by
Elders, or the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both
Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly
weeding out of university faculties all who showed willingness
to consider fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly
in progress destined to take instruction, and especially
instruction in the physical and natural sciences, out of its
old subordination to theology and ecclesiasticism.[412]

The most striking beginnings of this movement had been seen
when, in the darkest period of the French Revolution, there was
founded at Paris the great Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and
when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, scientific
and technical education spread quietly upon the Continent. By
the middle of the century France and Germany were dotted with
well-equipped technical and scientific schools, each having
chemical and physical laboratories.

The English-speaking lands lagged behind. In England, Oxford and
Cambridge showed few if any signs of this movement, and in the
United States, down to 1850, evidences of it were few and
feeble. Very significant is it that, at that period, while Yale
College had in its faculty Silliman and Olmsted--the professor
of chemistry and the professor of physics most widely known in
the United States--it had no physical or chemical laboratory in
the modern sense, and confined its instruction in these subjects
to examinations upon a text-book and the presentation of a few
lectures. At the State University of Michigan, which had even
then taken a foremost place in the higher education west of the
Great Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and
virtually none in physics. This being the state of things in the
middle of the century in institutions remarkably free from
clerical control, it can be imagined what was the position of
scientific instruction in smaller colleges and universities
where theological considerations were entirely dominant.

But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, began
in Great Britain and America a movement in favour of scientific
education; men of wealth and public spirit began making
contributions to them, and thus came the growth of a new system
of instruction in which Chemistry and Physics took just rank.

By far the most marked feature in this movement was seen in
America, when, in 1857, Justin S. Morrill, a young member of
Congress from Vermont, presented the project of a law endowing
from the public lands a broad national system of colleges in
which scientific and technical studies should be placed on an
equality with studies in classical literature, one such college
to be established in every State of the Union. The bill, though
opposed mainly by representatives from the Southern States,
where doctrinaire politics and orthodox theology were in strong
alliance with negro slavery, was passed by both Houses of
Congress, but vetoed by President Buchanan, in whom the
doctrinaire and orthodox spirit was incarnate. But Morrill
persisted and again presented his bill, which was again carried
in spite of the opposition of the Southern members, and again
vetoed in 1859 by President Buchanan. Then came the civil war;
but Morrill and his associates did not despair of the republic.
In the midst of all the measures for putting vast armies into
the field and for saving the Union from foreign interference as
well as from domestic anarchy, they again passed the bill, and
in 1862, in the darkest hour of the struggle for national
existence, it became a law by the signature of President Lincoln.

And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast
majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most
efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Amos
Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an instructor in
a little village of New York. His ideas were embodied in the
bill, and his efforts did much for its passage.

Thus was established, in every State of the American Union, at
least one institution in which scientific and technical studies
were given equal rank with classical, and promoted by
laboratories for research in physical and natural science. Of
these institutions there are now nearly fifty: all have proved
valuable, and some of them, by the addition of splendid gifts
from individuals and from the States in which they are situated,
have been developed into great universities.

Nor was this all. Many of the older universities and colleges
thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction. The
great physical and chemical laboratories founded by gifts from
public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago,
or by enlightened State legislators, as in Michigan, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, have also become
centres from which radiate influences favouring the unfettered
search for truth as truth.

This system has been long enough in operation to enable us to
note in some degree its effects on religion, and these are
certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that religion
was necessarily bound up with the older instruction controlled
by theology. While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the
colleges under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the
most powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom
Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan
are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer
institutions. While the theological way of looking at the
universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any
tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony
of those best acquainted with the American colleges and
universities during the last forty-five years that there has been
in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards
religion in its highest and best sense. The reason is not far to
seek. Under the old American system the whole body of students
at a university were confined to a single course, for which the
majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a
result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable.
Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially
courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and
aims, the great majority of students are interested, and
consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished.
Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learning
down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for the
religious culture of students was in the perfunctory
presentation of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring
up of what were called "revivals," which, after a period of
unhealthy stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students in
a state of religious and moral reaction and collapse. This
method is now discredited, and in the more important American
universities it has become impossible. Religious truth, to
secure the attention of the modern race of students in the
better American institutions, is presented, not by "sensation
preachers," but by thoughtful, sober-minded scholars. Less and
less avail sectarian arguments; more and more impressive becomes
the presentation of fundamental religious truths. The result is,
that while young men care less and less for the great mass of
petty, cut-and-dried sectarian formulas, they approach the
deeper questions of religion with increasing reverence.

While striking differences exist between the European
universities and those of the United States, this at least may
be said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority
of the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of
enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and that,
this being the case, the physical and natural sciences are
henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without fear of
being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesiasticism.


                              CHAPTER XIII.
                       FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.

              I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE.

NOTHING in the evolution of human thought appears more
inevitable than the idea of supernatural intervention in
producing and curing disease. The causes of disease are so
intricate that they are reached only after ages of scientific
labour. In those periods when man sees everywhere miracle and
nowhere law,--when he attributes all things which he can not
understand to a will like his own,--he naturally ascribes his
diseases either to the wrath of a good being or to the malice of
an evil being.

This idea underlies the connection of the priestly class
with the healing art: a connection of which we have survivals
among rude tribes in all parts of the world, and which is seen in
nearly every ancient civilization--especially in the powers over
disease claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in
Assyria by the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of
AEsculapius, and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh.

In Egypt there is evidence, reaching back to a very early
period, that the sick were often regarded as afflicted or
possessed by demons; the same belief comes constantly before us
in the great religions of India and China; and, as regards
Chaldea, the Assyrian tablets recovered in recent years, while
revealing the source of so many myths and legends transmitted to
the modern world through the book of Genesis, show especially
this idea of the healing of diseases by the casting out of
devils. A similar theory was elaborated in Persia. Naturally,
then, the Old Testament, so precious in showing the evolution of
religious and moral truth among men, attributes such diseases as
the leprosy of Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the
dysentery of Jehoram, the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal
illness of Asa, and many other ills, to the wrath of God or the
malice of Satan; while, in the New Testament, such examples as
the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting
out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of the person whom
"the devil ofttimes casteth into the fire"--of which case one of
the greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a
truer description of epilepsy--and various other episodes, show
this same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium
through which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician
were revealed to future generations.

In Greece, though this idea of an occult evil agency in
producing bodily ills appeared at an early period, there also
came the first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really
scientific theory of medicine. Five hundred years before Christ,
in the bloom period of thought--the period of AEschylus, Phidias,
Pericles, Socrates, and Plato--appeared Hippocrates, one of the
greatest names in history. Quietly but thoroughly he broke away
from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid
the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation,
and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to
this hour among the most precious possessions of our race.

His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and
there medical science was developed yet further, especially by
such men as Herophilus and Erasistratus. Under their lead studies
in human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had
weighed so long upon science, preventing that method of
anatomical investigation without which there can be no real
results, was cast aside apparently forever.[[2]]

But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of
events was set in motion which modified this development most
profoundly. The influence of Christianity on the healing art was
twofold: there was first a blessed impulse--the thought,
aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.
This spirit, then poured into the world, flowed down through the
ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the sick and wretched.
Through all those succeeding centuries, even through the rudest,
hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along this blessed stream. Of
these were the Eastern establishments for the cure of the sick at
the earliest Christian periods, the Infirmary of Monte Cassino
and the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons in the sixth century, the Hotel-Dieu
at Paris in the seventh, and the myriad refuges for the sick and
suffering which sprang up in every part of Europe during the
following centuries. Vitalized by this stream, all medieval
growths of mercy bloomed luxuriantly. To say nothing of those at
an earlier period, we have in the time of the Crusades great
charitable organizations like the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and
thenceforward every means of bringing the spirit of Jesus to help
afflicted humanity. So, too, through all those ages we have a
succession of men and women devoting themselves to works of mercy,
culminating during modern times in saints like Vincent de Paul,
Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, and Muhlenberg.

But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart
of the Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after
century, inspiring every development of mercy, there came from
those who organized the Church which bears his name, and from
those who afterward developed and directed it, another stream of
influence--a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions
of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest
historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew
and Christian sacred books.

The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in
relation to the cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there
was a new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical
disease is produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan,
or by a combination of both, which theology was especially called
in to explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of
miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the
Divine anger, or of thwarting Satanic malice.

Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the
life of Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians,
legends of miracles grew luxuriantly. It would be utterly
unphilosophical to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud.
Whatever part priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry
discreditable developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends,
Century after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as
naturally as elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie.


                   II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.--
                 THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.

Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all
great benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and
devotees. Throughout human history the lives of such personages,
almost without exception, have been accompanied or followed by a
literature in which legends of miraculous powers form a very
important part--a part constantly increasing until a different
mode of looking at nature and of weighing testimony causes
miracles to disappear. While modern thought holds the testimony
to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as worthless, it is
very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings who endow
the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest hold
upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise
such influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or
body are helped or healed.

We have within the modern period very many examples which
enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles. Out of
these I will select but one, which is chosen because it is the
life of one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of
humanity, one whose biography is before the world with its most
minute details--in his own letters, in the letters of his
associates, in contemporary histories, and in a multitude of
biographies: this man is St. Francis Xavier. From these sources I
draw the facts now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant
origin; every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and
Roman, and published under the sanction of the Church.

Born a Spanish noble, Xavier at an early age cast aside all
ordinary aims, devoted himself to study, was rapidly advanced to
a professorship at Paris, and in this position was rapidly
winning a commanding influence, when he came under the sway of
another Spaniard even greater, though less brilliantly endowed,
than himself--Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.
The result was that the young professor sacrificed the brilliant
career on which he had entered at the French capital, went to the
far East as a simple missionary, and there devoted his remaining
years to redeeming the lowest and most wretched of our race.

Among the various tribes, first in lower India and afterward
in Japan, he wrought untiringly--toiling through village after
village, collecting the natives by the sound of a hand-bell,
trying to teach them the simplest Christian formulas; and thus he
brought myriads of them to a nominal Confession of the Christian
faith. After twelve years of such efforts, seeking new conquests for
religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert island of San Chan.

During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of
letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and
these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly
all the features of his life. His own writings are very minute,
and enable us to follow him fully. No account of a miracle
wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any
contemporary document.[[6]] At the outside, but two or three things
occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by himself and
his contemporaries, for which the most earnest devotee could
claim anything like Divine interposition; and these are such as
may be read in the letters of very many fervent missionaries,
Protestant as well as Catholic. For example, in the beginning of
his career, during a journey in Europe with an ambassador, one of
the servants in fording a stream got into deep water and was in
danger of drowning. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed
very earnestly, and that the man finally struggled out of the
stream. But within sixty years after his death, at his
canonization, and by various biographers, this had been magnified
into a miracle, and appears in the various histories dressed out
in glowing colours. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed
for the safety of the young man; but his biographers tell us that
it was Xavier who prayed, and finally, by the later writers,
Xavier is represented as lifting horse and rider out of the
stream by a clearly supernatural act.

Still another claim to miracle is based upon his arriving at
Lisbon and finding his great colleague, Simon Rodriguez, ill of
fever. Xavier informs us in a very simple way that Rodriguez was
so overjoyed to see him that the fever did not return. This is
entirely similar to the cure which Martin Luther wrought upon
Melanchthon. Melanchthon had broken down and was supposed to be
dying, when his joy at the long-delayed visit of Luther brought
him to his feet again, after which he lived for many years.

Again, it is related that Xavier, finding a poor native
woman very ill, baptized her, saying over her the prayers of the
Church, and she recovered.

Two or three occurrences like these form the whole basis for the
miraculous account, so far as Xavier's own writings are concerned.

Of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word there is in
these letters of his no mention. Though he writes of his doings
with especial detail, taking evident pains to note everything
which he thought a sign of Divine encouragement, he says nothing
of his performing miracles, and evidently knows nothing of them.
This is clearly not due to his unwillingness to make known any
token of Divine favour. As we have seen, he is very prompt to
report anything which may be considered an answer to prayer or an
evidence of the power of religious means to improve the bodily
or spiritual health of those to whom he was sent.

Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any
miracles wrought by him. His brother missionaries, who were in
constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no allusions to them in
their communications with each other or with their brethren in Europe.

Of this fact we have many striking evidences. Various
collections of letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and
the East generally, during the years of Xavier's activity, were
published, and in not one of these letters written during
Xavier's lifetime appears any account of a miracle wrought by
him. As typical of these collections we may take perhaps the most
noted of all, that which was published about twenty years after
Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta.

The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his
associates not only from Goa, which was the focus of all
missionary effort and the centre of all knowledge regarding their
work in the East, but from all other important points in the
great field. The first of them were written during the saint's
lifetime, but, though filled with every sort of detail regarding
missionary life and work, they say nothing regarding any miracles
by Xavier.

The same is true of various other similar collections
published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In not
one of them does any mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a
letter from India or the East contemporary with him.

This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to
any "evil heart of unbelief." On the contrary, these good
missionary fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence
which they thought evidence of the Divine favour: it is indeed
touching to see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things
which could be thus construed.

Their ample faith was fully shown. One of them, in Acosta's
collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been
recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast
out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that
various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by
baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb
had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the
proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles
are imputed by his associates during his life or during several
years after his death.

On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his
personal limitations, and the difficulties arising from them,
fully confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting, for
example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was
divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to
note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement
utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and
detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of
knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent
in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.

Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel
Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries
continued without any indication of miracles performed by the
saint. Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had
already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these
miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later
accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very
period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of them
from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of these
miraculous manifestations.

But this negative evidence is by no means all. There is also
positive evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order
itself--that Xavier wrought no miracles.

For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know
anything of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the
highest contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the
closest correspondence with those who knew most about the saint,
a member of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of
its accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier
wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none.

This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit
order, its visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally
rector of the University of Salamanca. In 1571, nineteen years
after Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work
mainly concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he
refers especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier,
holding him up as an ideal and his work as an example.

But on the same page with this tribute to the great
missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in
the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic
times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching
could no longer produce apostolic results "lies in the
missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of
working miracles." He then asks, "Why should our age be so
completely destitute of them?" This question he answers at great
length, and one of his main contentions is that in early
apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the
world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men
being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that "in the
early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not."

This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly
to Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and
that of the other great missionaries of his time. That the Jesuit
order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta
trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at
Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished
afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.[[10]] Nothing
shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of
miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of
any land and time, and how independent it is of fact.

For, shortly after Xavier's heroic and beautiful death in
1552, stories of miracles wrought by him began to appear. At
first they were few and feeble; and two years later Melchior
Nunez, Provincial of the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions,
with all the means at his command, and a correspondence extending
throughout Eastern Asia, had been able to hear of but three.
These were entirely from hearsay. First, John Deyro said he knew
that Xavier had the gift of prophecy; but, unfortunately, Xavier
himself had reprimanded and cast off Deyro for untruthfulness and
cheatery. Secondly, it was reported vaguely that at Cape Comorin
many persons affirmed that Xavier had raised a man from the dead.
Thirdly, Father Pablo de Santa Fe had heard that in Japan Xavier
had restored sight to a blind man. This seems a feeble beginning,
but little by little the stories grew, and in 1555 De Quadros,
Provincial of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, had heard of nine
miracles, and asserted that Xavier had healed the sick and cast
out devils. The next year, being four years after Xavier's death,
King John III of Portugal, a very devout man, directed his
viceroy Barreto to draw up and transmit to him an authentic
account of Xavier's miracles, urging him especially to do the
work "with zeal and speedily." We can well imagine what treasures
of grace an obsequious viceroy, only too anxious to please a
devout king, could bring together by means of the hearsay of
ignorant, compliant natives through all the little towns of
Portuguese India.

But the letters of the missionaries who had been co-workers
or immediate successors of Xavier in his Eastern field were still
silent as regards any miracles by him, and they remained silent
for nearly ten years. In the collection of letters published by
Emanuel Acosta and others no hint at any miracles by him is
given, until at last, in 1562, fully ten years after Xavier's
death, the first faint beginnings of these legends appear in them.

At that time the Jesuit Almeida, writing at great length to
the brethren, stated that he had found a pious woman who believed
that a book left behind by Xavier had healed sick folk when it
was laid upon them, and that he had met an old man who preserved
a whip left by the saint which, when properly applied to the sick,
had been found good both for their bodies and their souls. From
these and other small beginnings grew, always luxuriant and sometimes
beautiful, the vast mass of legends which we shall see hereafter.

This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous
and less critical brethren in Europe until it had become
enormous; but it appears to have been thought of little value by
those best able to judge.

For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a
solemn oration on the condition and glory of the Church, before
the papal legates and other fathers assembled at the Council of
Trent, while he alluded to a multitude of things showing the
Divine favour, there was not the remotest allusion to the vast
multitude of miracles which, according to the legends, had been
so profusely lavished on the faithful during many years, and
which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of
prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church.

The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours
vouchsafed to the Church, or at least of any belief in them,
appears in that great Council of Trent among the fathers
themselves. Certainly there, if anywhere, one might on the Roman
theory expect Divine illumination in a matter of this kind. The
presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it was especially
claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual as well
as material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the
Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own
friend and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not
the slightest sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles. We have
the letters of Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these fathers
assembled at Trent, from 1557 onward for a considerable time, and
we have also a multitude of letters written from the Council by
bishops, cardinals, and even by the Pope himself, discussing all
sorts of Church affairs, and in not one of these is there
evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these reports,
which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles, were
worthy of mention.

Here, too, comes additional supplementary testimony of much
significance. With these orations and letters, Eugubinus gives a
Latin translation of a letter, "on religious affairs in the
Indies," written by a Jesuit father twenty years after Xavier's
death. Though the letter came from a field very distant from that
in which Xavier laboured, it was sure, among the general tokens
of Divine favour to the Church and to the order, on which it
dwelt, to have alluded to miracles wrought by Xavier had there
been the slightest ground for believing in them; but no such
allusion appears.[[14]]

So, too, when in 1588, thirty-six years after Xavier's
death, the Jesuit father Maffei, who had been especially
conversant with Xavier's career in the East, published his
_History of India_, though he gave a biography of Xavier which
shows fervent admiration for his subject, he dwelt very lightly
on the alleged miracles. But the evolution of miraculous legends
still went on. Six years later, in 1594, Father Tursellinus
published his _Life of Xavier_, and in this appears to have made
the first large use of the information collected by the
Portuguese viceroy and the more zealous brethren. This work shows
a vast increase in the number of miracles over those given by all
sources together up to that time. Xavier is represented as not
only curing the sick, but casting out devils, stilling the
tempest, raising the dead, and performing miracles of every sort.

In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome. Among the
speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the
claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal
Monte. In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from
those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them
minutely. He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the
sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his
fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed the
sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a lost
boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth
bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to
punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the
offenders in cinders from a volcano: this was afterward still
more highly developed, and the saint was represented in engravings
as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying the town.

The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the
cardinal's list. Regarding this he states that, Xavier having
during one of his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was
restored to him after he had reached the shore by a crab.

The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's
relics after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps
placed before the image of the saint and filled with holy water
burned as if filled with oil.

This latter account appears to have deeply impressed the
Pope, for in the Bull of Canonization issued by virtue of his
power of teaching the universal Church infallibly in all matters
pertaining to faith and morals, His Holiness dwells especially
upon the miracle of the lamp filled with holy water and burning
before Xavier's image.

Xavier having been made a saint, many other _Lives_ of him
appeared, and, as a rule, each surpassed its predecessor in the
multitude of miracles. In 1622 appeared that compiled and
published under the sanction of Father Vitelleschi, and in it not
only are new miracles increased, but some old ones are greatly
improved. One example will suffice to show the process. In his
edition of 1596, Tursellinus had told how, Xavier one day
needing money, and having asked Vellio, one of his friends, to
let him have some, Vellio gave him the key of a safe containing
thirty thousand gold pieces. Xavier took three hundred and
returned the key to Vellio; whereupon Vellio, finding only three
hundred pieces gone, reproached Xavier for not taking more,
saying that he had expected to give him half of all that the
strong box contained. Xavier, touched by this generosity, told
Vellio that the time of his death should be made known to him,
that he might have opportunity to repent of his sins and prepare
for eternity. But twenty-six years later the _Life of Xavier_
published under the sanction of Vitelleschi, giving the story,
says that Vellio on opening the safe found that _all his money_
remained as he had left it, and that _none at all_ had
disappeared; in fact, that there had been a miraculous
restitution. On his blaming Xavier for not taking the money,
Xavier declares to Vellio that not only shall he be apprised of
the moment of his death, but that the box shall always be full of
money. Still later biographers improved the account further,
declaring that Xavier promised Vellio that the strong box should
always contain money sufficient for all his needs. In that warm
and uncritical atmosphere this and other legends grew rapidly,
obedient to much the same laws which govern the evolution of
fairy tales.[[16]]

In 1682, one hundred and thirty years after Xavier's death,
appeared his biography by Father Bouhours; and this became a
classic. In it the old miracles of all kinds were enormously
multiplied, and many new ones given. Miracles few and small in
Tursellinus became many and great in Bouhours. In Tursellinus,
Xavier during his life saves one person from drowning, in
Bouhours he saves during his life three; in Tursellinus, Xavier
during his life raises four persons from the dead, in Bouhours
fourteen; in Tursellinus there is one miraculous supply of water,
in Bouhours three; in Tursellinus there is no miraculous draught
of fishes, in Bouhours there is one; in Tursellinus, Xavier is
transfigured twice, in Bouhours five times: and so through a long
series of miracles which, in the earlier lives appearing either
not at all or in very moderate form, are greatly increased and
enlarged by Tursellinus, and finally enormously amplified and
multiplied by Father Bouhours.

And here it must be borne in mind that Bouhours, writing
ninety years after Tursellinus, could not have had access to any
new sources. Xavier had been dead one hundred and thirty years,
and of course all the natives upon whom he had wrought his
miracles, and their children and grandchildren, were gone. It can
not then be claimed that Bouhours had the advantage of any new
witnesses, nor could he have had anything new in the way of
contemporary writings; for, as we have seen, the missionaries of
Xavier's time wrote nothing regarding his miracles, and certainly
the ignorant natives of India and Japan did not commit any
account of his miracles to writing. Nevertheless, the miracles of
healing given in Bouhours were more numerous and brilliant than
ever. But there was far more than this. Although during the
lifetime of Xavier there is neither in his own writings nor in
any contemporary account any assertion of a resurrection from the
dead wrought by him, we find that shortly after his death stories
of such resurrections began to appear. A simple statement of the
growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of
miraculous accounts generally. At first it was affirmed that some
people at Cape Comorin said that he had raised one person; then
it was said that there were two persons; then in various
authors--Emanuel Acosta, in his commentaries written as an
afterthought nearly twenty years after Xavier's death, De
Quadros, and others--the story wavers between one and two cases;
finally, in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been
developed. In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were
mentioned; but by the time of Father Bouhours there were
fourteen--all raised from the dead by Xavier himself during his
lifetime--and the name, place, and circumstances are given with
much detail in each case.[[17]]

It seems to have been felt as somewhat strange at first that
Xavier had never alluded to any of these wonderful miracles; but
ere long a subsidiary legend was developed, to the effect that
one of the brethren asked him one day if he had raised the dead,
whereat he blushed deeply and cried out against the idea,
saying: "And so I am said to have raised the dead! What a
misleading man I am! Some men brought a youth to me just as if
he were dead, who, when I commanded him to arise in the name of
Christ, straightway arose."

Noteworthy is the evolution of other miracles. Tursellinus,
writing in 1594, tells us that on the voyage from Goa to Malacca,
Xavier having left the ship and gone upon an island, was
afterward found by the persons sent in search of him so deeply
absorbed in prayer as to be unmindful of all things about him.
But in the next century Father Bouhours develops the story as
follows: "The servants found the man of God raised from the
ground into the air, his eyes fixed upon heaven, and rays of
light about his countenance."

Instructive, also, is a comparison between the successive
accounts of his noted miracle among the Badages at Travancore, in
1544 Xavier in his letters makes no reference to anything
extraordinary; and Emanuel Acosta, in 1571, declares simply
that "Xavier threw himself into the midst of the Christians, that
reverencing him they might spare the rest." The inevitable
evolution of the miraculous goes on; and twenty years later
Tursellinus tells us that, at the onslaught of the Badages, "they
could not endure the majesty of his countenance and the splendour
and rays which issued from his eyes, and out of reverence for him
they spared the others." The process of incubation still goes on
during ninety years more, and then comes Father Bouhours's
account. Having given Xavier's prayer on the battlefield,
Bouhours goes on to say that the saint, crucifix in hand, rushed
at the head of the people toward the plain where the enemy was
marching, and "said to them in a threatening voice, `I forbid you
in the name of the living God to advance farther, and on His part
command you to return in the way you came.' These few words cast
a terror into the minds of those soldiers who were at the head of
the army; they remained confounded and without motion. They who
marched afterward, seeing that the foremost did not advance,
asked the reason of it. The answer was returned from the front
ranks that they had before their eyes an unknown person habited
in black, of more than human stature, of terrible aspect, and
darting fire from his eyes.... They were seized with amazement at
the sight, and all of them fled in precipitate confusion."

Curious, too, is the after-growth of the miracle of the crab
restoring the crucifix. In its first form Xavier lost the
crucifix in the sea, and the earlier biographers dwell on the
sorrow which he showed in consequence; but the later historians
declare that the saint threw the crucifix into the sea in order
to still a tempest, and that, after his safe getting to land, a
crab brought it to him on the shore. In this form we find it
among illustrations of books of devotion in the next century.

But perhaps the best illustration of this evolution of
Xavier's miracles is to be found in the growth of another legend;
and it is especially instructive because it grew luxuriantly
despite the fact that it was utterly contradicted in all parts of
Xavier's writings as well as in the letters of his associates and
in the work of the Jesuit father, Joseph Acosta.

Throughout his letters, from first to last, Xavier
constantly dwells upon his difficulties with the various
languages of the different tribes among whom he went. He tells us
how he surmounted these difficulties: sometimes by learning just
enough of a language to translate into it some of the main Church
formulas; sometimes by getting the help of others to patch
together some pious teachings to be learned by rote; sometimes by
employing interpreters; and sometimes by a mixture of various
dialects, and even by signs. On one occasion he tells us that a
very serious difficulty arose, and that his voyage to China was
delayed because, among other things, the interpreter he had
engaged had failed to meet him.

In various _Lives_ which appeared between the time of his
death and his canonization this difficulty is much dwelt upon;
but during the canonization proceedings at Rome, in the speeches
then made, and finally in the papal bull, great stress was laid
upon the fact that Xavier possessed _the gift of tongues_. It was
declared that he spoke to the various tribes with ease in their
own languages. This legend of Xavier's miraculous gift of tongues
was especially mentioned in the papal bull, and was solemnly
given forth by the pontiff as an infallible statement to be
believed by the universal Church. Gregory XV having been
prevented by death from issuing the _Bull of Canonization_, it was
finally issued by Urban VIII; and there is much food for
reflection in the fact that the same Pope who punished Galileo,
and was determined that the Inquisition should not allow the
world to believe that the earth revolves about the sun, thus
solemnly ordered the world, under pain of damnation, to believe
in Xavier's miracles, including his "gift of tongues," and the
return of the crucifix by the pious crab. But the legend was
developed still further: Father Bouhours tells us, "The holy man
spoke very well the language of those barbarians without having
learned it, and had no need of an interpreter when he instructed."
And, finally, in our own time, the Rev. Father Coleridge, speaking
of the saint among the natives, says, "He could speak the language
excellently, though he had never learned it."

In the early biography, Tursellinus writes. "Nothing was a
greater impediment to him than his ignorance of the Japanese
tongues; for, ever and anon, when some uncouth expression
offended their fastidious and delicate ears, the awkward speech
of Francis was a cause of laughter." But Father Bouhours, a
century later, writing of Xavier at the same period, says, "He
preached in the afternoon to the Japanese in their language, but
so naturally and with so much ease that he could not be taken for
a foreigner."

And finally, in 1872, Father Coleridge, of the Society of
Jesus, speaking of Xavier at this time, says, "He spoke freely,
flowingly, elegantly, as if he had lived in Japan all his life."

Nor was even this sufficient: to make the legend complete,
it was finally declared that, when Xavier addressed the natives
of various tribes, each heard the sermon in his own language in
which he was born.

All this, as we have seen, directly contradicts not only the
plain statements of Xavier himself, and various incidental
testimonies in the letters of his associates, but the explicit
declaration of Father Joseph Acosta. The latter historian dwells
especially on the labour which Xavier was obliged to bestow on
the study of the Japanese and other languages, and says, "Even if
he had been endowed with the apostolic gift of tongues, he could
not have spread more widely the glory of Christ."[[21]]

It is hardly necessary to attribute to the orators and
biographers generally a conscious attempt to deceive. The simple
fact is, that as a rule they thought, spoke, and wrote in
obedience to the natural laws which govern the luxuriant growth
of myth and legend in the warm atmosphere of love and devotion
which constantly arises about great religious leaders in times
when men have little or no knowledge of natural law, when there
is little care for scientific evidence, and when he who believes
most is thought most meritorious.[[21b]]

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.


    III. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE.

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 schoolboy 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
travellers into domestic animals, and asserting that the peacock
is so favoured by the Almighty that its flesh will not decay, and
that he has tested it and knows this to be a fact. 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 of 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 Osbern 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 patients were cured in the
temples of AEsculapius, so they were cured in the Middle Ages,
and so they are cured now at the shrines of saints. Just as the
ancient miracles were solemnly attested by votive tablets, giving
names, dates, and details, and these tablets hung before the
images of the gods, so the medieval miracles were attested by
similar tablets hung before the images of the saints; and so they
are attested to-day by similar tablets hung before the images of
Our Lady of La Salette or of Lourdes. Just as faith in such
miracles persisted, in spite of the small percentage of cures at
those ancient places of healing, so faith persists to-day,
despite the fact that in at least ninety per cent of the cases at
Lourdes prayers prove unavailing. As a rule, 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 had undoubtedly 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. Medard, of the Ultramontanes
at La Salette and Lourdes, of the Russian Father Ivan at St.
Petersburg, 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 sainted personages
in the early Church and throughout the Middle Ages.[[24]]

There are undoubtedly serious lesions which yield to
profound emotion and vigorous exertion born of persuasion,
confidence, or excitement. The wonderful power of the mind over
the body is known to every observant student. Mr. Herbert Spencer
dwells upon the fact that intense feeling or passion may bring
out great muscular force. Dr. Berdoe reminds us that "a gouty man
who has long hobbled about on his crutch, finds his legs and
power to run with them if pursued by a wild bull"; and that "the
feeblest invalid, under the influence of delirium or other strong
excitement, will astonish her nurse by the sudden accession of
strength."[[25]]

But miraculous cures were not ascribed to persons merely.
Another growth, developed by the early Church mainly from germs
in our sacred books, took shape in miracles wrought by streams,
by pools of water, and especially by relics. Here, too, the old
types persisted, and just as we find holy and healing wells,
pools, and streams in all other ancient religions, so we find in
the evolution of our own such examples as Naaman the Syrian cured
of leprosy by bathing in the river Jordan, the blind man restored
to sight by washing in the pool of Siloam, and the healing of
those who touched the bones of Elisha, the shadow of St. Peter,
or the handkerchief of St. Paul.

St. Cyril, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and other great
fathers of the early Church, sanctioned the belief that similar
efficacy was to be found in the relics of the saints of their
time; hence, St. Ambrose declared that "the precepts of medicine
are contrary to celestial science, watching, and prayer," and we
find this statement reiterated from time to time throughout the
Middle Ages. From this idea was evolved that fetichism which we
shall see for ages standing in the way of medical science.

Theology, developed in accordance with this idea, threw
about all cures, even those which resulted from scientific
effort, an atmosphere of supernaturalism. The vividness with
which the accounts of miracles in the sacred books were realized
in the early Church continued the idea of miraculous intervention
throughout the Middle Ages. The testimony of the great fathers of
the Church to the continuance of miracles is overwhelming; but
everything shows that they so fully expected miracles on the
slightest occasion as to require nothing which in these days
would be regarded as adequate evidence.

In this atmosphere of theologic thought medical science was
at once checked. The School of Alexandria, under the influence
first of Jews and later of Christians, both permeated with
Oriental ideas, and taking into their theory of medicine demons
and miracles, soon enveloped everything in mysticism. In the
Byzantine Empire of the East the same cause produced the same
effect; the evolution of ascertained truth in medicine, begun by
Hippocrates and continued by Herophilus, seemed lost forever.
Medical science, trying to advance, was like a ship becalmed in
the Sargasso Sea: both the atmosphere about it and the medium
through which it must move resisted all progress. Instead of
reliance upon observation, experience, experiment, and thought,
attention was turned toward supernatural agencies.[[27]]


    IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE.--
        "PASTORAL MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT.

Especially prejudicial to a true development of medical
science among the first Christians was their attribution of
disease to diabolic influence. As we have seen, this idea had
come from far, and, having prevailed in Chaldea, Egypt, and
Persia, had naturally entered into the sacred books of the
Hebrews. Moreover, St. Paul had distinctly declared that the gods
of the heathen were devils; and everywhere the early Christians
saw in disease the malignant work of these dethroned powers of
evil. The Gnostic and Manichaean struggles had ripened the
theologic idea that, although at times diseases are punishments
by the Almighty, the main agency in them is Satanic. The great
fathers and renowned leaders of the early Church accepted and
strengthened this idea. Origen said: "It is demons which produce
famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of the air, pestilences; they
hover concealed in clouds in the lower atmosphere, and are
attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen offer to
them as gods." St. Augustine said: "All diseases of Christians
are to be ascribed to these demons; chiefly do they torment
fresh-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, newborn
infants." Tertullian insisted that a malevolent angel is in
constant attendance upon every person. Gregory of Nazianzus
declared that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that
medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the
laying on of consecrated hands. St. Nilus and St. Gregory of
Tours, echoing St. Ambrose, gave examples to show the sinfulness
of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession
of saints.

St. Bernard, in a letter to certain monks, warned them that
to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony neither
with their religion nor with the honour and purity of their
order. This view even found its way into the canon law, which
declared the precepts of medicine contrary to Divine knowledge. As
a rule, the leaders of the Church discouraged the theory that diseases
are due to natural causes, and most of them deprecated a resort to
surgeons and physicians rather than to supernatural means.[[28]]

Out of these and similar considerations was developed the
vast system of "pastoral medicine," so powerful not only through
the Middle Ages, but even in modern times, both among Catholics
and Protestants. As to its results, we must bear in mind that,
while there is no need to attribute the mass of stories regarding
miraculous cures to conscious fraud, there was without doubt, at
a later period, no small admixture of belief biased by
self-interest, with much pious invention and suppression of
facts. Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and
churches in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their
healing powers. Every cathedral, every great abbey, and nearly
every parish church claimed possession of healing relics. While,
undoubtedly, a childlike faith was at the bottom of this belief,
there came out of it unquestionably a great development of the
mercantile spirit. The commercial value of sundry relics was
often very high. In the year 1056 a French ruler pledged
securities to the amount of ten thousand solidi for the
production of the relics of St. Just and St. Pastor, pending a
legal decision regarding the ownership between him and the
Archbishop of Narbonne. The Emperor of Germany on one occasion
demanded, as a sufficient pledge for the establishment of a city
market, the arm of St. George. The body of St. Sebastian brought
enormous wealth to the Abbey of Soissons; Rome, Canterbury,
Treves, Marburg, every great city, drew large revenues from
similar sources, and the Venetian Republic ventured very
considerable sums in the purchase of relics.

Naturally, then, corporations, whether lay or ecclesiastical,
which drew large revenue from relics looked with little favour
on a science which tended to discredit their investments.

Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe can the philosophy of this
development of fetichism be better studied to-day than at
Cologne. At the cathedral, preserved in a magnificent shrine
since about the twelfth century, are the skulls of the Three
Kings, or Wise Men of the East, who, guided by the star of
Bethlehem, brought gifts to the Saviour. These relics were an
enormous source of wealth to the cathedral chapter during many
centuries. But other ecclesiastical bodies in that city were both
pious and shrewd, and so we find that not far off, at the church
of St. Gereon, a cemetery has been dug up, and the bones
distributed over the walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his
Theban band of martyrs! Again, at the neighbouring church of St.
Ursula, we have the later spoils of another cemetery, covering
the interior walls of the church as the bones of St. Ursula and
her eleven thousand virgin martyrs: the fact that many of them, as
anatomists now declare, are the bones of _men_ does not appear in
the Middle Ages to have diminished their power of competing with
the relics at the other shrines in healing efficiency.

No error in the choice of these healing means seems to have
diminished their efficacy. When Prof. Buckland, the eminent
osteologist and geologist, discovered that the relics of St.
Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded
off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the
slightest diminution in their miraculous power.

Other developments of fetich cure were no less discouraging
to the evolution of medical science. Very important among these
was the Agnus Dei, or piece of wax from the Paschal candles,
stamped with the figure of a lamb and Consecrated by the Pope. In
1471 Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of
this fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, tempest,
lightning, and hail, as well as in assisting women in childbirth;
and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture of
it. Even as late as 1517 Pope Leo X issued, for a consideration,
tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription: "This
cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in his
humanity. He who kisses it is preserved for seven days from
fallingsickness, apoplexy, and sudden death."

Naturally, the belief thus sanctioned by successive heads of
the Church, infallible in all teaching regarding faith and
morals, created a demand for amulets and charms of all kinds; and
under this influence we find a reversion to old pagan fetiches.
Nothing, on the whole, stood more Constantly in the way of any
proper development of medical science than these fetich cures,
whose efficacy was based on theological reasoning and sanctioned
by ecclesiastical policy. It would be expecting too much from
human nature to imagine that pontiffs who derived large revenues
from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or priests who derived both
wealth and honours from cures wrought at shrines under their
care, or lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics,
should favour the development of any science which undermined
their interests.[[30]]


          V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES.

Yet a more serious stumbling-block, hindering the beginnings
of modern medicine and surgery, was a theory regarding the
unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. This
theory, like so many others which the Church cherished as
peculiarly its own, had really been inherited from the old pagan
civilizations. So strong was it in Egypt that the embalmer was
regarded as accursed; traces of it appear in Greco-Roman life,
and hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly
strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic
ideas--the recognition of the human body as the temple of the
Holy Spirit. Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus
as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in
similar terms.

But this nobler conception was alloyed with a medieval
superstition even more effective, when the formula known as the
Apostles' Creed had, in its teachings regarding the resurrection
of the body, supplanted the doctrine laid down by St. Paul.
Thence came a dread of mutilating the body in such a way that
some injury might result to its final resurrection at the Last
Day, and additional reasons for hindering dissections in the
study of anatomy.

To these arguments against dissection was now added
another--one which may well fill us with amazement. It is the
remark of the foremost of recent English philosophical
historians, that of all organizations in human history the Church
of Rome has caused the greatest spilling of innocent blood. No
one conversant with history, even though he admit all possible
extenuating circumstances, and honour the older Church for the
great services which can undoubtedly be claimed for her, can deny
this statement. Strange is it, then, to note that one of the main
objections developed in the Middle Ages against anatomical studies
was the maxim that "the Church abhors the shedding of blood."

On this ground, in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade
surgery to monks. Many other councils did the same, and at the
end of the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all;
for then it was that Pope Boniface VIII, without any of that
foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in
an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice
which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the
separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains
it was desired to carry back to their own country.

The idea lying at the bottom of this interdiction was in all
probability that which had inspired Tertullian to make his bitter
utterance against Herophilus; but, be that as it may, it soon
came to be considered as extending to all dissection, and thereby
surgery and medicine were crippled for more than two centuries;
it was the worst blow they ever received, for it impressed upon
the mind of the Church the belief that all dissection is sacrilege,
and led to ecclesiastical mandates withdrawing from the healing art
the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the Middle Ages and
giving up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic charlatans.

So deeply was this idea rooted in the mind of the universal
Church that for over a thousand years surgery was considered
dishonourable: the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure
an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a
better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany
ordered that dishonour should no longer attach to the surgical
profession.[[32]]


            VI. NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.

In spite of all these opposing forces, the evolution of
medical science continued, though but slowly. In the second
century of the Christian era Galen had made himself a great
authority at Rome, and from Rome had swayed the medical science
of the world: his genius triumphed over the defects of his
method; but, though he gave a powerful impulse to medicine, his
dogmatism stood in its way long afterward.

The places where medicine, such as it thus became, could be
applied, were at first mainly the infirmaries of various
monasteries, especially the larger ones of the Benedictine
order: these were frequently developed into hospitals. Many
monks devoted themselves to such medical studies as were
permitted, and sundry churchmen and laymen did much to secure and
preserve copies of ancient medical treatises. So, too, in the
cathedral schools established by Charlemagne and others,
provision was generally made for medical teaching; but all this
instruction, whether in convents or schools, was wretchedly poor.
It consisted not in developing by individual thought and
experiment the gifts of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, but
almost entirely in the parrot-like repetition of their writings.

But, while the inherited ideas of Church leaders were thus
unfavourable to any proper development of medical science, there
were two bodies of men outside the Church who, though largely
fettered by superstition, were far less so than the monks and
students of ecclesiastical schools: these were the Jews and
Mohammedans. The first of these especially had inherited many
useful sanitary and hygienic ideas, which had probably been first
evolved by the Egyptians, and from them transmitted to the modern
world mainly through the sacred books attributed to Moses.

The Jewish scholars became especially devoted to medical
science. To them is largely due the building up of the School of
Salerno, which we find flourishing in the tenth century. Judged
by our present standards its work was poor indeed, but compared
with other medical instruction of the time it was vastly
superior: it developed hygienic principles especially, and
brought medicine upon a higher plane.

Still more important is the rise of the School of Montpellier;
this was due almost entirely to Jewish physicians, and it
developed medical studies to a yet higher point, doing much to
create a medical profession worthy of the name throughout
southern Europe.

As to the Arabians, we find them from the tenth to the fourteenth
century, especially in Spain, giving much thought to
medicine, and to chemistry as subsidiary to it. About the
beginning of the ninth century, when the greater Christian
writers were supporting fetich by theology, Almamon, the Moslem,
declared, "They are the elect of God, his best and most useful
servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their
rational faculties." The influence of Avicenna, the translator of
the works of Aristotle, extended throughout all Europe during the
eleventh century. The Arabians were indeed much fettered by
tradition in medical science, but their translations of
Hippocrates and Galen preserved to the world the best thus far
developed in medicine, and still better were their contributions
to pharmacy: these remain of value to the present hour.[[34]]

Various Christian laymen also rose above the prevailing
theologic atmosphere far enough to see the importance of
promoting scientific development. First among these we may name
the Emperor Charlemagne; he and his great minister, Alcuin, not
only promoted medical studies in the schools they founded, but
also made provision for the establishment of botanic gardens in
which those herbs were especially cultivated which were supposed
to have healing virtues. So, too, in the thirteenth century, the
Emperor Frederick II, though under the ban of the Pope, brought
together in his various journeys, and especially in his crusading
expeditions, many Greek and Arabic manuscripts, and took special
pains to have those which concerned medicine preserved and
studied; he also promoted better ideas of medicine and embodied
them in laws.

Men of science also rose, in the stricter sense of the word,
even in the centuries under the most complete sway of theological
thought and ecclesiastical power; a science, indeed, alloyed with
theology, but still infolding precious germs. Of these were men
like Arnold of Villanova, Bertrand de Gordon, Albert of
Bollstadt, Basil Valentine, Raymond Lully, and, above all, Roger
Bacon; all of whom cultivated sciences subsidiary to medicine,
and in spite of charges of sorcery, with possibilities of
imprisonment and death, kept the torch of knowledge burning, and
passed it on to future generations.[[35]]

From the Church itself, even when the theological atmosphere
was most dense, rose here and there men who persisted in
something like scientific effort. As early as the ninth century,
Bertharius, a monk of Monte Cassino, prepared two manuscript
volumes of prescriptions selected from ancient writers; other
monks studied them somewhat, and, during succeeding ages,
scholars like Hugo, Abbot of St. Denis,--Notker, monk of St.
Gall,--Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg,--Milo, Archbishop of
Beneventum,--and John of St. Amand, Canon of Tournay, did
something for medicine as they understood it. Unfortunately, they
generally understood its theory as a mixture of deductions from
Scripture with dogmas from Galen, and its practice as a mixture
of incantations with fetiches. Even Pope Honorius III did
something for the establishment of medical schools; but he did
so much more to place ecclesiastical and theological fetters upon
teachers and taught, that the value of his gifts may well be
doubted. All germs of a higher evolution of medicine were for
ages well kept under by the theological spirit. As far back as
the sixth century so great a man as Pope Gregory I showed himself
hostile to the development of this science. In the beginning of
the twelfth century the Council of Rheims interdicted the study
of law and physic to monks, and a multitude of other councils
enforced this decree. About the middle of the same century St.
Bernard still complained that monks had too much to do with
medicine; and a few years later we have decretals like those of
Pope Alexander III forbidding monks to study or practise it. For
many generations there appear evidences of a desire among the
more broad-minded churchmen to allow the cultivation of medical
science among ecclesiastics: Popes like Clement III and Sylvester
II seem to have favoured this, and we even hear of an Archbishop
of Canterbury skilled in medicine; but in the beginning of the
thirteenth century the Fourth Council of the Lateran forbade
surgical operations to be practised by priests, deacons, and
subdeacons; and some years later Honorius III reiterated this
decree and extended it. In 1243 the Dominican order forbade
medical treatises to be brought into their monasteries, and
finally all participation of ecclesiastics in the science and art
of medicine was effectually prevented.[[36]]


           VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE.

While various churchmen, building better than they knew,
thus did something to lay foundations for medical study, the
Church authorities, as a rule, did even more to thwart it among
the very men who, had they been allowed liberty, would have
cultivated it to the highest advantage.

Then, too, we find cropping out every where the feeling
that, since supernatural means are so abundant, there is
something irreligious in seeking cure by natural means: ever and
anon we have appeals to Scripture, and especially to the case of
King Asa, who trusted to physicians rather than to the priests of
Jahveh, and so died. Hence it was that St. Bernard declared that
monks who took medicine were guilty of conduct unbecoming to
religion. Even the School of Salerno was held in aversion by
multitudes of strict churchmen, since it prescribed rules for
diet, thereby indicating a belief that diseases arise from
natural causes and not from the malice of the devil: moreover, in
the medical schools Hippocrates was studied, and he had
especially declared that demoniacal possession is "nowise more
divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease." Hence it
was, doubtless, that the Lateran Council, about the beginning of
the thirteenth century, forbade physicians, under pain of
exclusion from the Church, to undertake medical treatment without
calling in ecclesiastical advice.

This view was long cherished in the Church, and nearly two
hundred and fifty years later Pope Pius V revived it by renewing
the command of Pope Innocent and enforcing it with penalties. Not
only did Pope Pius order that all physicians before
admninistering treatment should call in "a physician of the
soul," on the ground, as he declares, that "bodily infirmity
frequently arises from sin," but he ordered that, if at the end
of three days the patient had not made confession to a priest,
the medical man should cease his treatment, under pain of being
deprived of his right to practise, and of expulsion from the
faculty if he were a professor, and that every physician and
professor of medicine should make oath that he was strictly
fulfilling these conditions.

Out of this feeling had grown up another practice, which
made the development of medicine still more difficult--the
classing of scientific men generally with sorcerers and
magic-mongers: from this largely rose the charge of atheism
against physicians, which ripened into a proverb, "Where there
are three physicians there are two atheists."[[37]]

Magic was so common a charge that many physicians seemed to
believe it themselves. In the tenth century Gerbert, afterward
known as Pope Sylvester II, was at once suspected of sorcery when
he showed a disposition to adopt scientific methods; in the
eleventh century this charge nearly cost the life of Constantine
Africanus when he broke from the beaten path of medicine; in the
thirteenth, it gave Roger Bacon, one of the greatest benefactors
of mankind, many years of imprisonment, and nearly brought him to
the stake: these cases are typical of very many.

Still another charge against physicians who showed a talent
for investigation was that of Mohammedanism and Averroism; and
Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark
at Christ."[[38]]

The effect of this widespread ecclesiastical opposition was,
that for many centuries the study of medicine was relegated
mainly to the lowest order of practitioners. There was, indeed,
one orthodox line of medical evolution during the later Middle
Ages: St. Thomas Aquinas insisted that the forces of the body are
independent of its physical organization, and that therefore
these forces are to be studied by the scholastic philosophy and
the theological method, instead of by researches into the
structure of the body; as a result of this, mingled with
survivals of various pagan superstitions, we have in anatomy and
physiology such doctrines as the increase and decrease of the
brain with the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human
vitality with the tides of the ocean, the use of the lungs to fan
the heart, the function of the liver as the seat of love, and
that of the spleen as the centre of wit.

Closely connected with these methods of thought was the
doctrine of _signatures_. It was reasoned that the Almighty must
have set his sign upon the various means of curing disease which
he has provided: hence it was held that bloodroot, on account of
its red juice, is good for the blood; liverwort, having a leaf
like the liver, cures diseases of the liver; eyebright, being
marked with a spot like an eye, cures diseases of the eyes;
celandine, having a yellow juice, cures jaundice; bugloss,
resembling a snake's head, cures snakebite; red flannel, looking
like blood, cures blood-taints, and therefore rheumatism; bear's
grease, being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is
recommended to persons fearing baldness.[[39]]

Still another method evolved by this theological
pseudoscience was that of disgusting the demon with the body
which he tormented--hence the patient was made to swallow or
apply to himself various unspeakable ordures, with such medicines
as the livers of toads, the blood of frogs and rats, fibres of
the hangman's rope, and ointment made from the body of gibbeted
criminals. Many of these were survivals of heathen superstitions,
but theologic reasoning wrought into them an orthodox
significance. As an example of this mixture of heathen with
Christian magic, we may cite the following from a medieval
medical book as a salve against "nocturnal goblin visitors":
"Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat,
henbane, harewort, viper's bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek,
garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel. Put these
worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them
nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much
holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running
water. If any ill tempting occur to a man, or an elf or goblin
night visitors come, smear his body with this salve, and put it on
his eyes, and cense him with incense, and sign him frequently  with
the sign of the cross. His condition will soon be better"[[39b]]

As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with
survivals of pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of
medical science down to the modern epoch. The nominal hostility
of the Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen,
from surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence
surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised
profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of
charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name
"barber-surgeon" was a survival of this. In such surgery, the
application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of
the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled
poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured toothache.[[40]]

The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the
Church continued during century after century, and here probably
lay the main causes of hostility between the Church on the one
hand and the better sort of physicians on the other; namely, in
the fact that the Church supposed herself in possession of something
far better than scientific methods in medicine. Under the sway of
this belief a natural and laudable veneration for the relics of
Christian martyrs was developed more and more into pure fetichism.

Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been,
dipped was used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring
had been dipped cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint
had been dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the
tomb of St. Gall cured tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St.
Christopher, throat diseases; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid,
deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St. Apollonia, toothache; St.
Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the maladies
which bear their names. Even as late as 1784 we find certain
authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a mad dog
shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St. Hubert, and not
waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical cure.[[40]]
In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted by causing
the invalid to drink water in which St. Bernard had washed his
hands. Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a saint, when
steeped in water, were supposed to be especially effiacious in
various diseases. The pulpit everywhere dwelt with unction on the
reality of fetich cures, and among the choice stories collected
by Archbishop Jacques de Vitry for the use of preachers was one
which, judging from its frequent recurrence in monkish
literature, must have sunk deep into the popular mind: "Two lazy
beggars, one blind, the other lame, try to avoid the relics of
St. Martin, borne about in procession, so that they may not be
healed and lose their claim to alms. The blind man takes the lame
man on his shoulders to guide him, but they are caught in the
crowd and healed against their will."[[41]]

Very important also throughout the Middle Ages were the
medical virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had
early Oriental sanction. It is clearly found in Egypt. Pliny
devotes a considerable part of one of his chapters to it; Galen
approved it; Vespasian, when he visited Alexandria, is said to
have cured a blind man by applying saliva to his eves; but the
great example impressed most forcibly upon the medieval mind was
the use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus himself:
thence it came not only into Church ceremonial, but largely into
medical practice.[[41b]]

As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every
country had its long list of saints, each with a special power
over some one organ or disease. The clergy, having great influence
over the medical schools, conscientiously mixed this fetich
medicine with the beginnings of science. In the tenth century,
even at the School of Salerno, we find that the sick were cured
not only by medicine, but by the relics of St. Matthew and others.

Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making
various pious cures fashionable for a time and then allowing them
to become unfashionable. Just as we see the relics of St. Cosmo
and St. Damian in great vogue during the early Middle Ages, but
out of fashion and without efficacy afterward, so we find in the
thirteenth century that the bones of St. Louis, having come into
fashion, wrought multitudes of cures, while in the fourteenth,
having become unfashionable, they ceased to act, and gave place
for a time to the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier and St.
Catherine of Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures until
they too became out of date and yielded to other saints. Just so in
modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost prestige
in some measure, and those of Lourdes have come into fashion.[[42]]

Even such serious matters as fractures, calculi, and difficult
parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its
greatest triumphs, were then dealt with by relics; and to this hour
the _ex votos_ hanging at such shrines as those of St. Genevieve at
Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at Chartres, of
the Virgin at Einsiedeln and Lourdes, of the fountain at La Salette,
are survivals of this same conception of disease and its cure.

So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, and spots
of earth. In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had one such
sacred centre; in England and Scotland there have been many; and
as late as 1805 the eminent Dr. Milner, of the Roman Catholic
Church, gave a careful and earnest account of a miraculous cure
wrought at a sacred well in Flintshire. In all parts of Europe
the pious resort to wells and springs continued long after the
close of the Middle Ages, and has not entirely ceased to-day.

It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional deception
in the origin and maintenance of all fetich cures. Although two
different judicial investigations of the modern miracles at La
Salette have shown their origin tainted with fraud, and though
the recent restoration of the Cathedral of Trondhjem has revealed
the fact that the healing powers of the sacred spring which once
brought such great revenues to that shrine were assisted by
angelic voices spoken through a tube in the walls, not unlike
the pious machinery discovered in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii,
there is little doubt that the great majority of fountain and
even shrine cures, such as they have been, have resulted from a
natural law, and that belief in them was based on honest argument
from Scripture. For the theological argument which thus stood in
the way of science was simply this: if the Almighty saw fit to
raise the dead man who touched the bones of Elisha, why should
he not restore to life the patient who touches at Cologne the
bones of the Wise Men of the East who followed the star of the
Nativity? If Naaman was cured by dipping himself in the waters of
the Jordan, and so many others by going down into the Pool of
Siloam, why should not men still be cured by bathing in pools
which men equally holy with Elisha have consecrated? If one sick
man was restored by touching the garments of St. Paul, why should
not another sick man be restored by touching the seamless coat of
Christ at Treves, or the winding-sheet of Christ at Besancon? And
out of all these inquiries came inevitably that question whose
logical answer was especially injurious to the development of
medical science: Why should men seek to build up scientific
medicine and surgery, when relics, pilgrimages, and sacred
observances, according to an overwhelming mass of concurrent
testimony, have cured and are curing hosts of sick folk in all
parts of Europe?[[43]]

Still another development of the theological spirit, mixed
with professional exclusiveness and mob prejudice, wrought untold
injury. Even to those who had become so far emancipated from
allegiance to fetich cures as to consult physicians, it was
forbidden to consult those who, as a rule, were the best. From a
very early period of European history the Jews had taken the lead
in medicine; their share in founding the great schools of Salerno
and Montpellier we have already noted, and in all parts of Europe
we find them acknowledged leaders in the healing art. The Church
authorities, enforcing the spirit of the time, were especially
severe against these benefactors: that men who openly rejected
the means of salvation, and whose souls were undeniably lost,
should heal the elect seemed an insult to Providence; preaching
friars denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers in state
and church, while frequently secretly consulting them, openly
proscribed them.

Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having been
partially cured of disease of the eyes by St. Martin, sought
further aid from a Jewish physician, with the result that neither
the saint nor the Jew could help him afterward. Popes Eugene IV,
Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to
employ them. The Trullanean Council in the eighth century, the
Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth, the Councils of
Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and
the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in
the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful
to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as
John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against
them and all who consulted them. As late as the middle of the
seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, in
Wurtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physician "on
account of his admirable experience and skill," the clergy of the
city joined in a protest, declaring that "it were better to die
with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil."
Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals, kings, and even
popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated race.[[45]]


      VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH.

The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory
of medicine. Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed
his own diseases to "devils' spells," declaring that "Satan
produces all the maladies which afflict mankind, for he is the
prince of death," and that "he poisons the air"; but that "no
malady comes from God." From that day down to the faith cures of
Boston, Old Orchard, and among the sect of "Peculiar People" in
our own time, we see the results among Protestants of seeking the
cause of disease in Satanic influence and its cure in fetichism.

Yet Luther, with his sturdy common sense, broke away from
one belief which has interfered with the evolution of medicine
from the dawn of Christianity until now. When that troublesome
declaimer, Carlstadt, declared that "whoso falls sick shall use
no physic, but commit his case to God, praying that His will be
done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when you are hungry?" and the
answer being in the affirmative, he continued, "Even so you may
use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink is, or
whatever else we use for the preservation of life." Hence it was,
doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more ready than
others to admit anatomical investigation by proper dissections.[[46]]

Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in
the Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a
French germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of
the royal touch in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and
scrofula, the latter being consequently known as the king's evil.
This mode of cure began, so far as history throws light upon it,
with Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and came down
from reign to reign, passing from the Catholic saint to
Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with
ever-increasing miraculous efficacy.