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NOTES
NOTES TO LECTURE I
THE CESSATION OF THE CHARISMATA
1. W. Yorke Fausset, for example, unduly restricts the number of our Lord's miracles, speaking of the "severe economy with which He exercised such supernatural, or extranatural, powers." (Medicine and the Modern Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, pp. 175 ff-)
2. Xapfopora, or more rarely rveunarcxii, I Cor. 12 : 1, or S6ti(rc<z, Eph. 4 : 8.
3. Charismata: it is a distinctively Pauline term, occurring elsewhere than in Paul's writings only once in Philo (De Alleg. Leg., 2 : 75) and once in the First Epistle of Peter (4 : io), an epistle which, both in doctrine and language, is of quite Pauline character.
4. Cf. C. F. G. Heinrici, Das ersle Sendschreiben des Apostel Paulus an die Korinther, 1880, p. 452: "Mosheim says that Paul sketches in this section a kind of Church Directory. That goes too far: but it at least contains the outlines of a Directory of Worship in his community, for which it was at once made clear that in all matters which concern the value and effect of the worshipping assemblages, caprice and confusion are excluded." W. Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 1013, p. 106, describes very vividly, though on the naturalistic hypothesis explained in note 6 below, what their assemblies were for the Christians of the Apostolic times. "Here in the assemblies of the fellowship," he writes, "there arose for the believers in Christ the consciousness of their unity and peculiar sociological individuality. Scattered during the day in pursuit of their daily callings, subject in an alien world to derision and scorn, they came together in the evening (no doubt as often as possible) for the common sacred meal. They then experienced the miracle of fellowship, the glow of the enthusiasm of a common faith and a common hope, when the Spirit flamed up and encompassed them with a miracle-filled world: prophets and tongues, visionaries and ecstatics began to speak, psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs soared through the room, the forces of brotherly charity awoke in an unsuspected fashion, an unheard of new life pulsated through the crowd of Christians. And over this whole surging enthusiasm the Lord Jesus reigned as the head of His community, immediately present in His power with a tangibility and a certainty which takes the breath away."
5. J. H. Bernard, in an essay on "The Miraculous in Early Christian Literature," published in the volume called The Literature of the Second Century, by F. R. Wynne, J. H. Bernard, and S. Hemphill (New York, James Pott & Co., 1892), p. 145, gives a useful but incomplete exhibit of the references to the exercise of these gifts in the Acts and Epistles: (1) Tongues: Pentecost (Acts 2) and frequently alluded to by Paul in his epistles; (2) Prophecy: frequently called a "sign" of an Apostle, and also alluded to in the cases of Agabus (Acts 1 1 : 28, 21 : 10), the twelve Ephesian disciples on whom Paul laid his hands (Acts 10 : 6), and the four daughters of Philip (Acts 21 : 9); (3) Poison: Paul's viper (Acts *8 : 3); (4) Exorcism: by Paul (Acts 16 : 18); (5) Healing: by Paul in the case of Publius (Acts 28 : 8), by Peter in that of /Eneas (Acts 9 : 33), by Peter's shadow (Acts 5 : 15), by Paul's clothing (Acts 19 : 12), by Peter and John (Acts 3:7); (6) Raising the dead: by Paul, in the case of Eutychus (Acts 20 : 9), by Peter, in the case of Dorcas (Acts 9 : 36); (7) Punitive : in the cases of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:5), and Elymas (Acts 13 : 8); (8) General references to signs and wonders: attesting Paul and Barnabas (Acts 14 : 3), Stephen (Acts 6 : 8) and Philip (Acts 8 : 6).
miraculous character of the charisms on principle, and are prone to represent them as the natural manifestations of primitive enthusiasm. "We, for our part," says P. W. Schmiedel (Encyclopedia Biblica, col. 4776), "are constrained to" "deny the miraculous character of the charisms," "and to account for everything in the phenomena to which a miraculous character has been attributed by the known psychological laws which can be observed in crises of great mental exaltation, whether in persons who deem themselves inspired, or in persons who simply require medical treatment." From this point of view the charismata belong to the primitive church as such, to the church not merely of the Apostolic age, but of the first two centuries. This church is spoken of in contrast to the staid, organized church which succeeded it, as a Charismatic Church, that is to say, in the old sense of the word, as an Enthusiastic Church, a church swept along by an exalted state of mind and feeling which we should look upon to-day as mere fanaticism. "It is easily intelligible," says Schmiedel (col. 4775), "that the joy of enthusiasm over the possession of a new redeeming religion
school, of course, deny the should have expressed itself in an exuberant way, which, according to the ideas of the time, could only be regarded as the miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit." Or, as Adolf Harnack (The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, E. T. I., pp. 250 ff.), puts it, Christianity came into being as "the religion of Spirit and power," and only lost this character and became the religion of form and order toward the end of the second century. A rather sharp expression of this view is given in an (inaugural) address delivered in 1803 by A. C. McGiffert, on Primitive and Catholic Christianity. "The spirit of primitive Christianity," he says (p. 19), "is the spirit of individualism, based on the felt presence of the Holy Ghost. It was the universal conviction of the primitive church that every Christian believer enjoys the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit, through whom he communes with God, and receives illumination, inspiration and strength for his daily needs. The presence of the Spirit was realized by these primitive Christians in a most vivid way. It meant the power to work miracles, to speak with tongues, to utter prophecies (cf. Mark 16 : 1718, and Acts 2 : 16 ff.)." McGiffert is not describing here some Christians, but all Christians; and all Christians not of the Apostolic age, but of the first two centuries: "By the opening of the third century all these conceptions had practically disappeared." An attempt to give this general view a less naturalistic expression may be read at the close of R. Martin Pope's article, "Gifts," in Hastings's Dictionary of the Apostolic Church. "To sum up," he writes (vol. I, p. 451), "an examination of the passages in apostolic literature which treat of spiritual gifts inevitably brings us to the conclusion that the life of the early church was characterized by glowing enthusiasm, simple faith, and intensity of joy and wonder, all resulting from the consciousness of the power of the Holy Spirit; also that this phase of Spirit-effected ministries and service was temporary, as such 'tides of the Spirit' have since often proved, and gave way to a more rigid and disciplined Church Order, in which the official tended more and more to supersede the charismatic rninistries."
It has always been the characteristic mark of a Christian that he is "led by the Spirit of God": "if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His." It has never been the mark of a Christian that because he is "led by the Spirit of God" he is a law to himself and free from the ordinances of God's house. It is very clear from the record of the New Testament that the extraordinary charismata were not (after the very first days of the church) the possession of all Christians, but special supernatural gifts to the few; and it is equally clear from the records of the sub-Apostolic church that they did not continue in it, but only a shadow of them lingered in doubtful manifestations of which we must say, Do not even the heathen so? How little this whole representation accords with the facts the progress of the present discussion will show. For an examination of McGiffert's position, see The Presbyterian Quarterly, April, 1895, pp. 185-194. For a vivid popular description of conditions in the early church as reconstructed from the "Liberal" view-point, and brought into relation to the "enthusiasm" of later centuries, see The Edinburgh Review for January, 1903, pp. 148 ff.
7. R. Martin Pope, as cited, p. 450, speaks of modes of ministry, "in addition to the more stable and authorized modes" mentioned in I Cor. 1 : 4-12, 28, which were of "a special order, perhaps peculiar to the Corinthian Church, with its exuberant manifestations of spiritual energy, and certainly, as the evidence of later Church History shows, of a temporary character, and exhausting themselves (cf. H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the N. T., London, 1909, p. 320) in the Apostolic or sub-Apostolic age." In contrast with these special modes of ministry, he speaks of "the charisms of miracle-working as lasting down to the second century, if we may trust the evidence of Justin Martyr (Apol., 2 : 6)." In the passage of Justin appealed to, as also in section 8, and in Dial., 30, 76, 85, it is said only that demoniacs are exorcised by Christians; cf. G. T. Purves, The Testimony of Justin Martyr to Early Christianity, 1889, p. 159. We shall see that the evidence of the second and subsequent centuries is not such as naturally to base Pope's conclusion. When he adds of these "charisms of miracle-working" that "they never were intended, as the extreme faith-healer of to-day contends, to supersede the efforts of the skilled physician," he is of course right, since they were confined to the Apostolic age, and to a very narrow circle then. But when he goes on to say, "they represent the creative gift, the power of initiating new departures in the normal world of phenomena, which is rooted in faith (see A. G. Hogg, Christ's Message of the Kingdom, Edinburgh, 1911, pp. 62-70); and as such reveal a principle which holds good for all time"—he is speaking wholly without book, and relatively to the charisms of the New Testament equally wholly without meaning.
8. A. Tholuck's figure ("Ueber die Wunder der katholichen Kirche," in Vermischte Schriften, I, 1839, p. 28) is this: "Christ did not appear like the sun in tropical lands, which rises without a dawn and sets without a twilight, but, as millenniums of prophecy preceded Him, so miracles followed Him, and the forces which He first awoke were active in a greater or less measure for a subsequent period. Down into the third century we have credible testimonies of the persistence of the miraculous forces which were active in the first century." A mechanical conception of the miracle-working of both Christ and His followers lurks behind such figures; Christ let loose forces which naturally required some time to exhaust their energies.
9. Miscellaneous Works, London, 1755, vol. I, p. xli.
10. Works, New York, 1856, vol. V, p. 706.
11. E. T., p. 169.
12. Persecution and Tolerance, pp. 55-56.
13. On the literary form of Hennas, see Kerr Duncan Macmillan in Biblical and Theological Studies, by the Faculty of Princeton Seminary, 1012, pp. 494-543. The Didacbi tells of "prophets" who spoke "in the Spirit," as apparently a well-known phenomenon in the churches for which it speaks, and thus implies the persistence of the charism—or rather of the shadow of the charism—of "prophecy." Papias is reported by Philip of Side as having stated on the authority of the daughters of Philip that Barsabas (or Justus) drank serpent's poison inadvertently, and that the mother of Manaim was raised from the dead, as well as that those raised from the dead by Christ lived until the time of Hadrian (cf. Eusebius, H. E., Ill, 39, 9; below, note 25); these events belong, in any event, to the Apostolic age.
14. Cf. H. M. Scott, "The Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament Revelation," in The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, July, 1892, vol. III, pp. 470-488.
15. J. B. Lightfoot discusses these miraculous features of the letter in The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, S. Ignatius, S. Poly carp, vol. I, pp. 598 ff.; cf. Bernard's exhibition of their natural character op. cit., p. 168. H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 10 ff., remarks: "thus, out of the entire series of authentic Passiones there remains as an outspoken miracle-martyrdom only the Acts of Polycarp: and even they are not unquestionably such."
16. Justin Martyr, by the Bishop of Lincoln, ed. 3,1853, p. 121.
17. Cf. Blunt, On the Early Fathers, p. 387.
18. Doctor Hey, in Tertullian, by the Bishop of Lincoln, ed. 2, 1826, p. 168.
19. Cf. what is said of Justin's and Irenaeus's testimony by Gilles P:son Wetter, Charis, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des illtesten Christentums, 1913, p. 185: "We can still hear of x^p^iuna in the church, in Justin and Irenseus. . . . Justin and Irenseus are probably the latest witnesses of a prophetic gift of grace in the church. ... It is generally wholly uncertain whether we can still really find 'gifts of grace' in the church in great amount in the time of Justin and Irenseus. A declaration like that in Justin, Dial., 82, 1,
irapd 7(kp ij/up Hal M^XP' *vp rpotp-rrruti. xapw/iard iarir, testifies rather to
the contrary. If both steadily speak of 'we' or of the 'church' or the like, yet it is possible that they refer by this to the great spiritual operations in the earliest period of Christianity, of which we read in the Gospels, in Acts, and perhaps in some of the Apocrypha. These were to them certainly valuable 'proofs' of the truth of the divine origin of Christianity (cf. for this e. g., Justin, Apol., I, 58; Theophilus, ad Aut., Ill, 16 and 26; Minucius Felix, Octavius, 20 and 23)."
20. Bernard, as cited, p. 147, remarks that "with a few notable exceptions," "there is no trace up to the end of the second century" —and the same, we may add, is true of the third—"of any miraculous gifts still existing in the primitive church, save those of prophecy and healing, including exorcism, both of which are frequently mentioned." With reference to prophecy he adduces the warning against false prophets in Hennas (Com. 11) and the Didach£, together with Justin's assertion that prophetic gifts continued even —the "even" is perhaps significant—to his day (Dial., 315 B). As to healing, he adduces the general assertions of Justin (Dial., 258 A) and Origen (Cont. Cels., Ill, 24). With respect to exorcisms, he appeals to repeated references by Justin (Apol., 45 A; Dial., 247 C, 302 A, 311 B, 350 B, 361 C) and Tertullian (Apol., 23, 37, 43; De Sped., 2; De Test. Anim., 3; Ad Scap., 2; De Corona, 11; De Idol., 11). He remarks that these Fathers all believed in magic and betray a feeling that the miracles of their day were not quite the same kind of thing which happened in the New Testament times (Tertullian, De Rud., c. 21; Origen, Cont. Cels., I, 2).
21. The prominence of exorcisms in the notices of marvellous occurrences in these Fathers belongs to the circumstances of the times, and would call for no special notice except for the use which has been made of it in recent discussions (cf. S. McComb in Religion and Medicine, by Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, and Isador H. Coriat, 1008, pp. 295-299). In point of fact, Christianity came into a world that was demon-ridden, and, as Harnack remarks (The Expansion of Christianity, E. T., 1004, vol. I, p. 158), "no flight of the imagination can form any idea of what would have come over the ancient world or the Roman Empire during the third century had it not been for the church." In conflict with this gigantic evil which dominated the whole life of the people, it is not to be wondered at that the Christians of the second and subsequent centuries, who were men of their time, were not always able to hold the poise which Paul gave them in the great words: "We know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no God but one." Accordingly, as Harnack points out, "from Justin downwards, Christian literature is crowded with allusions to exorcisms, and every large church, at any rate, had exorcists" (p. 162). But this is no proof that miracles were wrought, except this great miracle, that, in its struggle against the deeply rooted and absolutely pervasive superstition—"the whole world and the circumambient atmosphere," says Harnack (p. 161), "were filled with devils; not merely idolatry, but every phase and form of life was ruled by them: they sat on thrones; they hovered over cradles; the earth was literally a hell"—Christianity won, and expelled the demons not only from the tortured individuals whose imagination was held captive by them, but from the life of the people, and from the world. The most accessible discussion of the subject (written, of course, from his own point of view) may be found in Harnack, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 152-180. An article really on the Christian doctrine of angels has somehow strayed into the bounds of the comprehensive article, "Demons and Spirits," in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, and thus deprived the reader of the description which he would naturally look for in that place of the ideas of demons and spirits which have been prevalent among Christians.
22. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, ed. 1884, vol. II, 117 ff., sums up the testimony of this period as follows: "It is remarkable that the genuine writings of the ante-Nicene church are more free from miraculous and superstitious elements than the annals of the Nicene age and the Middle Ages. . . . Most of the statements of the apologists are couched in general terms, and refer to the extraordinary cures from demoniacal possession . . . and other diseases. . . . Justin Martyr speaks of such occurrences as frequent . . . and Origen appeals to his own personal observation, but speaks in another place of the growing scarcity of miracles. . . . Tertullian attributes many if not most of the conversions of his day to supernatural dreams and visions, as does also Origen, although with more caution. But in such psychological phenomena it is exceedingly difficult to draw the line of demarcation between natural and supernatural causes, and between providential interpositions and miracles proper. The strongest passage on this subject is found in Irenxus, who, in contending against the heretics, mentions, besides the prophecies and miraculous cures of demoniacs, even the raising of the dead among contemporary events taking place in the Catholic Church; but he specifies no particular case or name; and it should be remembered also, that his youth still bordered almost on the Johannean age."
When Schaff cites Origen as speaking of a "growing scarcity of miracles," his language is not exact. What Origen says, is: "But there were signs from the Holy Spirit at the beginning of Christ's teaching, and after His ascension He exhibited more, but subsequently fewer. Nevertheless, even now still there are traces of them with a few who have had their souls purified by the gospel." Here, there is a recognition of the facts that miracles were relatively few after the Apostolic age, and that in Origen's day there were very few indeed to be found. But there is no assertion that they had gradually ceased; only an assertion that they had practically ceased. "The age of miracles, therefore," comments Harnack justly, "lay for Origen in earlier days." "Eusebius is not the first (in the third book of his History) to look back upon the age of the Spirit and of power as the bygone heroic age of the church, for Origen had already pronounced this judgment on the past from an impoverished present." (The Expansion of Christianity, as cited, p. 257, and note 2.)
23. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xv, § m, ed. Smith, 1887, vol. II, pp. 178 ff.
24. These points are accordingly duly intimated by Milman in his note on Gibbon's passage. For the former of them he appeals to Middleton {Works, I, p. 59) as sponsor; for the latter to Douglas (Criterion, p. 389).
25. H. K, III, 39, 9.
26. Bernard, op. cil., p. 159, remarks justly that Papias "virtually implies that he himself never saw any such occurrence, his only knowledge of 'miracles' of this kind being derived from hearsay."
27. Cf. Bernard, as cited: "If they were frequent, if he had ever seen one himself, he would have told us of it, or to speak more accurately, Eusebius would not have selected for quotation a second-hand story, if the direct evidence of an eye-witness was on record." How did Eusebius, then, understand Irenaeus? As testifying to a common occurrence in his time? Or, even to a single instance within his own knowledge? This seems unlikely.
28. H. E., V, 7, 1 f.
29. I : 13: "Then, as to your denying .that the dead are raised —for you say, 'Show me one who has been raised from the dead, that seeing I may believe'—first, what great thing is it if you believe when you have seen the thing done? Then, again, you believe that Hercules, who burned himself, lives; and that .Aesculapius, who was struck with lightning, was raised; and do you disbelieve the things that are told you by God? But, suppose I should show you a dead man raised and alive, even this you would disbelieve. God indeed exhibits to you many proofs that you may believe Him. For, consider, if you please, the dying of seasons, and days, and nights, how these also die and rise again," etc.
30. De Pudicilia, ai: "And so, if it were agreed that even the blessed Apostles had granted any such indulgence, the pardon of which comes from God, not from man, it would have been competent for them to have done so, not in the exercise of discipline, but of power. For they both raised the dead, which God alone can do; and restored the debilitated to their integrity, which none but Christ can do; nay they inflicted plagues, too, which Christ would not do, for it did not beseem Him to be severe who had come to suffer. Smitten were both Ananias and Elymas—Ananias with death, Elymas with blindness—in order that by this very fact it might be proven that Christ had had the power of doing even such (miracles)."
31. Adv. Bceer., II, 31 : 2: Speaking of the followers of one Simon, and their inability to work miracles, Irenaeus proceeds (Bernard's translation): "They can neither give sight to the blind, nor hearing to the deaf, nor put to flight all demons, except those which are sent into others by themselves, if they can, indeed, even do this. Nor can they cure the weak, or the lame, or the paralytic, or those that are troubled in any other part of the body, as often happens to be done in respect of bodily infirmity. Nor can they furnish effective remedies for those external accidents which may occur. And so far are they from raising the dead as the Lord raised them, and the Apostles did by means of prayer, and as when frequently in the brotherhood, the whole church in the locality, having made petition with much fasting and prayer, the spirit of the dead one has returned (trtarphfii), and the man has been given back {(x^plaOv) to the prayers of the saints—(so far are they from doing this) that they do not believe that it can possibly be done, and they think that resurrection from the dead means a rejection of the truth of their tenets." Adv. Hceer., II, 32 : 4: "Those who are in truth the Lord's disciples, having received grace from Him, do in His name perform (miracles) for the benefit of other men, according to the gift which each one has received from Him. For some certainly and truly drive out demons, so that those who have been cleansed from the evil spirits frequently believe and are in the church. Others have foreknowledge of things to come, and visions, and prophetic warnings. Others heal the sick by imposition of their hands, and they are restored to health. Yea, moreover, as we said, even the dead were raised and abode
with US many years (faipBrpav Kalirapi^iravvbp^tuplKamtttTtai).
What more shall I say? It is not possible to tell the number of the gifts which the church throughout the world has received from God in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and which she exerts day by day for the welfare of the nations, neither deceiving any, nor taking any reward for such. For as freely as she hath received from God, so freely doth she minister." It is quite clear that in II, 32 : 4 Irenaeus throws the raisings from the dead well into the past. This is made evident not only from the past tenses employed, which are markedly contrasted with the present tenses used in the rest of the passage, but also from the statement that those who were thus raised had lived after their resuscitation a considerable number of years, which shows that recent resuscitations are not in view. The passage in II, 31 : 2, ambiguous in itself, is explained by II, 32 : 4, which Irenaeus himself represents as a repetition of it ("as we said"). It appears, then, that in neither passage has Irenaeus recent instances in view—and there is no reason why the cases he has in mind may not have occurred during the lifetime of the Apostles or of Apostolic men.
32. As cited, p. 164. Cf. Douglas, as cited in note 24.
33. Th. Trede, Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1001, pp. 83-88, brings together the instances from the literature. No doubt the heathen did not really believe in these resuscitations, at least when they were instructed men. It did not require a Lucian to scoff at them: Minucius Felix (Octavius, chap. 11 ad fin.) makes his Caecilius remark that despite the long time that has passed away, the innumerable ages that have flowed by, no single individual has returned from the dead, either by the fate of Protesilaus, with permission to sojourn even a few hours, or to serve as an example to men. The Christians, he asserts, in teaching a resurrection from the dead, have but revamped the figments of an unwholesome belief with which deceiving poets have trifled in sweet verses.
34. Cf. Erwin Rohde, Der'griechische Roman und seine VorlSufer, 1000, p. 287, note 1. Also Origen, Contra Celsum, 2 : 16, 48-58. The famous physician Asclepiades is said to have met a funeral procession and detected that the corpse was still living (Pliny, Nat. Hist., 7 : 124; cf. Weinreich, p. 173). Apuleius, Flor., 19, relates this as an actual resuscitation. The texts may be conveniently consulted in Paul Fiebig, Antike Wundergeschichten, etc., io11.
35. Cf. F. C. Baur, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, p. 140.
36. Antike Heilungswunder, 1900, pp. 171-174.
37. Weinreich, as cited, p. 171, note 1; R. Reitzenstein, Hellenistische Wundererzdhlungen, 1906, p. 41, note 3.
38. Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, etc., with an English translation by F. C. Conybeare (The Loeb Classical Library), vol. I, 1912, pp. 4S7 ff.
39. Cf. E. von Dobschtttz, "Der Roman in der Altchristlichen Literatur," in the Deutsche Rundschau, vol. CXI, April, 1902, p. 105. He remarks: "To that we owe it that so many of these legends have been preserved."
40. Von Dobschtttz, as cited, p. 88. "I think that I may venture to say," says Reitzenstein, op. cit., p. 55, "that the literary model of the Christian Acts of the Apostles was supplied by the Aretalogies of prophets and philosophers. We should not think merely of the few which accident has preserved for us—and that exclusively in literary reworkings or parodies; a certain importance attaches to the connection of one of these essentially anonymous miracle-stories already with Athenodorus, the Stoic teacher of Augustus."
41. Perhaps we may roughly represent these two things by "romance" and "fable."
42. Op. cit., p. 97.
43. As cited, p. 100.
44. As cited, pp. 100 ff.
45. On Greek and Latin fiction, the short article by Louis H. Gray in Hastings's Encyclopadia of Religion and Ethics, vol. VI, pp. 6-8, may be consulted, and the work on which Gray chiefly depends, F. M. Warren, History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century, 1800, pp. 21 ff. A good brief account of Greek and early Christian novels is given by T. R. Glover, in the last chapter of his Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, 1901, pp. 357-386. The German replica of this is Von Dobschutz's essay already mentioned. The great work on the Greek romances is Erwin Rohde's, already mentioned, by the side of which should be placed E. Schwartz, Ftinf VortrUge uber den Griechen Roman, 1896, and A. Chassang, Histoire du Roman dans VAntiquiU Grecque et Latine, 1862. Reitzenstein, in the book already mentioned, seeks to introduce more precision into the treatment of literary forms. See also the concluding chapter on Die Bekenner-vita in E. Gtinter's Legenden-Studien, 1906 (c/. also his Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910), and cf. G. H. Gerould, Saints' Legends, 1916, pp. 33 f.
46. The use to which this opinion, become traditional, is put, may be illustrated by its employment by Charles Herman Lea, A Plea . . . for Christian Science, 1015, p. 58, and its similar employment by Samuel McComb, Religion and Medicine, 1008, pp. 295 ff. The former writes: "In the early years of the Christian Church, this command to heal the sick appears to have been fulfilled to a considerable degree, and history records that Christian healing was practiced until the end of the third century. Then it appears to have been gradually discontinued, as the spiritual life of the church declined, until the power was entirely lost sight of in the gross materialism that culminated in the union of Church and State. That the power to heal is not generally possessed by the 'Christian' Church to-day is certain; nor could anything be more misleading than the idea, sometimes propounded from the pulpits, that the ability to heal was withdrawn because it became no longer necessary for the church to give such evidence of God's power, and of their understanding of Him. For this very power was the evidence that Jesus Christ himself gave as proof of the truth of his teaching. Hence, one of the questions that the churches of Christendom need to face to-day is, 'Why are we unable to fulfil our Lord's clear and express command?' Is it because they do not correctly understand his teaching, or because they do not consider obedience to him, in this respect, necessary? Or has the church not yet risen above the materialism that marked its decadence in the early centuries of its history?" "Perhaps nowhere in history," writes McComb, "can we find the power of faith to heal disorders of a semi-moral and semi-nervous character so strikingly illustrated as in the early centuries of the church's existence. The literature of the ante-Nicene period is permeated with a sense of conquest over sickness, disease, and moral ills of every kind. . . . Gibbon, in his famous fifteenth chapter, mentions as the third cause of the spread of Christianity, 'the miraculous powers of the primitive church,' among which he names the expulsion of demons, but he dismisses the whole matter with a scoff as a product of superstition. Wider knowledge now shows that the historian's skepticism was quite unjustified. There is abundant testimony that one of the most important factors of the early propaganda of the Christian faith was an especial power which Christians seemed to have over various psychical disturbances. . . . Even so late as the time of Augustine, we find a belief in the healing power of faith still existent. In his C*7y of God he describes various healing-wonders of which he was an eye-witness, and which were done in the name of Christ." The entire angle of vision here is unhistorical. r • ■
47. John Lightfoot (Works, Pittman's 8 vol. ed., vol. Ill, p. 204) suggests as the reason for these two exceptions: "The Holy Ghost at this its first bestowing upon the Gentiles is given in the like manner as it was at its first bestowing on the Jewish nation,— namely, by immediate infusion; at all other times you find mention of it, you find mention of imposition of hands used for it."
48. Acts 9 : 12-17 is no exception, as is sometimes said; Ananias worked a miracle on Paul but did not confer miracle-working powers. Paul's own power of miracle-working was original with him as an Apostle, and not conferred by any one.
49. Schaff-Herzog, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1st edition, vol. II, p. 873.
50. The connection of the "signs and wonders and manifold powers of the Holy Ghost" in some particular fashion with the first generation of Christians—"them that heard" the Lord, that is to say, at least the Apostolic generation, possibly specifically the Apostles—seems to be implied in Heb. 2 : 4. That Paul regards the charismata as "credentials of the Apostolic mission" (possibly even Rom. 1: 11 may be cited here) is clear even to J. A. MacCulloch (Hastings's E R E., VIII, p. 683 b), although he himself doubts the soundness of this view. A. Schlatter (Hastings's Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, I, 577 a) says with great distinctness: "The Gospels, the Book of Acts, and the utterances of St. Paul regarding his 'signs' (II Cor. 12 : 12), all show distinctly that miracles were intimately related to the Apostolic function."
51. The Ecclesiastical History of the Second and Third Centuries, Illustrated from the Writings of TertuUian, 1825; 2d ed., 1826; 3d ed., 1845, pp. 98 ft*.
52. Bernard, as cited, p. 130, gives his acceptance to Kaye's view, speaking of "that power which in the days of the Apostles was confined to them and those on whom they had laid their hands." B. F. Manire, in an article on the "Work of the Holy Spirit," in The New Christian Quarterly, IV, 2, p. 38 (April, 1895), gives exceptionally clear expression to the facts: "The matter of imparting the Holy Ghost through the laying on of their hands, belonged exclusively, as it appears to me, to the Apostles, and therefore passed away with them. . . . Others besides the Apostles could preach the Gospel 'with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven,' and could work miracles in confirmation of their testimony; but only the Apostles by the imposition of their own hands could impart the Holy Spirit to others in its wonder-working power. To me it appears that the bestowal of this power on the Apostles was the highest testimonial of their official character and authority." Paton J. Gloag comments on Acts 8 : 15-16 thus: "By the Holy Ghost here is not to be understood the ordinary or sanctifying influences of the Spirit. The Samaritans, in the act of believing the gospel, received the Holy Ghost in this sense. . . . The miraculous influences of the Spirit, which are manifested by speaking with tongues and prophesyings, are here meant. As Calvin remarks, 'He speaks not in this place of the common grace of the Spirit, whereby God regenerates us that we may be His children, but of those singular gifts whereby God would have certain endowed, at the beginning of the Gospel, to beautify the Kingdom of Christ.' But the question arises, Why could not Philip bestow the Holy Ghost? . . . The common opinion appears to be the correct one —namely, that Philip could not bestow the Holy Ghost because he was not an Apostle. This, though not expressly stated, yet seems implied in the narrative. So Chrysostom and Epiphanius among the fathers, and Grotius, Lightfoot, DeWette, Baumgarten, Meyer, Olshausen, and Wordsworth among the moderns." John Lightfoot holds that the charismata were not conferred indiscriminately on all but only on a select few, to endow them (a plurality in each church) for the office of "minister." But that these gifts were conferred only by laying on the Apostles' hands he is clear. Cf. Works, ed. Pittman, vol. Ill, p. 30: "To give the Holy Ghost was a peculiar prerogative of the Apostles"; vol. Ill, p. 194, commenting on Acts 8: "Philip baptized Samaritans and did great wonders among them, but could not bestow the Holy Ghost upon them: that power belonged only to the Apostles; therefore Peter and John are sent thither for that purpose."
53. Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, E. T., 1898, p. 368; cf. pp. 3SS ff
54. Institutes of the Christian Religion, E. T., by John Allen; ed. Philadelphia, 1909, vol. I, pp. 26 ff.: "Their requiring miracles of us is altogether unreasonable; for we forge no new Gospel, but retain the very same whose truth was confirmed by all the miracles ever wrought by Christ and the Apostles"—and so forth.
55. Gereformeerde Dogmatie!?, I, pp. 363 f.
56. On Wesley's relations with Middleton, see F. J. Snell, Wesley and Methodism, 1900, pp. 151 ff.
57. Free Answer to Dr. Middleton's Free Inquiry, etc., 1749.
58. A Vindication of the Miraculous Powers which Subsisted in the Three First Centuries of the Christian Church, 1750. Chapman's Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church, 1752 (following up his Discovery of the Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church, 1747) came too late to be included in Middleton's Vindication.
59. The literature of the subject has been intimated in the course of the lecture. By the side of Middleton's Free Inquiry may be placed J. Douglas, The Criterion; or rules by which the True Miracles recorded in the New Testament are distinguished from the Spurious miracles of Pagans and Papists, 1752, new edd. 1857, etc., 1867; and Isaac Taylor, Ancient Christianity, 1839; ed. 4,1844, vol. II, pp. 233-365. Cf. also Lecture VIII in J. B. Mozley, Eight Lectures on Miracles, 1865. Of J. H. Newman's Two Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, some account will be given in the next lecture. By its side should be placed Horace BushnelTs eloquent argument for the continuation of miracles in the church in the fourteenth chapter of bis Nature and the Supernatural (1858; ed. 4,1859, pp. 446-492)
NOTES TO LECTURE II
PATHISTIC AND MEDIEVAL MARVELS
r. Eorce Sabbatka, vol. II, pp. 413 ft.
2. Gregory's Panegyric on Gregory Thaumaturgus is described and characterized, and its true character shown, by Th. Trede, Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1900, pp. 144 ff.: "Our declaimer attains the climax of rhetorical fire-works in his Christian Panegyric on Gregory Thaumaturgus." In this connection Trede makes some very illuminating remarks on the transference into the church of the bad traditions of the heathen rhetorical schools in which so many of the Christian leaders had their training.
3. Cap. 8.
4. The confidence which Augustine reposed in these narratives is perhaps most strongly shown in such an incidental remark as meets us in the City of God, 22 : 28. He is speaking of Plato and Cornelius Labeo, and reporting what they say of resuscitations. He remarks: "But the resurrection which these writers instance resembles that of those persons whom we have ourselves known to rise again, and who came back indeed to this life, but not so as never to die again." Augustine supposes himself to have actually known people once dead to have come back to this life; he has no doubt of it at all.
5. Raising the dead, so common an occurrence in Augustine's day, seems later to have passed somewhat out of fashion. John of Salisbury, at all events, when speaking of the miracles wrought at the tomb of Thomas a Becket (t 1170), includes this among them, but speaks of it as something new to experience: "And (a thing unheard of from the days of our fathers) the dead are raised" (E. A. Abbott, St. Thomas of Canterbury, 1898, I, p. 227, cf. II, p. 17, and, in general, the Index sub voe., "Death, Restoration from"). Later, however, this miracle recovered its popularity. No less than fourteen instances of it are attributed to Francis Xavier— although he himself, unfortunately, died without knowledge of them. Andrew D. White (The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, ed. 1896, vol. II, p. 17) sums up the facts thus: "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 such stories 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 he had raised two persons; then in various authors— Emmanuel 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 Bonhours 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." The references to Bonhours are given thus: The Life of St. Francis Xavier, by Father Dominic Bonhours, translated by James Dryden, Dublin, 1838, pp. 69, 82, 93, in, 218, 307, 316, 321. For the repeated occurrence of raisings of the dead in mediaeval legend, see H. Giinter, Die chtistliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, pp. 25, 32, 43, 47, 191; it is, in spite of John of Salisbury's ignorance of it, of common occurrence in the legends. An instructive instance is repeated to us by H. Delehaye, Les Ligendes Hagiographiques, 1905, p. 101: "When St. Bernard was preaching the crusade in the diocese of Constance, an archer in the following of the Duke of Zahringcn jeered at his preaching and at the preacher himself, saying, 'He cannot work miracles any more than I can.' When the saint proceeded to lay his hands on the sick, the mocker saw it, and suddenly fell over as if dead; he remained a considerable time without consciousness. Alexander of Cologne adds: 'I was close to him when the thing happened. . . . We called the Abb6, and this poor man could not get up until Bernard came, made a prayer and lifted him up.' No single eye-witness says a word which can make ua think of a resuscitation of a dead man. Yet, a century later, Herbert, author of a collection of the miracles of St. Bernard, Conrad, author of the Exordium, and Cesar of Heisterbach, affirm that the archer was dead and the saint restored him to life." Delehaye refers to G. Httffer, Der heilige Bernard von Clairvaux, vol. I (Munster, 1886), pp. 92, 182.
6. 25 : 47.
7. § 34: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. Ill, p. 364.
8. I. 14. 5.
9- I. 13, 7
10. Ibid.
11. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, p. 346.
12. Tract, in Joh., 13, (15): Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. VII, p. 93. When he says: "Contra istos, ut sic loquar, mirabiliarios cautum me fecit Deus meus, he is obviously using a contemptuous term.
13. City of God, 22, 10, at the end.
14. On Augustine's doctrine of miracles, see especially, Friedrich Nitzsch, Auguslinus' Lehre vom Wunder, 1865; especially pp. 32-35 on the "Continuance of Miracles in the Church," and pp. 35-37, "Miracles outside the limits of the Revelation-history and the Church."
15. C»7y of God, 22, 8.
16. Cf. T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, 1901, pp. 40, 287.
17. How little the abounding miracles of the lives of the saints were noted—or we should better say, known—in mediaeval times, we may learn from a remark of H. GUnter's (Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 176 f.): "For the proper estimate of these things we must bear in mind that contemporary profane history very essentially corrects the literature of the Lives: the very names which here seem to move the world, scarcely receive bare mention there: of the flood of miracles in the Lives there is not even a trace. The Chronicles and Annalists were nevertheless children of those times, and receptive enough for everything that was miraculous. The notion which might occur to one, that the Chronicles, the newspapers of the day, purposely left the domain of the saints to biography and romance, is clearly untenable. He who reads Widukind's History of the Saxons, the Continuatio Regionis, the Chronicle of Thietmar of Merceberg, will not fail to learn of the saints of the Saxon period. Thietmar's description of the saint-bishop and ascetic Eido of Meissen (VIII, c. 25) is a true classic. But saints in the same sense of the legend, these figures are not."
18. Dial., Ill, 5.
19. Dial., I, 26.
20. Cf. T. R. Glover, as cited, p. 289: "Sulpicius says, and it is not improbable that he is presenting Martin's view, as well as his own, that to doubt these marvels of healing, etc., is to diminish the credibility of the gospel, 'for when the Lord Himself testified that such works as Martin did were to be done by all the faithful, he who does not believe Martin did them, does not believe Christ said so.' Perhaps the logic is not above suspicion, but it is clear that it was held Martin's miracles were proven no less by the words of the gospel than by ocular evidence." J. H. Newman had already made much the same remark, Two Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, p. 209: "Sulpicius almost grounds his defence of St. Martin's miracles on the antecedent force of this text." It would be a curious and not unprofitable study to ascertain how large a part this spurious text has had in producing spurious miracles in all ages of the church.
21. Ep. 22 : 9; Nicene and Posl-Nicene Fathers, p. 438.
22. Horn, on I Cor. 6 : 2, 3 (Horn. 6, vol. X, p. 45).
23. Horn. 8, in Col. No. 5 (vol. XI, p. 387).
24. Cf. e. g. Horn. 24 in Joan. (vol. VIII, p. 138); Horn, in Iscr. Act. (vol. Ill, p. 60).
25. De. Sacerd., lib. 4; Opera, ed. Sav., vol. VI, p. 35.
26. Ep. 4 : 80.
27. In Evang., 2, 29.
28. Isid. Hispal. Sententiarum lib. 1, cap. 27; ed. Col. Agripp., 1617, p. 424.
29. Serm. i. de Ascens., 2.
30. The Patristic citations in this paragraph have been taken largely, without verification, from Newman, op. cit., pp. 13s ff., 208, and W. Goode, The Modern Claims to the Possession of the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit, 1834, pp. 4 ff., 275 ff. Cf. also A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, I, pp. 35 ff. Such passages abound. H. Gunter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 77 ff., very naturally raises the question whether the legends of the Middle Ages really wished to be believed, and whether they were believed. His conclusion is that there can be no doubt that they were put forth as literal facts, but that the credit accorded to them by men of independent mind left certainly something to be desired. "No one of the theologians of importance," he remarks (p. 82), "ever made an attempt to support scientific speculations by appeals to legendary tales as historical evidence, no matter how near at hand an illustration from them lay." Cf. what he says in Legenden-Studien, 1906, p. 132: "I think it is not by accident, when Cassian observes that the monks of his time—he died in 435—were no longer subjected to the power of the demons as the 'Fathers' were. Similarly Gregory the Great later finds that miracles do not manifest themselves now as in the past (Dial., I, c. 12). And the same reflection is repeated dozens of times in the literature of the Middle Ages. Is there not a sufficient suggestion in this?"
31. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Smith, 1887, vol. II, p. 180, note 81.
32. Op. cit., p. 220.
33. Among the many anomalies of the legends of the saints, the question asks itself why the saints, many of whom had severe sufferings to undergo, many of whom were lifelong invalids, never rescued or healed themselves by the exercise of their miraculous powers? Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, when in extremities, needed to be saved from without—by the intervention of Mary, who gave him her breast. Christina Mirabilis, it is true, nourished herself with her own virgin milk; but this is an exception to the general rule. It is a proverb, "Physician, heal thyself"; yet even the most diseased of the saints did not do it—and all of them apparently died. That the Martyr-heroes of the Martyr-aretalogies ultimately succeeded in dying is a standing wonder. They are delivered apparently from every imaginable, and often unimaginable, peril, at the cost of every imaginable, and often unimaginable, miracle; fire will not burn them, nor steel cut their flesh; the sea will not drown them, nor will chains bind them. They bear a charmed life and walk unscathed through every conceivable danger. And then suddenly their heads are simply chopped off as if it were the most natural thing in the world—and they are dead. The reader catches his breath and cannot believe his eyes: the exceeding sang-froid with which the author kills at the end those whom nothing can harm in the meantime produces nothing less than an enormous anticlimax. Has the miracle-power of the martyr given suddenly out—been all used up in its wonderful action hitherto? Or is it merely that the invention of the author has been exhausted, and he has to close thus lamely because he can think of nothing else to say? We have something of the same feeling when we contemplate sick saints healing others with wonderful facility, while apparently wholly without power to heal themselves. Is it adequate to say with Percy Dearmer (Body and Soul, p. 133): "And often, when they healed others they did not spare the strength to heal themselves; often they endured without thinking of themselves the infirmities which they could not bear to see unhelped in others. They thought so much of One of whom it is said, 'He saved others; Himself He cannot save.'" The suggested comparison with Christ is, of course, offensive. The sufferings of the saints are not expiatory sacrifices offered to God in behalf of a sinful world—although it must be sadly acknowledged that many of them (e. g., the Stigmatics) fancied they were. Christ could not save Himself, not because He lacked the power to do so, but because the work which He came to do was precisely suffering—to give His life a ransom for many. There was no more reason in the nature of things, on the other hand, why the saints should suffer than others. And the description which Dearmer gives of the saints is not true to life, in many instances at least. They do not seem to have borne their sufferings without thinking of them; they apparently thought a great deal of them, either to bewail them or, by a spiritual perversion, to glory in them as a mark of spiritual distinction. And how does it do to say in one sentence, "The saints have always seemed to regard their healing works as easy things, done by the way and out of compassion"; and then in the next, "They did not spare the strength to heal themselves"? If it cost them nothing to heal —if they did it with a passing wave of the hand—why should they have not healed themselves? The sicknesses of the saints is a standing puzzle.
34. Horstman, Richard Rolle of Hampole, vol. II, p. xxviii.
35. Cf. H. Gunter, Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, p. 187, who cites the Vita of St. Gongolf at the end of the ninth century, and Gislebert of Sens, about 1150, as declaring that in the absence of good merit miracles are nothing, since they are performed by many evil men; as also the archdeacon Robert of Ostrevand in his life of Aybert, of the same age, who remarks that the virtue of love which belongs to the good alone is of far more worth than the virtue of miracles which belongs alike to good and evil. Cf. also the like citation from Thomas of Reuil. Gunter refers on the general matter to L. Zopf, Das Heilegen-Leben in 10 Jahrh. in "Beitr&ge z. Kulturgesch. des Mittelalters u. des Renaissance," herausgegeben von W. G8tz, Heft 1 (1008), pp. 62 f., pp. 181 ff.
36. This is of course the established doctrine;" cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 351, where Benedict XIV is quoted (on Heroic Virtue, 1851, III, p. 130) to the effect that, since the gift of miracle-working is a grace gratis data, it is independent of the merit of the recipient; even bad men might be granted it (for God's own purposes) and good men denied it. It forms no ground of inference then to saintliness. But do not difficulties arise then with reference to the customs of "canonization"?
37. Vol. II, p. 2049. On miracles connected with the host, see very especially Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 1912, pp. 120 ff., with the literature given on pp. 502 ff.
38. Newman, as cited, p. 134.
39. Middleton, as cited, vol. I, p. li.
40. Smith and Cheatham, as cited.
41. Diet, des Prophities el des Miracles (Migne), vol. I, p. 370. For the miracle of Bolsena and its significance in the historical development of the legends, see H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 174 ff.; cf. Yrjb Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 1912, pp. 103 f.
42. Deut. 13 : 1 ff.
43. Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, April, 1856, pp. 255-285, article on "Miracles and their Counterfeits."
44. As cited, p. 99.
45. Pp. 115 5.
46. Pp. 150 f.
47. This portion of Fleury's great Bisloire EcclSsiastique (Paris, 1691-1720, 20 vols., quarto), from 381 to 400 A. D., translated by Herbert (London, 1828), was republished in three volumes, Oxford, 1842, in a text carefully revised by Newman, and supplied with this introduction.
48. P. 188.
49. Nor indeed can John T. Driscoll writing as late as 191 r (The Catholic Encyclopedia, X, p. 346). If we may judge from reports of cases in the public press, modern surgery provides numerous similar instances. We have happened to clip the following two examples. The New York Tribune for May 6, 1901: "William H. Crampton, the lecturer, who some time ago had the greater part of his tongue cut out on account of a cancerous growth, is now able to articulate slowly so that he can make himself understood. . . . Crampton, who for some years has made his living by lecturing, just before the operation was performed, spent two days in delivering his lectures into a phonograph. His idea was that when he left the hospital, bereft of speech, as he anticipated, he would still be able to earn a living by giving phonograph lectures. . . . Doctor L. S. Pitcher, of the staff of the Seney Hospital, who performed the operation, has asked Mr. Crampton to appear before the next meeting of the Brooklyn Surgical Society in order that its members may get a thorough understanding of the case. Mr. Crampton will have his phonograph records with him to show the effects of the operation upon his speech." The Lexington (Ky.) Leader, January 11, 1906 (Associated Press Telegram): "Chicago, Jan'y 10.—Frederick Power, actor and stage-manager, who had his tongue cut from his mouth in an operation for cancer five weeks ago, is again able to talk so as to be understood. The case is said by physicians to be a remarkable triumph for surgery. All of Mr. Power's tongue and part of the root had to be removed in the operation. With his tongue gone, he is able to articulate, uttering some words quite distinctly. For several days Mr. Power has been attempting to sing, and the hospital attendants say that while the efforts were not entirely successful, they have encouraged the patient and made him quite hopeful. There is still some paralysis in Mr. Power's lower lip, due to the operation, and there is a heavy gold bridge in his mouth. His jaw is still held in a heavy plaster cast, and when these impediments are removed it is believed he will be able to articulate fairly well."
50. Philomythus: An Antidote against Credulity. A Discussion of Cardinal Newman's Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles. By Edwin A. Abbott, 1891. Second edition, 1891.
51. St. Thomas of Canterbury: His Death and Miracles. By Edwin A. Abbott, M.A., D.D., 2 vols., 1898.
52. P. 189.
53. Loc. cit., p. 105, note 2.
54. Op. cit., p. 55; cf. pp. 82 ff.
55. Pp. 54 ff.
56. Loc. cit., p. 384.
57. Pp. 81 f. On the integrity of the present text of the Life of HUarion, see H. Gilnter, Legenden-Studien, 1006, p. 130, note 3.
58. Th. Trede, in the chapter on "Monchtum," in his Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1901, has some very useful remarks (pp. 213 ff.) on Athanasius's Life of Antony and its relation to the miracle-love of the times. "As apostle of Monasticism," he says, "Athanasius becomes a rhetorician, with reference to whom we ask, Where does fancy stop and where does reality begin? When the great doctor of the church assures us that he has throughout looked only to the truth, his idea of the truth was not different from that which we have found among other leaders of the church and permitted him such means to reach his purpose as were looked upon as self-evident in the heathen notions of the time." With an appeal, then, to Lucian's exposition of the different laws which govern history and panegyrics (The Way to Write History, 7 and 8: "The panegyrist has only one concern—to commend and gratify his living theme some way or other; if misrepresentation will serve his purpose, he has no objection to that. History, on the other hand, abhors the intrusion of any least scruple of falsehood . . ."), he continues: "The Life of Antony by Athanasius is a panegyric, just such as Gregory of Nyssa wrote about Gregory Thaumaturgus. . . ." When Gregory of Nazianzus describes Athanasius as setting forth in this book "in r\d<riian of a narrative, the laws of the monastic life" (Oration XXI, 5, Post-Nicene Fathers, p. 270), does he not really suggest that it is fiction, in part at least? Trede discusses in a similar spirit Jerome's Lives of Paul and Hilarion. On the Vita Pauli, see Weingarten, PRE?, X, 760, and Griitzmacher PRE?, XIII, 217. The reality of Paul's existence is defended by Butler, The Lausiac History, I, 231, and Workman, The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal, 1913, p. 96, both of whom defend also the historicity of the Life of Antony, I, 178 and 354 respectively. The Lausiac History is interpreted as a mere romance also by Lucius and Amelineau, but defended as history by Butler, I, 257 ff. There is a good brief statement of Athanasius's relation to miracle-working in the Vita Antonii and elsewhere, in A. Robertson's preface to the English translation of the Vila Antonii printed in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, II, n, p. 192.
59. Das Mbnchlhum, seine Ideale und seine Geschichte,1 1881, p. 21; ed. 3, 1886, p. 27; cf. G. Griitzmacher, Hieronymus, I, p. 162.
60. Op. cit., pp. 1 f.
61. See Acts of Peter and Andrew, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Am. ed., vol. VIII, p. 527: "Peter says to him: One thing I say unto thee: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to go into the kingdom of heaven. When Onesiphorus heard this, he was still more filled with rage and anger, . . . saying, ... If thou wilt show me this miracle, I will believe in thy God, . . . but if not thou shalt be grievously punished. . . . The Saviour appeared . . . and he says to them, Be courageous and tremble not, my chosen disciples, for I am with you always: let the needle and camel be brought. . . . And there was a certain merchant in the city, who had believed in the Lord, . . . and, ... he ran and searched for a needle with a big eye, to do a favour to the Apostles. When Peter learned this, he said, My son, do not search for a big needle, for nothing is impossible with God: rather bring us a small needle. And after the needle had been brought . . . Peter looked up and saw a camel coming. . . . Then he fixed the needle in the ground, and cried out with a loud voice, saying, In the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, I order thee, O camel, to go through the eye of the needle. Then the eye of the needle was opened like a gate, and the camel went through it, and all the multitude saw it. And Peter says to the camel: Go again through the needle. And the camel went through the second time." Even this is not enough. Onesiphorus now provides a needle and a camel of his own, and sets a woman on the camel—and the same thing is done. Is not the conception here, mere magic?
62. The Ancient Catholic Church, 1902, pp. 303 f.
63. Cdsarius von Arelate, 1894, p. 165.
64. P. 166, note 545 (see Migne, Pal. Lai., XXXIX, 2257, 3).
65. E. T., pp. 33 {. His reference is Cesar of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum (Strange's ed., Cologne, 1851, 2 vols., 8vo; vol. II, pp. 255 and 125).
66. Sabatier, op. tit., p. 192. His references are: Egbert von Schonau's Contra Catharos, Serm. I, cap. 2 (Migne, Pat. Lot., vol. CXCV), cf. Heisterbach, loc. cit., 5 :18; Luc de Tuy's De altera Vita, lib. 2 : 9; 3 : 9, 18 (Migne, Pal. Lat., vol. CCVIII).
67. Inquisit. in verit. Miraculor. F. de Paris, sec. 1, as cited by Newman, op. cit., p. 90, note 1. On the Jansenist miracles cf. the excellent criticism of A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1839,1, pp. 133-148; he mentions the chief sources of information, among which cf. especially Carr6 de Montgeron, La Veriti des Miracles Operis par VIntercession deM.de Paris et Autres Appelans, Cologne, 1747, with the comments on it by J. M. Charcot in The New Review, January, 1893, vol. VIII, pp. 25 ff., and the comment on Charcot's use of this book by G. Bertrin, Lourdes, E. T., 1008, pp. 138 ff. On the use made of these miracles by Hume, see James Orr, Hume, p. 215, who refers us for the real facts to Campbell and Leland.
68. Cf. Middleton, as cited, I, p. 357; Newman, as cited, p. 45; Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. VII, p. 480.
69. The first of the ten miracles which Montgeron discusses at large was wrought on a young Spaniard, who was stone blind in one eye and saw but dimly with the other. Only the better eye was healed, and the famous oculist Gendron told him that he ought to be content with that, since the restoration of the other eye, in which many parts were absolutely destroyed, would require a miracle of creation comparable to giving a cripple two new legs, and no one ever heard of such a miracle. Yet Charlotte Laborde, we are told, who on the certificate of two surgeons had no legs at all, recovered a serviceable pair by one of these Jansenist miracles. Here is a miracle which overtops all other miracles—even that of the famous Pierre de Rudder at Lourdes, who only had an old fracture of the leg mended. Compare pp. 118 ff.
70. The literature of the subject is sufficiently intimated in the 'course of the lecture. The following may be profitably consulted:
E. Lucius (ed. G. Anrich), Die AnfSnge des Heiligenkults in der christlichen Kirche, 1904; H. Achelis, "Die Martyrologien, ihre Geschichte und ihr Wert," in the Abhandlungen d. kaiserl. Gesettschoft da Wissensch. zu GdUingen, N. F. Ill, 1900; P. Allard, Dix lecpns sur le martyre*, 1907 (E. T. by L. Cappadelta, Ten Lectures on the Martyrs); L. Leclerq, Les Martyrs, 1902-1906; A. van Gennep, La Formation des Ltgendes, 1910; H. Delehaye, Les Ligendes Hagiographiques, 1905 (E. T. by N. M. Crawford, The Legends of the Saints); H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, article "Legends of the Saints" in the Catholic Encyclopedia; E. von Dobschtitz, article "Legende" in Haupt-Herzog*; G. H. Gerould, Saints' Legends, 1916.
Naturally the same infection from heathenism which produced the Christian miracles of these ages, showed itself also among the Jews. For the earliest period, see P. Fiebig, Jildische Wundergeschichten des neutestamenil. Zeitalters, 1911 (original texts in same author's Rabbinische Wunderges. d. N. T. Zeitalters, 1911). S. Schechter (Jewish Quarterly Review, April, 1900, pp. 431-433) writes: "Again our knowledge of the spiritual history of the Jews during the first centuries of our era might be enriched by a chapter on Miracles. Starting from the principle that miracles can only be explained by more miracles, an attempt was made some years ago by a student to draw up a list of the wonder-workings of the Rabbis recorded in the Talmud and the Midrashim. He applied himself to the reading of these works, but his reading was only cursory. The list, therefore, is not complete. Still it yielded a harvest of not less than two hundred and fifty miracles. They cover all classes of supernatural workings recorded in the Bible, but occur with much greater frequency." As the Christians did not think of denying the reality of the heathen miracles, but had their own way of accounting for their occurrence (see the interesting discussion in Augustine, City of God, X, 16), so the Jews. P. J. Hershon (Genesis with a Talmudic Commentary, E. T., p. 284) quotes from the Avoda-zarah, fol. 51, col. 1, as follows: "Zonan once said to Rabbi Akiva: Both I and thou know that an idol has nothing in it, and yet we see men who go to it lame and return sound; how dost thou account for it? He replied: I will tell thee a parable. There was a faithful man with whom his townspeople deposited their goods, without the presence of witnesses. One man did so likewise, but was careful to bring witnesses with him. Once, however, he deposited something with him when no one else was present. Oh, said his wife, after his departure, let us keep that deposit for ourselves. What! replied the husband, because the fool acted improperly shall we forfeit our faith? So also when chastisements are sent on men, they (the chastisements) are adjured not to leave them before a certain day, a certain hour, and then only by a certain medicament. It happens that the heathen man repairs to the heathen temple at that very time. The chastisements then say: By right we should not depart just now; but, on reflection, they add: Because that fool acts improperly, shall we violate our oath?" Where the Christians invoked demons, Akiva fell back on coincidence.
NOTES TO LECTURE III
ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLES
1. Mysticism and the Creed, 1914, p. ix.
2. The Sacred Shrine, 1912, p. xi.
3. The sense of this continuity is very strong among Romanist writers; e.g., R. H. Benson, Lourdes, 1914, p. 59: "'These signs shall follow them that believe,' He said Himself; and the history of the Catholic Church is an exact fulfillment of the words. It was so, St. Augustine tells us, at the tombs of the martyrs; five hundred miracles were reported at Canterbury within a few years of St. Thomas' martyrdom. And now here is Lourdes, as it has been for fifty years, in this little corner of France."
4. The same general point of view finds expression sometimes in non-Romanist quarters. For example, J. Arthur Hill, The Hibberl Journal, October, 1906, vol. V, p. 118, writes as follows: "Christ's miracles and resurrection were objective phenomena, and Christianity was based upon them. . . . But belief in Christianity has gradually crumbled away because there has been no continuance of well-attested cognate facts. The Catholic miracles and ecstasies make belief easier for one section of Christianity; but Protestantism—which cuts off miracles at the end of the Apostolic Times—has committed suicide; by making unique events of its basic phenomena it has made continued belief in them impossible." On this view no man can believe in miracles who has not himself witnessed miracles. Testimony is discredited out of hand; man believes only what he has seen. Must we not go further on this ground? Can a man continue to believe in miracles unless he continues to see them? Is not memory itself a kind of testimony? Must not there be a continuous miracle in order to support continuous faith? We cannot thus chop up the continuity of life, whether of the individual or of the race, in the interests of continuous miracle. Granted that one or the other must be continuous, life or miracle; but both need not be.
5. Above, pp. 17 ff., 61 ff.
6. Rdmische Geschichte, I, p. 181.
7. Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1901, p. 101.
8. Op. cit., pp. 56-57.
9. hoc. cit.
10. Monasticism and the Confessions of Augustine, E. T., p. 123
11. History of Dogma, E. T., vol. V, p. 172, note 1.
12. The City of God, book XXI, chap. IV (Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. II, p. 458).
13. De cura pro mortuis gerenda, c. 12 : 15 (Migne, vol. VI, pp. 602 f.).
14. Dialog., IV, 36 (Migne, vol. Ill, p. 384 A).
15. Philopseudes, 25 (The Works of Lucian of Samosata, translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, vol. Ill, 1005, p. 244).
16. Die chrisUiche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, p. III.
17. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 130.
18. Les Ligendes Hagiographiques, 1005, p. 210.
19. Hellenistische WundererztMungen, 1006, p. 6.
20. Eusebius, The Preparation for the Gospel, 11 : 37 (E. T. by E. H. GiSord, vol. Ill, pp. 610 f.), quotes it from Plutarch's treatise On the Soul. Plutarch is speaking of his friend Antyllus. He writes: "For he was ill not long ago, and the physician thought that he could not live; but having recovered a little from a slight collapse, though he neither did nor said anything else showing derangement, he declared that he had died and had been set free again, and was not going to die at all of that present illness, but that those who had carried him away were seriously reproved by their Lord; for, having been sent for Nicandas, they had brought him back instead of the other. Now, Nicandas was a shoe-maker, besides being one of those who frequent the palustra?, and familiar and well-known to many. Wherefore the young men used to come and mock him, as having run away from his fate, and as having bribed the officers sent from the other world. It was evident, however, that he was himself at first a little disturbed and disquieted; and at last he was attacked by a fever and died suddenly the third day. But this Antyllus came to life again, and is alive and well, and one of our most agreeable friends."
21. Psyche1, 1898, vol. II, p. 364, note.
22. Festschrift Theodor Gomperz dargebracht, usw., 1902.
23. Loc. cit.
23a. Erasmus has some very sensible remarks on the matter (Epistle 475) which J. A. Froude (Life and Letters of Erasmus, 1894, p. 301) reproduces in a condensed form thus: "This Dialogue [Lucian's Philopseudes] teaches us the folly of superstition, which creeps in under the name of religion. When lies are told us Lucian bids us not disturb ourselves, however complete the authority which may be produced for them. Even Augustine, an honest old man and a lover of truth, can repeat a tale as authentic which Lucian had ridiculed under other names so many years before Augustine was born. What wonder, therefore, that fools can be found to listen to the legends of the saints or to stories about hell, such as frighten cowards or old women. There is not a martyr, there is not a virgin, whose biographies have not been disfigured by these monstrous absurdities. Augustine says that lies when exposed always injure the truth. One might fancy they were invented by knaves or unbelievers to destroy the credibility of Christianity itself." Miracles, according to Erasmus, did not happen in his time—though they were said to happen. "I have spoken of miracles," he writes (Froude, p. 351). "The Christian religion nowadays does not require miracles, and there are none; but you know that lying stories are set about by crafty knaves." He describes with his biting satire what happened (and did not happen) when the Protestants took over Basle. "Smiths and carpenters were sent to remove the images from the churches. The roods and the unfortunate saints were cruelly handled. Strange that none of them worked a miracle to avenge their dignity, when before they had worked so many at the slightest provocation" (p. 359). "No blood was shed; but there was a cruel assault on altars, images, and pictures. We are told that St. Francis used to resent light remarks about his five wounds, and several other saints are said to have shown displeasure on similar occasions. It was strange that at Basle not a saint stirred a finger. I am not so much surprised at the patience of Christ and the Virgin Mary" (p. 360). As to relics and relic-worship: "What would Jerome say could he see the Virgin's milk exhibited for money; with as much honor paid to it as to the consecrated body of Christ; the miraculous oil; the portions of the true cross, enough if they were collected to freight a large ship? Here we have the head of St. Francis, there our Lady's petticoat or St. Anne's cowl, or St. Thomas of Canterbury's shoes; not presented as innocent aids to religion, but as the substance of religion itself—and all through the avarice of priests and the hypocrisy of monks playing on the credulity of the people. Even bishops play their parts in these fantastic shows, and approve and dwell on them in their rescripts" (pp. 121 f.).
24. Legenden-Studien, 1906; Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910.
25. Die christliche Legende, usw., p. 69.
26. Pp. 3, 4.
27. P. 117.
28. Op. cit., p. 8; cf. Legenden-Studien, p. 70.
29. Die christliche Legende, usw., p. 118.
30. On the miracles, especially of healing, of classical antiquity, see E. Thräner, art., "Health and Gods of Healing," in Hastings's ERE, vol. VI, pp. 540-566; Otto Weinreich, Antike Heilungsvntnder, 1909; R. Lembert, Die Wunderglaube der Rdmer und Griechen, 1905; and Antike Wunderkuren, 1911; G. von Rittersheim, Der medizin. Wunderglauben und die Incubation im Altertum, 1878; L. Deubner, De Incubatione, 1900; M. Hamilton, Incubation, 1906. On the transference of the heathen customs to Christianity, see Deubner and Hamilton, and especially E. Lucius, Die A nfänge des Heiligenkults in der christliche Kirche, 1904; Th. Trede, Wunderglaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1901, and Das Heidentum in der Rdmishen Kirche, 4 vols., 1889-1891; P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907. With respect to the mediaeval miracles, see especially P. Toldo of Turin, who began in 1901 in the Studien der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte a "scientific classification" of the mediaeval miracles, in a series of articles entitled, "Lives and Miracles of the Saints in the Middle Ages"; see also Koch's Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, vol. XIV (1901), pp. 267 ff., where Toldo prints the Introduction to these studies. The bizarre character of these miracles is fairly illustrated by a brief but brightly written review of them in R. A. Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics,* 1903, vol. II, pp. 218-222.
31. Heinrich Günter, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 229, singles the stigmata out from other miraculous manifestations as "an especially Christian manifestation"; all the rest have heathen parallels.
32. Consult, however, A. M. Königer, in Schiele and Zscharnack's Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. V, 1913, col. 924: "In the absolute sense in which it has been until recently thought to be such, Francis of Assisi does not begin the long list. It is, on the contrary, possible to show that at the least the idea of imitating the stigmata, as a consequence of longing after the sufferings of the Lord, was active for the period of the opening thirteenth century when not only was reverence for the sufferings of Christ fostered by the crusades, but more still self-mortifications of all sorts were set on foot by the growing call to repentance and amendment. Consult the self-mutilations of the Belgian Beguine Marie of Oignies (f 1213), of the religious fanatic condemned by the Oxford Synod of 1222, further of the Marquis Robert of Montferrand, about 1226, of the Dutch hermit Dodon von Hasha (t«3i)."
Francis was not only the first of the stigmatics in both time and importance, but presented the stigmata in a form which has remained peculiar to himself. The contemporary accounts agree in describing the marks on his hands and feet as blackish, fleshy excrescences, recalling in form and color the nails with which the hands and feet of Jesus were pierced. Only the mark in the side was a wound, whence at times exuded a little blood. No bloody exudation took place except at the side. (Cf. Paul Sabatier, Life of Francis of Assisi, E. T., 1894, p. 296, note, and p. 435). Francis's somatization consisted, then, not of five bleeding wounds but of the imitation of the four nails and the spear thrust in the side. The description given of them by Brother Elias (Sabatier, p. 436) in his letters as Vicar of the Order to the brothers, sent out after Francis's death, describes them as follows: "For (or Not) a long time before his death our Brother and Father appeared as crucified, having in his body five wounds, which are truly the stigmata of Christ, for his hands and his feet bore marks as of nails without and within, forming a sort of scars; while at the side he was as if pierced with a lance, and often a little blood oozed from it." Joseph von Gorres, Die christliche Myslik, ed. of 1836, vol. II, p. 422, puts together a very detailed description of the wounds on the hands and the feet: "The wounds of notable extent opened in the centre of the extremities. In the middle of them had grown out of the flesh and cellular tissue nails like iron; black, hard, fixed, with heads above, below pointed and as if clinched, so that a finger could be inserted between them and the skin. They were movable from side to side, and if drawn out to one side, were correspondingly drawn in on the other but could not be extracted; as St. Clara discovered when she tried to extract them after his death, and could not do it. The fingers remained, moreover, flexible as before, and the hands performed their service; neither did the feet fail, although walking had become more difficult to him, and he therefore rode thereafter in his journeying through the neighborhood." A. Tholuck, Vermischle Schriften, 1839,1, pp. 105 f., points out the defects in the testimony: "In the case of all other saints the legend speaks only of wound scars, and the portraits of Francis present him only with the scars; the old reporters nevertheless describe them in a peculiar way as if there had grown nails of flesh, with the color of fresh iron and with clinched points. Nevertheless perfect clearness is lacking in the reports. The report of the tres socii says: nails of flesh were seen et ferri quoque nigredinem. Celano says: Non clavorum quidem puncturas, sed ipsos clavos in eis impositos, ex Jerri recenti nigredine; the last words yield no sense, and the editors conjecture: ex ferri recentis nigredinem. The matter is spoken of still less clearly in a letter of Francis's immediate successor in the generalship of the Minorites (in Wadding, ad annum 1226, no. 45). Here we read: Nam manus ejus et pedes, quasi puncturas clavorum habuerunt ex utraque parte confixas, reservantes cicatrices, et clavorum nigredinem ostendentes. According to this also nails were present." For recent discussions see the works mentioned at the close of the article on the "Stigmatics" in Schiele and Zscharnack, as cited, pp. 433-443.
33. Gorres, as cited, pp. 426-428: cf. Margaret Roberts, Saint Catherine of Sienna and Her Times2, 1007, p. 103: "Catherine spent long hours in the Church of St. Cristina, and it was there that to her inner consciousness she received the stigmata, invisible to human eyes, but to her awfully real." On her bloody sweat and weeping with bloody tears, see Augusta T. Drane, The History of St. Catherine of Siena3, 1899, vol. I, p. 52.
34. Germano di Stanislao, Gemma Galgati, German version by P. Leo Schlegel, 1913; W. F. Ludwig, Gemma Galgati, eine Studie aus jiingste Zeil, 1912. The most well-known instance of somatization of the later years of the nineteenth century was probably Louise Lateau. Her case is discussed by William A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 350-362; on page 350 an extended bibliography is given which may be supplemented from that at the end of the article, "Stigmatization," in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. XI, pp. 96-07. A. Rohling's Louise Lateau, nach authentischen medizinischen und theologischen Documenten, 1874, was translated and printed in The Catholic Review, and afterward in a pamphlet entitled Louise Lateau, Her Stigmas and Ecstasy, New York, Hickey & Co., 1891. The following account is drawn from this pamphlet.
Louise Lateau was born a peasant girl, in a Belgian village, on the 30th of January, 1850. Her early life was passed in poverty and sickness. In the spring of 1867 she fell into a violent illness, and remained in a dying condition for a year, suffering from abscesses and hemorrhages, until she was miraculously cured, arising at once from her bed, on the 20th of April, 1868. "Three days later," says Rohling, "Louise received the stigmas of our Saviour, Jesus Christ" (p. 8). Here is the account given by Doctor Rohling:
"We have seen that she was suddenly restored to health on the 20 April, 1868. During the two following days she continued perfectly well, the thought of receiving the stigmas of the Passion never of course entering her mind. Indeed at that time, she had never even heard of God's having bestowed this wonderful favor either on St. Francis, or upon any other of his faithful servants. On the 24th of April, however, she experienced a return of those excruciating pains, from which she had been enduring a martyrdom of suffering since the beginning of the preceding year. And on the same day, which was Friday, the first trace of the stigmas appeared. On that occasion, however, blood flowed only from the left side. Next day the bleeding had entirely ceased, and all the pain had disappeared. Louise, thinking that it was some transient form of her late illness, remained silent about what had occurred. But on the following Friday, the 1st of May, the stigmas again appeared; and the blood now flowed not only from the side, as in the previous week, but also from the upper surface of both feet. Filled with anxiety and embarrassment, Louise still kept the matter a profound secret, speaking of it only to her confessor . . . (who) . . . made nothing of what had occurred. . . . On the next Friday, the 8th of May, blood came as in the previous weeks, and, in addition, about nine o'clock in the morning it began to flow copiously from the palms and backs of both hands." . . . "Since then the bleeding is accustomed to return on Fridays." "On the 25th September, 1868, blood flowed for the first time from the forehead and from a number of points around the head—a striking memorial of our Lord's crown of thorns—and this has also occurred regularly ever since. On the 26th April, 1873, an additional wound of large dimensions appeared on Louise's right shoulder, such as our Lord received in carrying the cross to Calvary. The blood usually begins to flow from the stigmas about midnight on Thursdays; occasionally the bleeding from the left side does not begin until somewhat later. Sometimes blood flows only from either the upper or lower surface of the feet, and from either the palms or backs of the hands; but frequently the bleeding takes place from both. Nor is the time uniform, during which the bleeding continues . . . but invariably the blood ceases to flow before midnight Friday. The first symptom of the commencement of the bleeding is the formation of blisters on the hands and feet. . . . When they are fully developed, the blisters burst, the watery liquid passes off, and blood immediately begins to flow from the true skin beneath. . . . During the rest of the week, the position of the stigmas can be discerned by a reddish tinge, and a glassy appearance of the skin, the epidermis is intact, exhibiting no trace of wound or scar, and beneath it with the aid of a good lens (with a magnifying power of 20) the skin may be observed in its normal condition. . . . During the ecstasy Louise has no consciousness of material occurrences around her. . . . The stigmas are the seat of acute pain."
35. Les Stigmatisies, Louise Lateau, etc., Paris, 1873; La Stigmatizalion, I'ecstasie divine, et les miracles de Lourdes, Paris, 1894. We are drawing, however, directly from The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 294. Two American cases are described incidentally in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp. 341 and 345.
36. Migne, Diclionnaire des Prophities et des Miracles, p. 1069.
37. Op. tit., pp. 1068 f.; cf. Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1007, p. 207.
38. G. Dumas, Revue des Deux Mondes, May x, 1907, p. 207, quoting Ribadeneira, Vie d'Ignace de Loyola, book V, chap. X.
39. Pp. 1066 ff.
40. P. 1070.
41. Pp. 1080 f.
42. A. Poulain, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 295: "It seems historically certain that ecstatics alone have the stigmata."
43. It is the judgment of a sympathetic critic that "trances, losses of consciousness, automatisms, visions of lights, audition of voices, 'stigmata,' and such like experiences, are evidences of hysteria, and they are not in themselves evidences of divine influence or of divine presence."—Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 1909, p. xxviii. Compare what he says more at large, when speaking of Francis of Assisi (p. 165): "The modern interpreter, unlike the mediaeval disciple, finds this event, if it is admitted, a point of weakness rather than a point of strength. Instead of proving to be the marks of a saint, the stigmata are the marks of emotional and physical abnormality." In a like spirit, Baron von Htigel, The Mystical Element oj Religion, vol. II, p. 42, declares generally that "the downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and normal constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization." On the Stigmata and Stigmatics, see especially F. W. H. Myers, Personality, Human and Divine, vol. I, pp. 492 ff.
44. Die christliche Mystik, new ed., 1836, vol. II, pp. 407-468: "Die Ecstase im unterem Leben, tmd die durch sie gewirkte Transformation der Leiblichkeit." English translation of this section under the title of The Stigmata: A History of Various Cases, London, 1883.
45. A. M. KBniger, in Schiele and Zscharnack, as cited, col. 924: "Their bearers are predominantly women and simple people. In the immaturity of their understanding they have not yet reached stability. . . ."
46. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 294. The italics are ours.
47. Pp. 205 ff.
48. Gorres, op. cit., vol. II, p. 189.
49. J. K. Huysmans, Sainte Lydwine, p. lor.
50. We are reminded by Mrs. E. Herman, however (The Meaning and Value of Mysticism, 1915, p. 159), that in one element of the faith of those "moderns" whom she represents, there is a return to this desire to help Christ save the world. Commenting on some remarks of Angela de Foligno, she says: "To those unacquainted with medieval religious literature this seems curiously modern in its implied insistence upon our obligation to ask a humble share in the atoning suffering, instead of acquiescing in a doctrine which would make a passive acceptance of Christ's sufferings on our behalf sufficient for the remission of sins." No sharing in Christ's atoning sufferings can be described as humble. It is not the "acceptance of Christ's sufferings" which is represented by the Scriptures and understood from them by evangelicals as "sufficient for the remission of sins." It is Christ's sufferings themselves which are all-sufficient, and the trail of the serpent is seen in any suggestions that they need or admit of supplementing.
51. For example, A. Poulain, as cited; cf. A. M. KBniger, as cited: "The analogous cases of suggestion from without (local congestion of blood, slight blood-sweating, formation of blisters, and marks of burning) lie so far from the real stigmata, connected with lesion of the walls of the blood vessels (hemorrhages), that medical science knows as yet nothing else to do but to class this among the 'obscure neuropathic bleedings.'"
52. The Principles of Psychology, ed. 1008, vol. II, p. 612. Compare the statement quoted by A. T. Schofield, The Force of Mind, 1908, pp. 61 f., from Professor Barrett, of Trinity College, Dublin, Humanitarian, 1905: "It is not so well known but it is nevertheless a fact, that utterly startling physiological changes can be produced in a hypnotized subject merely by conscious or unconscious mental suggestion. Thus a red scar or a painful burn, or even a figure of definite shape, such as a cross or an initial, can be caused to appear on the body of the entranced subject solely through suggesting the idea. By creating some local disturbance of the blood-vessels in the skin, the unconscious self has done what it would be impossible for the conscious self to perform. And so in the well-attested cases of stigmata, where a close resemblance to the wounds on the body of the crucified Saviour appears on the body of the ecstatic. This is a case of unconscious «//-suggestion, arising from the intent and adoring gaze of the ecstatic upon the bleeding figure on the crucifix. With the abeyance of the conscious self the hidden powers emerge, whilst the trance and mimicry of the wounds are strictly parallel to the experimental cases previously referred to."
53. These cases, with others of the same kind, are cited by F. W. A. Myers, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII (1801-1892), pp. 337ff., who introduces them with the following remarks: "The subliminal consciousness, it will be seen, was able to turn out to order the most complicated novelty in the way of hysterical freaks of circulation. Let us turn to an equally marked disturbance of the inflammatory type, the production namely, of suppurating blisters by a word of command. This phenomenon has a peculiar interest, since, from the accident of a strong emotional association with the idea of the stigmata in the hands and feet, this special organic effect has been anticipated by the introverted broodings of a line of mystics from St. Francis of Assisi to Louise Lateau." Cf. the similar cases cited by G. Dumas, as cited, pp. 215 ff.
54. Myers, as cited, p. 333.
55. Letter to Thomas de Gardo, a Florentine physician, printed in the Eighth Book of his Correspondence—as cited by Dumas, as cited, p. 213.
56. Traili de VAmour de Dieu. Book IV, chap, xv (E. T. in Methuen's "Library of Devotion," On the Love of God, 1002, p. 196). Cf. Dumas, as cited, who, however, quotes more at large, including certain phrases (not found in the E. T.) which withdraw somewhat from the purity of the naturalistic explanation.
57. The literature of Stigmatization is very large and varied; a guide to it may be found in the bibliographies attached to the appropriate articles in Herzog-Hauck, the New Schaff-Herzog, Schiele and Zscharnack and The Catholic Encyclopedia. The essay by Dumas in the Revue des Deux Mondes for May 1, 1907, is exceptionally instructive. With it may be consulted the older discussions by A. Maury, in the Revue des Deux Monies, 1854, vol. IV, and in the Annates Medico-Psychologiques (edited by Baillarger, Cerise, and Longet), 1855; and the more recent studies by R. Virchow, "Ueber Wunder und Medizin," in the Deutsche Zeitschrift fur practische Medizin, 1872, pp. 335-339; Paul Janet, "Une Ecstatique," in the Bulletin de I Institute psychologique for July, 1901, and The Mental Stale of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata, New York, 1901; and Maurice Apte, Les Stigmatisis, 1003; cf. also W. A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 320-362, and the short note in W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1874, pp. 689-600. No general description is better than Gorres's, as cited; and no general discussion supersedes Tholuck's, as cited. O. Stoll, Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Vdlker-psychologie1, 1004, pp. 520 ff., is chiefly useful for the setting in which the subject is placed.
58. Les Ugendes Hagiographiques, 1005, p. 187. Cf. what is said by G. H. Gerould, Saints' Legends, 1916, p. 42.
59. L. Deubner, De Incubatione: "The religion of Christians had and has its own demi-gods and heroes; that is to say, its saints and martyrs"; G. Wobbermin, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien, 1896, p. 18: "The saints of the Christian Churches, and especially those of the Greek Church, present a straightforward development of the Greek hero-cult. The saints are the heroes of the Ancients." Cf. P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907, and especially Lucius, as cited; also M. Hamilton, as cited.
60. Cf. Friedrich Pfister, Der Reliquienkuli im Altertum, 1902, pp. 429 ff.; E. Lucius, Die Anfdnge des Heiligenkulls in der christliche Kirche, 1904.
61. Cf. the account by Pfister, as cited, p. 323, and especially 43°ff.
62. Cf. Saintyves, as cited, pp. 336. We are told that many of the bones of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs displayed at the Church of St. Ursula at Cologne are bones of men (A. D. White, Warfare, etc., vol. II, p. 29).
63. A. D. White records that Frank Buckland noted that the relics of St. Rosalia at Palermo are really the bones of a goat (Gordon's Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96); and yet they cure diseases and ward off epidemics.
64. Harbey, Supplement aux Acta Sanctorum, vol. I, 1809, p. 203 (cited by Giinter). Cf. in general Saintyves, as cited, pp. 44 ff.
65. H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, p. 109, note 6, citing the Vita S. Maximini, c. 9 (JScriplores rerum Merov., Ill, 78).
66. Pausanias, III, 16, i (Pfister, p. 325); also Delehaye, p. 186, with references given there.
67. Henri Etienne, Apologie pour H£rodole, ou Traiti de la Conformiti des Merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ed. le Duchat, 1735, chaps, xxix-xxvni, as cited by P. Saintyves, as cited, p. 46, who may be consulted (pp. 44-48) on the general subject.
68. Cf. Paul Parfait, La Foire aux Reliques, pp. 137-138.
69. On Mary's milk, see the whole chapter on "Le Saint Lait d'Evron," in Paul Parfait, as cited, pp. 135-144. On what may lie in the background of this whole series of legends, see article "Milk," in Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, pp. 633-637.
70. The Sacred Shrine, 1912, p. 363.
71. These words are Mechthild's; and Hirn adds: "The idea that the Madonna gives milk to all believers appears finely in a poem in the Swedish collection of Latin hymns, Pia Cantiones, p. 161:
'Super vinum et unguentum
the mamme dant fomentum,
fove, lacta parvulos."'
72. P. 365.
73. He gives a series of references to instances.
74. Deutsche Schriften, I, p. 74.
75. Acta Sanctorum, 38, pp. 207-208.
76. Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 165 f. Compare Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, p. 43: "That the legend [of Mary] praises the Mother of Pity also as the succorer of the sick is a matter of course. But the mysticism of the Mary-legend brought a new means of healing, in that it makes Mary give her breast to the sick." Cf. the curious details on p. 85. In the notes accompanying the passage quoted from the Legenden-Studien, Giinter shows how wide-spread and how full of variants such legends were. In one MS. the motive is varied in a threefold way: a cleric in his illness had bitten off his tongue and hps, and was suddenly healed by Mary's milk; a monk thought already dead was healed; another monk had his experience only in a dream, but with the same effect. Noting that the milk with which Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, was sprinkled and healed, is said in one us. to have been gathered up and saved as a relic, Giinter infers that the milk-relics date from this epoch. This is how the story of Fulbert is told in Sablon, Histoire et Description de la Cathidrale de Chartres: "St. Fulbert, Bishop and Restorer of this Church, having been visited by God with an incurable fire which parched him and consumed his tongue, and seized with an insupportable pain which permitted him no rest through the night, saw as it were a noble lady who commanded him to open his mouth, and when he had obeyed her she at once ejected from her sacred breasts a flood of celestial and savory milk which quenched the fire at once and made his tongue more well than ever. Some drops had fallen on his cheeks, and these were afterwards put into a vial and kept in the treasury."
77. Gtlnter, Legenden-Studien, p. 178; Die christliche Legende, pp. 85, 162.
78. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, p. 59.
79. Ibid., p. 208.
80. Ibid., p. 107; cf. the list of others of similar character in Th. Trede, Das Heidentum in der RSmischen Kirche, I, 1889, pp. 158 ff.
81. Ibid.
81 a. Op. cit., p. 610.
82. Legenden-Studien, p. 106.
83. J. B. Heinrich, Dogmatische Theologie, vol. X, p. 797, makes much of this: "A miracle which belongs peculiarly to them, wrought not by but on the holy bodies, is their incorruptibility through the centuries. No doubt this incorruptibility can in many cases be explained by purely natural causes; but in many cases the miracle is obvious. It is especially evident when a portion only of the holy body remains uncorrupted, particularly that portion which was peculiarly placed at the service of God during life, as the tongue of St. John of Neponac, the arm of St. Stephen of Hungary, the heart of St. Teresa, etc. And especially when, with the preservation of the body there is connected a pleasant fragrance instead of the necessarily following penetrating corpse-odor, or when everything was done, as there was done with the body of St. Francis Xavier, to bring about a speedy corruption." It is astonishing what stress is laid on this incorruptibility of the body of the saints. Thus Herbert Thurston (Hastings's ERE, VIII, 149) thinks it worth while, in a very condensed article on Lourdes, to record, of Bernadette Soubirous: "It is noteworthy that, though her body at the time of death (1879) was covered with tumors and sores, it was found, when the remains were officially examined in 1009, thirty years afterwards, entire and free from corruption (see Carriere, Histoire de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, p. 243)." On this matter see A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1896, II, pp. 10,11, who sets it in its right light, and mentions similar instances—of those who were not saints.
84. Accordingly, Percy Dearmer, Body and SouP, 1912, p. 262, says: "For the greater part of Christian history faith-healing was mainly centered in relics, so that probably more people have benefited in this way than in any other." Speaking particularly no doubt of the ancient church, but in terms which would apply to every age, Heinrich (op. cit., X, p. 796) observes: "Now, however, these miracles are regularly wrought at the graves, in the churches, and often precisely by the relics of the saints," and he is led to add two pages further on (p. 798): "There is scarcely another doctrine of the church which has been so approved, established by God Himself, as the veneration of the saints and relics"—that is to say by miraculous attestation.
85. For the literature of pilgrimages, see the bibliography attached to the article "Wallfahrt und Wallfahrtsorten," in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion.
86. Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, pp. 684 f. It is a refreshing note that Meister Eckhard strikes, proving that common sense was not quite dead even in the opening years of the fourteenth century, when he asks, "What is the good of the dead bones of saints? The dead can neither give nor take."
87. W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, 1889, p. 262 and note 2, is prepared to maintain that "a degraded form" of fetichism is exhibited in much else in modern Roman Catholicism than its relicworship. He finds it exhibited, for example, "by the so-called neo-mystical school of modern France, and in the baser types of Roman Catholicism everywhere." He adduces in illustration Huysmans two "mystical" novels, En Route and La Cathidrale, and comments as follows: "The naked fetichism of the latter book almost passes belief. We have a Madonna who is good-natured at Lourdes and cross-grained at La Salette; who likes 'pretty speeches and little coaxing ways' in 'paying court' to her, and who at the end is apostrophised as 'our Lady of the Pillar,' 'our Lady of the Crypt.' It may, perhaps, be excusable to resort to such expedients as these in the conversion of savages" (Query: Is it?); "but there is something singularly repulsive in the picture (drawn apparently from life) of a profligate man of letters seeking salvation in a Christianity which has lowered itself far beneath educated paganism." "Our Lady of the Pillar," "Our Lady of the Crypt," are two images of Mary venerated at the cathedral at Chartres, information concerning which is given in the article entitled "The oldest of our Lady's Shrines: St. Mary's Under-Earth," in The Dolphin, vol. VI (July-December, 1904), pp. 377-399. On Mary's shrines in general, see below. Those who have read Huysmans's La Cathidrale should read also Blasco Ibafies's La Catedral, and perhaps Evelyn Underbill's The Lost Word, that the lascinations of cathedral symbolism may be viewed from several angles.
88. Op. cit., vol. X, p. 799. Yet it is not merely God who is venerated in the saints, he says; there is an honor due to the saints in themselves, and accordingly Alexander VIII condemned the proposition: The honor that is offered to Mary as Mary is vain. On the other hand it is said that it is merely the saint and through him God that is venerated in the relic, according to the explanation of Thomas Aquinas: "We do not adore the sensible body on its own account, but on account of the soul which was united with it, which is now in the enjoyment of God, and on account of God, whose ministers they were." Why then continue to adore the body when it is no longer united with the soul, on account of its union with which alone it is adored?
89. P. 704.
90. P. 794.
91. What Pfister says, p. 610, although not free from exaggerations, is in its main assertion true. In the Christian religion, he says, the presence in the relics of a supernatural, in a certain degree magical, power is accustomed to be emphasized even more than it is in the heathen. For, according to the Greek belief, the graves were thought of chiefly as the protection of the heroes, without the bones themselves being thought able to work miracles—for they rest in the grave; the miracle, the help, comes in general from the hero himself, not from an anonymous, impersonal, magical power which dwells in the relics. According to the Christian belief the relics themselves, on the other hand, can perform miracles, and the power residing in them can by contact be directly transferred and produce effects. Thus artificial relics can be produced by contact with genuine ones. The habit of relic-partition is connected with this: a part of the object filled with magical power may act like the whole. Compare Hirn, p. 490, note 2: "We deliberately leave out of consideration here the assertion of educated Catholics that in the relics was really worshipped the saint in the same way that God is worshipped in a picture or a symbol (cf. Esser, art., 'Reliquien,' in Wetzer-Welte, Kirchenlexicori). It cannot be doubted that relic worship—for the earlier Christians as for the mass of believers to-day—was based on utilitarian ideas of the help that might be had from the sacred remains."
92. See the characterization of the Catholic world-view, by E. Schmidt in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 1736.
93. Baumgarten, in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 2162.
94. The Sacred Shrine, chaps, I-iv.
95. Compare Smith and Cheatham, Dictionary of Christian Archaology, I, pp. 62, 429; II, p. 1775, and especially I, p. 431: "As churches built over the tombs of martyrs came to be regarded with peculiar sanctity, the possession of the relics of some saint came to be looked upon as absolutely essential to the sacredness of the building, and the deposition of such relics in or below the altar henceforward formed the central portion of the consecration rite." The succeeding account of the ritual of the consecration should be read.
96. The literature of relics and relic-veneration is sufficiently indicated in the bibliographies attached to the articles on the subject, in the encyclopedias: Herzog-Hauck, New Schaff-Herzog, Schiele-Zscharnack. The exhibition of the Holy Coat at Treves from August 20 to October 3,1891, with the immense crowd of pilgrims which it brought to Treves, created an equally immense literature, a catalogue of which may be derived from the Theologischer Jahresbericht of the time, and a survey of which will give an insight into the whole subject of the veneration of relics in the nineteenth century.
97. The recent history of relic-miracles in the United States is chiefly connected with the veneration of relics of St. Ann. Certain relics of St. Anthony venerated in the Troy Hill Church at Allegheny, Pa., have indeed won large fame for the miracles of healing wrought by their means, and doubtless the additional relic of the same saint deposited in the Italian Church of St. Peter, on Webster Avenue, Pittsburgh, has taken its share in these works. But St. Ann seems to promise to be the peculiar wonder-worker of the United States. The Church of St. Anne de Beaupr6 has, within recent years, become the most popular place of pilgrimage in Canada; until 1875 not over 12,000 annually visited this shrine, but now they are counted by the hundred thousand; in 1905 the number was 168,000. A large relic of St. Ann's finger-bone has been in the possession of this shrine since 1670; three other fragments of her arm have been acquired since, and it was in connection with the acquisition of one of these, in 1892, that the cult and its accompanying miracles of healing were transferred to New York. St. Ann seems to be one of those numerous saints too much of whom has been preserved in the form of relics. Her body is said to have been brought from the Holy Land to Constantinople, in 710; and it is said to have been still in the Church of St. Sophia in 1333. It was also, it is said, brought by Lazarus to Gaul, during the persecution of the Jewish Christians in Palestine under Herod Agrippa, and finally found a resting-place at Apt. Lost to sight through many years, it was rediscovered there in the eighth century, and has been in continuous possession of the church at Apt ever since. Yet the head of St. Ann was at Mainz up to 1516, when it was stolen and carried to Dttren in the Rhineland, and her head, "almost complete"— doubtless derived from Apt—is preserved also at Chiry, the heir of the Abbey of Ourscamp. Churches in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and in several towns in France "flatter themselves that they possess more or less considerable portions of the same head, or the entire head" (Paul Parfait, Le Foire aux Reliques, p. 04, in an essay on "The Head of St. Ann at Chiry"). Despite all this European history, a relic of St. Ann was again brought from Palestine in the thirteenth century, and it was this that was given to St. Anne d'Auray in Brittany in the early half of the seventeenth century by Ann of Austria and Louis XIII. The origin of the pilgrimages and healings at St. Anne d'Auray was not in this relic, however, but antedated its possession, taking their start from apparitions of St. Ann (1624-1626). The relics which have been recently brought to this country are said to derive ultimately from Apt. Thence the Pope obtained an arm of the saint which was intrusted to the keeping of the Benedictine monks of St. Pauloutside-the-Wall, Rome. From them, through the kind offices of Leo XIII, Cardinal Taschereau obtained the "great relic" which was presented to St. Anne de Beaupr6 in 1892; and from thence also came the relic, obtained by Prince Cardinal Odeschalchi, and presented to the Church of St. Jean Baptiste in East Seventy-sixth Street, New York, the same year (July 15, 1892). Another fragment was received by the Church of St. Jean Baptiste on August 6, 1893; and some years later still another fragment was deposited in the Church of St. Ann in Fall River, Mass., whence it was stolen on the night of December 1, 1901.
The "Great Relic"—a piece of the wrist-bone of St. Ann, four inches in length—was brought from Rome by Monsignor Marquis; and, on his way to Quebec, he stopped in New York with it. Monsignor O'Reilly has given us an enthusiastic account of the effect of its exposition at the Church of St. Jean Baptiste during the first twenty days of May of that year (see the Ave Maria of August 6, 1892; and The Catholic Review of the same date). Something like two or three hundred thousand people venerated the relic; cures were wrought, though apparently not very many. When Monsignor Marquis returned on July 15 with the fragment which was to remain at St. Jean Baptiste, the enthusiasm was redoubled, and St. Ann did not let her feast-day (July 26) pass "without giving some signal proof of her love to her children." Since then a novena and an exposition of the relics are held during the latter part of each July, in conjunction with St. Ann's feast-day, and many miracles have been wrought. In 1901 a new marble crypt was completed at the church, and used for the first time for this novena and exposition, and public attention was very particularly called to it. The public press was filled with letters pointing out abuses, or defending the quality of the cures, which were numerous and striking (see a short summary note in The Presbyterian Banner, August 8, iooi). On the whole Monsignor O'Reilly's hope that the depositing of the relics of St. Ann in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste will result in "the founding here in New York of what will become a great national shrine of St. Anne"—to be signalized, the editor of the Ave Maria adds, "by such marvels as have rendered the sanctuaries of St. Anne de Beauprt and St. Anne d'Auray famous throughout Christendom"—seems in a fair way to be fulfilled. The following is a typical instance of what is happening there. It was reported in The Catholic Telegraph. It is the case of a young man aged nineteen, of New Haven, Conn.: "Two years ago young Maloney, who was working at the time in a New Haven factory, fell and injured his hip. Every doctor consulted said he would be a cripple for life. When he walked he was obliged to use crutches. Until recently he has been under the care of the ablest physicians in the city, yet all declared him incurable. Hearing of several cures wrought at St. Anne's shrine, New York, he started thither, making a retreat on arriving. After several days spent in prayer, he visited the shrine of St. Anne. The morning of his visit he received holy communion, and then the relic of the saint was applied, and the sufferer anointed with consecrated oil. Almost instantly he felt better. Another visit and he was able to walk without crutches, leaving the latter before the shrine in which the relics are kept. He was well, quite well, and thus returned to New Haven, to the astonishment of all who knew him." It is worth noting that the Cincinnati Enquirer of July 28 and the Lexington (Ky.) Leader of July 20, 1002, record the sudden cure of a deaf woman in St. Anne's Church, West Covington, Ky., on St. Ann's feastday. "She said she had heard the key in the tabernacle, which contains a relic of St. Ann, click as the priest turned it"—and after that she heard everything.
The following extract from The New York Tribune for August 13, 1006, will be not uninteresting in this connection: "Two thousand quarts of water from the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, in France, arrived here in huge sealed casks on Saturday, consigned to the Fathers of Mercy, who have charge of the American shrine of that name, at Broadway and Aberdeen Street, Brooklyn. The water will be distributed to thousands of physically afflicted men, women and children from all parts of the country next Wednesday afternoon and the following Sunday. Next Wednesday in the Catholic calendar is known as the Feast of the Assumption. It is the titular day of the French shrine, and is kept with equal solemnity by the Fathers of Mercy at the American shrine. The water comes to this country under the seal of the clergy in charge of the French shrine, who guarantee it to be undiluted. Father Porcile, rector of the Brooklyn church, said yesterday that only two ounces would be given to each person applying. The celebration of the festival will begin at [blurred] o'clock on Wednesday morning with a solemn mass. In the afternoon at 3.30 o'clock the pilgrimage to the shrine, which has stood for years on the grounds of the church, will take place. Father Porcile, who has been at the French shrine several times, says the French Government will not attempt to carry out the threatened abandonment of Lourdes on the charge that it is a menace to public health. 'I read about French pathologists holding that the piscina in which the afflicted bathe is unhealthy,' he said. 'Anybody who has seen the piscina knows better. It is not a pool, but a cavity, which is filled with running water. If the pool were stagnant, it might be argued, with some show of truth, that it was unhealthful.'" It is only right to suppose that the reporter misunderstood his collocutor with regard to the piscinas— whether their formation or their filth. Their filth is not glossed by, say, Robert Hugh Benson (Lourdes, 1014, pp. S1 who bathed in one of them: "That water," says he, "had better not be described."
08. Cf. Giinter, LegendenStudien, p. 177, and especially Die chrisiliche Legende des Abendlandes, pp. 35 ff.
99. This string of epithets is taken from the Roman Breviary, Antiphon to the Magnificat. If we wish to know the extravagances to which the prevalent Mariolatry can cany people, we may go to Liguori's Le Glorie di Maria, a book which a J. H. Newman could defend (Letter to Pusey on the Eirenicon, 1866, pp. 105 ff.). "The way of salvation is open to none otherwise than through Mary." "Whoever expects to obtain graces otherwise than through Mary, endeavors to fly without wings." "Go to Mary, for God has decreed that He will grant no grace otherwise than by the hands of Mary." "All power is granted to thee (Mary) in heaven and on earth, and nothing is impossible to thee." "You, oh Holy Virgin, have over God the authority of a Mother, and hence can obtain pardon for the most obdurate of sinners." Here is the way J. K. Huysmans represents her as thought of by her votaries, doubtless drawing from the life (La Cathidrale, ed. 1003, p. 0): "He meditated on the Virgin whose watchful attentions had so often preserved him from unforeseen danger, easy mistakes, great falls. Was she not"—but we must preserve the French here—"le Puits de la Bont6 sans fond, la Collatrice des dons de la bonne Patience, la Touriere des cceurs sees et clos; was she not above all the active and beneficent Mother?"
100. Compare Lachenmann in Schiele and Zschamack's Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 1837: "Belief in miracles is the chief motive of the favorite places of pilgrimage and the climax is reached in the innumerable localities where the grace of Mary is sought. The origin of these lies not in the region of veneration of relics since the Catholic church knows neither the grave of Mary nor relics of her body, but goes back to stories of visible appearances or of inner revelations of the Mother of God at particular localities which she herself has thus indicated for her special worship, or as places of grace (La Salette, Lourdes); or else to vows made to Mary by individuals, or by whole communities, in times of need; or finally to the miraculous activities of an image of Mary."
101. A full account of it is given by Leon Marillier in The Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp.
IOO-IIO.
102. "Our Lady of Pellevoisin," reprinted in The Catholic Review (New York) for July 30, 1892, from the Liverpool Catholic Times.
103. In J. K. Huysmans's La Cathidrale we are given a highly picturesque meditation on the several manners in which Mary has revealed herself. She owes something to sinners, it seems, for had it not been for their sin she could never have been the immaculate mother of God. She has tried hard, however, to pay her debt, and has appeared in the most diverse places and in the most diverse fashions—though of late it looks as if she had deserted all her old haunts for Lourdes. She appeared at La Salette as the Madonna of Tears. Twelve years later, when people had got tired of climbing to La Salette (the greatest miracle about which was that people could be got to go there), she appeared at Lourdes, no longer as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, but as the Madonna of Smiles, the Tenant of the glorious Joys. How everything has been changed! The special aspect in which Mary is worshipped at Chartres, it is added, is under the traits of a child or a young mother, much more as the Virgin of the Nativity than as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. The old artists of the Middle Ages, working here, have taken care not to sadden her by recalling too many painful memories, and have wished to show, by this discretion, their gratitude to her who has constantly shown herself in their sanctuary the Dispensatrice of benefits, the Chatelaine of graces.
104. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XV, p. 464.
105. See The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, p. 115; vol. XV, p. 115; also B. M. Aladel, The Miraculous Medal: Its Origin, History, etc. Translated from the French by P. S. Baltimore, 1880.
106. Doctor Rouby, La Vtrilt sur Lourdes, 1910, pp. 318 f.
107. A sufficient outline of these scandals is given in the article on La Salette in The Catholic Encyclopedia, which also mentions the chief literature. It was said that "the beautiful lady" seen by the children was a young woman named Lamerliere; suits for slander were brought; and A. D. White is able to say (Warfare, etc., II, pp. 21-22, note) that the shrine "preserves its healing powers in spite of the fact that the miracle which gave rise to them has twice been pronounced fraudulent by the French courts." The whole matter is involved in inextricable confusion. A sympathetic account of La Salette may be read in J. S. Northcote, Celebrated Sanctuaries of the Madonna, 1868, pp. 178 ff. Gustave Droz's first novel, Autour d'une Source, 1869, seems to have drawn part of its inspiration from the story of La Salette; it is extravagantly praised by A. D. White (Warfare, II, p. 44) as "one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction"; and not quite accurately described as "showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous powers at a fashionable spring in France." It does show how easily such things may be even innocently invented. On the question whether the visions of Bernadette may not have been the result of ecclesiastical arrangement, see J. de Bonnefon, Lourdes et ses Tenanciers, Paris, without date, and, on the other side, G. Bertrin, Lourdes, un document apocryphe, in the Revue praclique d'Apologitique, April 15, 1008, pp. 125-133.
108. See Marillier, as cited, and cf. H. Thurston's remarks in Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, p. 149.
109. J. K. Huysmans, in his La Cathidrale, suggests that two rules seem to govern the appearances of Mary. First, she manifests herself only to the poor and humble. Secondly, she accommodates herself to their intelligence and shows herself under the poor images which these lowly people love. "She accepts the white and blue robes, the crowns and garlands of roses, the jewels and chaplets, the appointments of the first communion, the ugliest of attire. The peasants who have seen her, in a word, have had no other examples by which to describe her (except under the appearance of a 'fine lady') but the traits of an altar Virgin of the village, of a Madonna of the Saint-Sulpice quarter, of a Queen of the streetcorner."
no. We are quoting A. T. Myers and F. W. H. Myers, Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1894, p. 177. 111. Legenden-Studien, p. 126.
in. Lourdes, 1891, p. 31, as cited by Myers, as cited, p. 178.
113. Myers, as cited, pp. 178, 179.
114. In the contrast which he draws between La Salette and Lourdes, in his La Cathtdrale, J. K. Huysmans does not neglect this one. "And God who imposed La Salette, without having recourse to the methods of worldly publicity, has changed His tactics and, with Lourdes, puffing comes into play. This is very confounding—Jesus resigning Himself to employ the miserable artifices of human commerce, accepting the repulsive stratagems of which we make use in pushing a product or a business!"
115. Lourdes (the first of the triad on "the cities," Lourdes, Rome, Paris) was published in 1894; E. T. same year, by Vizetelly, and often since. Cf. a critical article on it in The Edinburgh Review, 1903, No. 103. The secret of Lourdes, says Zola, is that it offers to suffering humanity "the delicious bread of hope, for which humanity ever hungers with a hunger that nothing will ever appease"; it proposes to meet "humanity's insatiable yearning for happiness." Since its publication Catholic writers on Lourdes have, as is natural, concerned themselves very much with Zola's book; G. Bertrin's work (Histoire critique des Mnements de Lourdes) which reached its 37th edition in 1913, and which Herbert Thurston pronounces "undoubtedly the best general work on Lourdes" (Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, p. 150), would not be unfairly described as a formal reply to Zola.
116. Edward Berdoe, "A Medical View of the Miracles at Lourdes," in The Nineteenth Century, October, 1895, PP- 614 ff. Doctor Berdoe was a liberal-minded Catholic in faith; see Herbert Thurston's remarks in The Month for November, 1895, and his citation of Doctor Berdoe's own representations in The Spectator, July, 1895. (Cf. Public Opinion, November 28, 1895, p. 108.)
117. Lourdes, 1914, p. 29.
118. The details are given by Benson, p. 32.
119. A curious fact emerges from Bertrin's tables in his appendix (E. T., p. 292); more physicians visit Lourdes every year to look on at the cures than there are cures made for them to observe. For the fourteen years from 1890 to 1903, inclusive, 2,530 physicians visited the Medical Office there, an average of 180 yearly. During these fourteen years 2,130 cures were registered at that office, an average of 152 yearly.
120. A. D. White, Warfare, etc.,1 vol. II, p. 24: E. Berdoe, as cited, p. 615. Other estimates of the proportion of the cured to patients may be found in Dearmer, Body and Soul,* 1912, p. 315, and in Rouby, La Virili sur Lourdes, 1910, p. 272. Rouby thinks that about five out of every thousand patients are cured, that is, about one-half of one per cent; Dearmer can arrive at no more than orfe per cent from the figures given, and remarks that even if five per cent be allowed, as is asserted by some, the proportion is much smaller than under regular psychotherapeutical treatment.
121. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 390; cf. the earlier estimates in his Lourdes, A History of Us Apparitions and Cures, E. T., 1908, p. 91.
122. A rather favorable opportunity for estimating the proportion of cures to patients seems to be afforded by the figures given concerning the patients from Villepinte, a private asylum for consumptive girls, near Paris. Bertrin (E. T., pp. 98 ff.) tells us that for the three years 1896-1898 inclusive, 58 of these girls were sent to Lourdes, of whom 20 were cured. Rouby (pp. 163 ff.) derives from Boissarie a report also for three years (apparently just preceding those given by Bertrin, but not explicitly identified) during which 58 girls were sent to Lourdes, of whom 24 were cured or ameliorated, the cure being maintained with two or three exceptions. Rouby says he investigated the facts for one of these years, 1894, in which out of 24 girls who were sent, 14 were reported cured or ameliorated; he found that 10 of those so reported afterwards relapsed, leaving only 4 benefited. He went to Villepinte, he says, and investigated personally the facts for 1902, finding that 30 girls had been sent, and all 30 had come back unbenefited; and he quotes Ludovic Naudeau as having investigated the facts for 1901 with the same result—none were benefited. We gather from Bertrin, p. 101, that the same thing was true for 1903. Here, apparently, then, are three consecutive years, 1001-1003, in which no cures at all were wrought in the Villepinte delegation.
123. Benson, as cited, pp. 25-26.
124. We find Doctor E. Mackey, Dublin Review, October, 1880, pp. 396 f., very properly dissenting when Pere Bonniot (Le Miracle, etc., p. 89) lays stress thus on suddenness as a proof of miraculousness in a cure. "Mere suddenness of cure," he says, "is not decisive . . . the power of imagination is very great." Cures just as remarkable and just as sudden as those of Lourdes constantly occur in the ordinary experience of p 'lysicians. Doctor J. Burney Yeo quite incidentally records two sv ch sudden cases, in an article on a subject remote from Lourdes, in The Nineteenth Century for August, 1888, vol. XXIV, pp. 106-1P7—one of blindness and the other of lameness. "A gentleman," says he, "the subject of serious disease, who had shown a tendem y to the development of somewhat startling subjective symptoms, suddenly declared that he was blind. He was carefully examined by the writer and by an eminent oculist, and although no par icular optical defect could be found in his eyes, to all the tests it was possible to apply, he appeared to be blind. A few days afterwards, and without any apparent or sufficient cause or reason for the change, and almost without comment, he asked for the Times newspaper, which he proceeded to read in bed without any difficulty 1" "The next instance," he continues, "is perhaps still more remarkable. A young woman presented herself at a London Hospital, supporting herself on crutches, and declared she was losing the use of her legs. After one or two questions, and after noticing the awkward manner in which the crutches were used, the writer took from her both crutches, and ordered her, in a firm manner, to walk away without them, which she did! Some years afterwards he was sent for into a distant suburb to see this person's father, having himself quite forgotten the preceding incident, when this same young woman came forward and reminded him that he 'had cured her of lameness' many years ago! Now, although no curative agency whatever, in the ordinary sense, was introduced or applied, in either of these instances, yet one of them might have said, 'whereas I was blind, now I see,' and the other, 'whereas I was lame, now I walk.'" Professor Charles (or George?) Buchanan, "a distinguished Professor of Surgery in Glasgow" "visited Lourdes in the autumn of 1883, and was much interested in the undoubted benefit that some of the pilgrims received." He published some notes in the Lancet of June 25,1885, from which Doctor A. T. Myers and F. W. H. Myers extract the following account of an instantaneous cure in which he was an actor (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1893-1804, pp. 191 ff.). "With regard," he writes, "to persons who have been lame and decrepit and known as such to their friends, the fact of their leaving their crutches and walking away without help does seem astonishing and miraculous, and it is cases such as these which make the greatest impression." "I believe that the simple visit to the grotto by persons who believe in it, and the whole surroundings of the place, might have such an effect on the mind that a sudden change in the nerve condition might result in immediate improvement in cases whee there is no real change of structure, but where the malady is a fu "ctional imitation of organic disease. Such cases are frequent and f.imiliar to all medical men, and are the most intractable they hav; to deal with, the disorder being in the imagination and not in the part. ... It is rather a remarkable coincidence that on October 2, 1883, within three weeks of my visit to Lourdes, I received a letter from Mrs. F., reminding me that some years before I had perforr led in her case a cure, instantaneous, and to all appearances miraa lous, and which she properly attributed to undoubting faith in ny word. It is a very good illustration of the kind of case to v hich I have been alluding, and of the power of mind over mind, an i of the effect of imagination in simulating real disease. Mr. F. '.ailed on me in October, 1875, and requested me to visit his wife, who had been confined to bed for many months with a painful affection of the spine. When I went into the house I found Mrs. F., a woman of about thirty-one years of age, lying in bed on her left side, and her knees crouched up, that being the position that afforded most relief. She was thin and weak-looking, with a countenance indicative of great suffering. I was informed that for many months she had been in the same condition. She was unable to move her limbs, any attempt being attended with pain, and practically she was paralytic. She was not able to alter her position in bed without help, and this always gave so much trouble that she would have remained constantly in the same position if the attendants had not insisted on moving her to allow of the bed-clothes being changed and arranged. She had altogether lost appetite, and had become dreadfully emaciated, and only took what was almost forced on her by her husband and friends. She had given up all hope of recovery, but had expressed a strong desire to be visited by me in consequence of something she had heard from her husband in connection with a health lecture he had been present at many years before. When I entered her bedroom something in the way she earnestly looked at me suggested the idea that I might have some influence over her supposing it to be a case of hysterical spine simulating real spine irritation and sympathetic paralysis. The story I got was not that of real disease of spine or cord or limbs, and I at once resolved to act on the supposition that it was subjective or functional, and not dependent on actual molecular change or disintegration. I went to her bedside and said suddenly: 'I cannot do you any good unless you allow me to examine your back.' In an instant she moved slightly round, and I examined her spine, running my finger over it at first lightly, then very firmly, without her wincing at all. I then said: 'Get out of bed at once.' She declared she could not move. I said: 'You can move quite well; come out of bed,' and gave her my hand, when, to the surprise of her husband and sister, who looked perfectly thunderstruck, she came out of bed almost with no help at all, and stood alone. I said: 'Walk across the floor now,' and without demur, she walked without assistance, saying: 'I can walk quite well; I knew you would cure me; my pains arc gone.' She then went to bed with very little assistance, lay on her back, and declared she was perfectly comfortable. She was given a glass of milk which she took with relish, and I left the house having performed a cure which to the bystanders looked nothing short of a miracle. For many years I heard nothing of Mrs. F., when on October 2, 1883, I got her letter referred to, and shortly after the patient herself called at my house. In February, 1885, she again called on me. She is at present in fair health, not robust, but cheerful and contented. She says she never altogether regained her full strength; but as an evidence that she is not feeble or unable for a good deal of exertion, I may state that she now lives about five miles from my house, and she made her way alone, partly by omnibus, partly by tramway, and the rest on foot." Compare the curiously parallel case, happening half a century earlier, described in note 26 to Lecture IV, on the "Irvingite Gifts."
125. Benson, as cited, p. 24.
126. Bertrin, as cited, p. 280.
127. Pp. 256, 262.
128. P. 280.
129. P. 256.
130. P. 280.
131. P. 262.
132. On the case of Frau Ruchel, see the report in the Deulschevangelische Korrespondenz for August i1, 1008. The facts are brought out in the brochure of Doctor Aigner of Munich, Die V/ahrheit Uber eine Wunderheilung in Lourdes.
133. Pp. 197-108.
134. Zola, wishing to express these limitations in a word, said he would not ask very much—only let some one take a knife and cut his finger and immerse it in the water, and if it came out cured he would say nothing more. Charcot puts it in a higher form: "Faithawe has never availed to restore an amputated limb" (as cited, p. 19). Percy Dearmer, having theories of his own, makes merry over such statements. There is no such thing as the supernatural, he says; all that God does is natural. But that carries with it that it is not unnatural. The only limit to such cures as we see at Lourdes, then, is that nothing unnatural can happen there. Of course, then, faith cannot grow a new leg. But that is only because we are men and not crabs, and cannot be expected to act in a crustacean manner. Grace can turn a sick man into a well one, but it cannot turn a man into an apple-tree or a cactus. God must act on the lines of nature; the supernatural is not the unnatural (Body and Soul* pp. oo ff.). All this is, of course, pure absurdity. It is to be noted, not obscured, that there are limitations to such cures; that a lost member cannot be restored by them, not even a lost tooth. It is only to dodge the question to say that such things are out of the question; they are not out of the question but very much in it—when it is a question of miracle. It is easy to say, "Better far to hop about on crutches than to have the soul of a rcrab," but it is better simply to acknowledge that there are physical disabilities which Lourdes cannot repair, and that the reason is that they are above the power of nature to repair. It should be noted in passing that Lourdes does not admit that there are any physical disabilities which she cannot repair, and that the reason | is that she, unlike Dearmer, believes in the supernatural, and believes that she wields it.
135. Ed. 7, 1005, p. 55. (E. T., Medicine and Mind.)
136. The New Review, January, 1803, p. 31: "I have seen patients return from the shrines now in vogue who had been sent thither with my consent, owing to my own inability to inspire the operation of the faith-cure. I have examined the limbs affected with paralysis or contraction some days before, and have seen the gradual disappearance of the local sensitive spots which always remain for some time after the cure of the actual disease—paralysis or contraction."
137. The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, E. T., 1008, p. 7a: A patient, "whose neck and jaw had been immobilized for years, and who had undergone unsuccessfully medical and surgical treatment from the most renowned clinicians, found sudden cure in the piscina at Lourdes." Yet Dubois does not think well of Lourdes (p. 211); that is to say, after experience with it. His expectations had been good, and he was disillusioned only by experience. "The cures there," he says, "are in fact rare." Superstition goes all lengths, and—well, "Lourdes is not very far from Tarascon."
138. As cited, p. 271.
139. Jean de Bonnefon has accumulated at the end of his trenchant pamphlet, Faul-il fermer Lourdes? 1906—in which he argues that Lourdes should be abolished by the state—a number of opinions from French physicians to whom a questionnaire was sent, asking whether they thought the enterprise of Lourdes useful or injurious to the sick, whether they thought the piscinas were dangerous, on account of the chill or the filth, whether the long pilgrimages of the sick across France were or were not a menace to the country, and whether they thought the laws of hygiene were observed at Lourdes. The opinions of the physicians vary greatly: many are thoroughly hostile, a few are wholly favorable. What is noticeable is that a considerable number believe it is useful and ought to be sustained, although they have no belief whatever in the supernaturalness of the cures wrought there. One physician, for example, writes: "For a great number of sick people, and particularly women, Lourdes is a benefit. . . . Free from all religious opinions, I never hesitate to send to Lourdes sick people who are in the particular mental condition to receive benefit from it, and I have often had occasion to congratulate myself on having done so" (p. 51). Another writes in a less genial spirit (p. 51): "The enterprise of Lourdes is useful for feeble-minded people, and there are legions of these in our fine land of France. ... I know Lourdes, and it seems to me that they are as filthy there—in the medical sense of the word—as they are everywhere else in France."
140. W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1824, p. 684, is engaged in pointing out the physical effects which may be wrought by "expectant attention." He says: "That the confident expectation of a cure is the most potent means of bringing it about, doing that which no medical treatment can accomplish, may be affirmed as the generalized result of experiences of the most varied kind, extending through a long series of ages. For it is this which is common to methods of the most diverse character; some of them —as the Metallic Tractors, Mesmerism, and Homoeopathy—pretending to some physical power; whilst to others, as to the invocations of Prince Hohenlohe, and the commands of Doctor Vernon, or the Zouave Jacob, some miraculous influence was attributed. It has been customary, on the part of those who do not accept the 'physical' or the 'miraculous' hypothesis as to the interpretation of these facts, to refer the effects either to the 'imagination' or to 'faith'—two mental states apparently incongruous, and neither of them rightly expressing the condition on which they depend. For although there can be no doubt that in a great number of cases the patients have believed themselves to be cured, when no real amelioration of their condition had taken place, yet there is a large body of testimony and evidence that permanent amendment of a kind perfectly obvious to others has shown itself in a great variety of local maladies, when the patients have been sufficiently possessed by the expectation of benefit, and by faith in the efficacy of the means employed."
141. The New Review, January, 1893, p. 23.
142. A writer in The Edinburgh Review for January, 1903, p. 154, has this to say of the use of "suggestion" at Lourdes: "What is so painful and so repulsive in Lourdes and similar centres of popular devotion, is not so much the fanaticism of the pilgrims, the commercial element inseparable from the necessity of providing transport and lodging for the multitude of strangers, or even the incongruous emergence of those lower passions never wholly absent when men are met together, and separated by so small an interval from overwrought emotion, whatever its source, as the deliberate organization of hysteria, the training of suggestion, the exploitation of disease. Everything in the pilgrimage is calculated to disturb the equilibrium of the faculties, to stimulate, to excite, to straia. The unsanitary condition under which the journey is made, the hurry, the crowding, the insufficient food and sleep, the incessant religious exercises, the acute tension of every sense and power, all work up to a calculated climax."
143. Op. cit., E. T., pp. 118 ff.
144. Lourdes, pp. 42 ff.
145. Ibid., p. 56.
146. Ibid., p. v; cf. also Herbert Thurston, Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, p. 150. This is apparently also what J. A. MacCulloch means when he says (Hastings's ERE, vol. VIII, p. 682): "Occasionally miracles at Lourdes are also wrought on more than neurotic diseases," and "they suggest an influx of healing power from without."
147. Op. cit., pp. 150 ff. Cf. John Rickaby, "Explanation of Miracles by Unknown Natural Forces," in The Month for January, 1877.
148. October, 1880, pp. 386-398.
149. P. 308.
150. La VeriU sur Lourdes, pp. 123 ff.
151. We take the account as given by A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, I, p. 139.
152. The shortcomings of the authorities at Lourdes in their reports of the cures may be read in The Dublin Review, October, 1908, pp. 416 ff., apropos of Doctor Boissarie's L'CEuvre de Lourdes, new ed., 1908. Cf. Paul Dubois, The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, p. 211: "I have detected in the physicians of the bureau of statistics, in spite of their evident good faith, a mentality of such a nature that their observations lose all value in my eyes."
153. Sir Francis Champneys, M.D., F.R.C.P., in The Church Quarterly Review, April, 1917, p. 44, says justly: "It is not safe to define a Miracle as something which cannot be understood; for, at that rate, what can be understood?"
154. Systematic Theology, vol. I, p. 52.
155. Deut. 13 : 2.
156. Paris, p. 195.
157. Lourdes, p. 39.
158. See above, p. 59.
159. Lourdes, p. 82.
160. P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, p. 11, note 1.
161. The bibliography at the end of Herbert Thurston's article "Lourdes," in Hastings's ERE, is a model list, and contains all that the student need concern himself about. The English reader has at his disposal: H. Lasserre, Miraculous Episodes of Lourdes, 1884; R. F. Clarke, Lourdes, and its Miracles, 1888; G. Bertrin, Lourdes; a History of its Apparitions and Cures, 1908; R. H. Benson, Lourdes, 1914; together with such illuminating articles as that of Professor George Buchanan in the Lancet of June 25, 1885; of a series of British physicians and surgeons in the British Medical Journal for June 18, 1910; of J. M. Charcot ("The Faith Cure") in The New Review, January, 1893, vol. VIII, pp. 18-31; and of Doctor A. T. Myers, and F. W. H. Myers ("Mind Cure, Faith Cure and the Miracles of Lourdes") in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1893-1894, pp. 160-209. There are also three excellent articles by Catholic physicians accessible: Doctor E. Maqkey, Dublin Review, October, 1880, pp. 386-398; Doctor J. R. Gasquet, Dublin Review, October, 1894, pp. 342-357; Doctor E. Berdoe, Nineteenth Century, October, 1895, pp. 614-618.
NOTES TO LECTURE IV
IRVINGITE GIFTS
1. Edinburgh Review, vol. LIII, p. 302.
2. F. J. Snell, Wesley and Methodism, 1900, p. 157.
3. "The Principles of a Methodist Farther Explained," etc., in Works, New York, 1856, vol. V, p. 328.
4. "I acknowledge," he says, "that I have seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, several things which, to the best of my judgment, cannot be accounted for by an ordinary course of natural causes; and which I therefore believe ought to be 'ascribed to the extraordinary interposition of God.' If any man choose to style them miracles, I reclaim not. I have diligently inquired into the facts, I have weighed the preceding and following circumstances. I have strove to account for them in a natural way. ... I cannot account for (them) ... in a natural way. Therefore, I believe they were . . . supernatural." (Op. cit., p. 325.) On Wesley's ingrained superstition and wonder-craving proclivities, see the remarks by L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley,1 1880,1, pp. 220 ff.; and Isaac Taylor, there referred to. \
5. "A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton; occasioned by his late 'Free Inquiry,'" in Works, as cited, vol. V, p. 746.
6. Snell, as cited, pp. 153 f.
7. Works, 1811, vol. VIII, pp. 322, 329. Cf. The Edinburgh Review, January, 1831, p. 272, note. On Wesley's views on extraordinary exercises, see Richard Watson, "Life of Rev. John Wesley," in Watson's Works, 1835, pp. 89 ff.; also Watson's observations on Southey's Life, pp. 385 ff., 421 ff.
8. John Lacy's Prophetical Warnings, 1707, pp. 3, 31, 32, as cited by William Goode, The Modern Claims to the Possession of the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit, Stated and Examined, etc., second edition, 1834, p. 194. Cf. pp. 188-189. Goode's account of "The French Prophets" and similar phenomena is very instructive.
9. An interesting account of present-day "Irvingism" will be found in an article by Erskine N. White in The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, October, 1899, vol. X, pp. 624-635; see also the article by Samuel J. Andrews, "Catholic Apostolic Church," in The New Schaf-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, with its supplement by Th. Kolde, and the added bibliography.
10. The Collected Writings of Edward Irving, edited by his nephew, the Reverend G. Carlyle, M.A. In five volumes, London and New York, 1866, vol. V, pp. 499 ff., 532 ff.
11. Chalmers himself says: "When Irving was associated with me at Glasgow he did not attract a large congregation, but he completely attached to himself and his ministry a limited number of persons with whose minds his own was in affinity. I have often," he adds, "observed this effect produced by men whose habits of thinking and feeling are peculiar or eccentric. They possess a magnetic attraction for minds assimilated to their own." (William Hanna, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, New York, 1855, vol. Ill, pp. 275-276.) C. Kegan Paul (Biographical Sketches, 1883, p. 8) puts it thus: "Though his labors from house to house were unceasing, though all brought face to face with him loved him, in the pulpit he was unrecognized. ... A few looked on him with exceeding admiration, but neither the congregation nor Chalmers himself gave him cordial acceptance." In Glasgow, says Mrs. Oliphant (The Life of Edward Irving, New York, 1862, p. 98)," Irving lived in the shade." "It was then a kind of deliverance," says Th. Kolde (Herzog-Hauck, vol. IX, 1901, p. 425, lines 14 f), "when by the intermediation of Chalmers, he was chosen in 1822 as minister to the little (it had then about fifty members) Scottish (so-called Caledonian) congregation which was connected with a small Scotch Hospital in Hatton Garden, London."
12. See sub. nom. in the Dictionary of National Biography.
13. From 1820 to 1833 they published a periodical, The Morning Watch, a Journal of Prophecy.
14. J. A. Froude, Life of Carlyle, 1795-1835, vol. II, p. 177.
15. See Mrs. Oliphant's Life, p. 302.
16. Ibid., pp. 312, 362.
17. The writer of the sketch of Scott in the Dictionary of National Biography thinks Mrs. Oliphant does him injustice. There seems to be no good reason for so thinking. Cf. what David Brown says of him, The Expositor, III, VI, pp. 219, 266.
18. Fraser's Magazine, January, 1832, quoted by Mrs. Oliphant,
P- 363
19. Ibid., p. 363.
20. Ibid., p. 365.
21. Ibid., p. 378.
22. Ibid., p. 379.
23. Ibid., p. 363.
24. Ibid., p. 379.
25. Ibid., p. 381. It is perhaps worth mentioning that neither of these young women was bedridden. The miracle did not consist in their literally rising up from their beds.
26. Samuel J. Andrews, The New Schajf-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. II, 457, thinks it worth while, in the interest of the genuineness of the "gifts," to insist on their first occurrence in England apart from Irving's congregation. The deputation to Scotland, he writes, "returned fully convinced that the utterances were divine. In May, 1831, like utterances were heard in London, the first in a congregation of the Church of England. This being reported to the bishop, he forbade them in the future as interfering with the service. Their occurrence in several dissenting congregations brought forth similar prohibitions, and this led to the utterances being made chiefly in the church of Edward Irving, he being a believer in their divine origin. But they were not confined to London. At Bristol and other places the same spiritual phenomena appeared." The entire drift of Andrews's account is to represent the "gifts" as thrust upon, rather than earnestly wooed, by Irving and his fellows. This is wholly unhistorical. On Miss Fancourt's case, see Mrs. Oliphant, Life, etc., pp. 416, 561; it was the subject of a controversy between The Morning Watch and The Christian Observer, some account of which may be read in The Edinburgh Review, June, 1831 (vol. LIII, pp. 263 ff.). The opinion of the medical attendants was that there was nothing miraculous in the cure. One of their opinions (Mr. Travers's) is so modern, and a parallel case which is inserted in it is so instructive, that we transcribe the latter part of it. "A volume, and not an uninteresting one," we read, "might be compiled of histories resembling Miss Fancourt's. The truth is, these are the cases upon which, beyond all others, the empiric thrives. Credulity, the foible of a weakened though vivacious intellect, is the pioneer of an unqualified and overweening confidence, and thus prepared, the patient is in the most hopeful state of mind for the credit as well as the craft of the pretender. This, however, I mention only by the way, for the sake of illustration. I need not exemplify the sudden and remarkable effects of joy, terror, anger, and other passions of the mind upon the nervous systems of confirmed invalids, in restoring to them the use of weakened limbs, etc. They are as much matters of notoriety as any of the properties and powers of direct remedial agents recorded in the history of medicine. To cite one. A case lately fell under my notice of a young lady, who, from inability to stand or walk without acute pain in her loins, lay for near a twelvemonth upon her couch, subjected to a variety of treatment by approved and not inexperienced members of the profession. A single visit from a surgeon of great fame in the management of such cases set the patient upon her feet, and his prescription amounted simply to an assurance, in the most confident terms, that she must disregard the pain, and that nothing else was required for her recovery, adding, that if she did not do so she would become an incurable cripple. She followed his directions immediately, and with perfect success. But such and similar examples every medical man of experience could contribute in partial confirmation of the old adage, 'Foi est tout.' Of all moral energies, I conceive that faith which is inspired by a religious creed to be the most powerful; and Miss Fancourt's case, there can be no doubt, was one of the many instances of sudden recovery from a passive form of nervous ailment, brought about by the powerful excitement of this extraordinary stimulus, compared to which, in her predisposed state of mind, ammonia and quinine would have been mere trifling." A curiously similar instance to that given by Mr. Travers is adduced by a distinguished recent surgeon, Mr. George Buchanan, in illus
trating what he saw done at Lourdes. It is recorded by the Messrs. Myers, in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. IX (1893-1894), pp. 191 ff., and we have cited it thence on a previous occasion. See above, pp. 218 ff. Doctor W. B. Carpenter, in an article in The Quarterly Review, vol. XCIII (1853), p. 513, directly refers to Miss Fancourt's case, and pronounces it a case of "hysterical" paralysis, such as is well known to be curable by mental means.
27. Mrs. Oliphant, Life, p. 420.
28. Ibid., p. 417.
29. Ibid., p. 418.
30. The Expositor, Third Series, vol. VI (October, 1887), 268.
31. Cf. what Irving says, in Mrs. Oliphant's Life, p. 418.
32. For example, Mr. Pilkington's, printed in Mrs. Oliphant's Life, p. 424.
33. Cf. Mrs. Oliphant's Life, pp. 448 ff.
34. Robert Baxter, Narrative of Facts, Characterizing the Supernatural Manifestations in Members of Mr. Irving's Congregation, and other Individuals in England and Scotland, and formerly in the Writer Himself, second edition, 1893 (April; the first edition had been published in February of the same year). Mrs. Oliphant prints extracts from Baxter's Narrative in her Appendix B, pp. 562 ff.
35. Baxter, op. cil., p. 118.
36. As cited, p. 272.
37. "Though Irving was the 'angel' of the church," writes Theo. Eolde (The New Schajf-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. VI, p. 34), "the voices of the prophets left him little hearing. Cardale, Drummond, and the prophet Taplin took the lead of the movement, and the new organization proceeded rapidly, new functionaries were created as the Spirit bade, on the analogy of the New Testament indications, and presently there were six other congregations in London, forming with Irving's the counterpart of the seven churches of the Apocalypse. Irving accepted the whole development in faith, although he had conceived the Apostolic office as something different which should not interfere with the independence of himself as the 'angel.' But he had lost control of the movement, and those who now led it lost no opportunity of humiliating the man to whose personality they had owed so much. When the sentence of deposition was confirmed by the Presbytery of Annan, and then by the Scottish General Synod, and he returned to London strong in the consciousness of his call of God to the office of angel and pastor of the church, he was not allowed to baptize a child, but was told to wait until, on the bidding of the prophets, he should be again ordained by an apostle. His health was now failing, and his physician ordered him, in the autumn of 1834, to winter in the South. He went, however, to Scotland, where the prophets had promised him great success in the power of the Spirit, and died in Glasgow, where he is buried in the crypt of the Cathedral." There are obvious slips in this account, due apparently to the translator, but we transcribe it as it stands. On the matter, cf. Mrs. Oliphant's Life, pp. 527 fi.
38. Mrs. Oliphant's Life, p. 505.
39. C. Kegan Paul, as cited, pp. 29 ff., strongly protests against this representation, citing Mrs. Oliphant's account, and controverting it. "The congregation," he writes, "after some wanderings, found refuge in a picture-gallery in Newman Street, their home for many years. Here it was that the organization and ceremonies began to set aside the old Presbyterian forms, and gain somewhat of Catholic magnificence. Here it was that by the voice of prophecy six apostles were called out to rule the church before Mr. Irving's death. Mr. Irving was not called as an apostle, nor was he a prophet, nor did he speak with tongues; but he remained as he had ever been, the chief pastor of the congregation, the Angel, as the minister in charge of each church began to be called. He was not shelved in any degree, nor slighted, and though the details which took place were ordered by others in prophecy, yet the whole was what he had prayed for and foreseen, as necessary in his estimation to the perfection of the church. So in ordering and building up his people under, as it seemed to him, the immediate direction of the Holy Spirit, passed the rest of that year." There is nothing here inconsistent with Mrs. Oliphant's representation; it is the same thing looked at from a different angle. Paul, however, by adducing the dates, does show, that, as he puts it, "there was no period of mournful silence during which he waited to speak, nor was his recognition for a moment doubtful." For the rest, he only shows that Irving kissed the rod.
40. The Brazen Serpent, p. 253, quoted in William Hanna, Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen from 1800 till 1840, 1877, p. 183. Compare these passages quoted on the same page from On the Gifts of the Spirit: "Whilst I see nothing in the Scripture against the reappearance, or rather the continuance of miraculous gifts in the church, but a great deal for it, I must further say that I see a great deal of internal evidence in the west country to prove their genuine miraculous character, especially in the speaking with tongues. . . . After witnessing what I have witnessed among those people, I cannot think of any person decidedly condemning them as impostors, without a feeling of great alarm. It certainly is not a thing to be lightly or rashly believed, but neither is it a thing to be lightly or rashly rejected. I believe that it is of God."
41. Hanna, as cited, p. 218; cf. p. 220.
42. Hanna, as cited, p. 209: "I think that I mentioned to Lady Matilda at Cadder the circumstance that shook me with regard to the Macdonalds at Port Glasgow, that in two instances when James Macdonald spoke with remarkable power, a power acknowledged by all the other gifted people there, I discovered the seed of his utterances in the newspapers. . . . And I put it to him; and although he had spoken in perfect integrity (of that I have no doubt) yet he was satisfied that my conjecture as to its origin was correct. ... I thus see how things may come into the mind and remain there, and then come forth as supernatural utterances, although their origin be quite natural. James Macdonald could not say that he was conscious of anything in these two utterances distinguishing them from all the others; but only said that he believed these two were of the flesh. Taplin made a similar confession on being reproved by Miss Emily Cardale for having rebuked Mr. Irving in an utterance. He acknowledged that he was wrong; and yet he could not say where the difference lay between that utterance and any other."
43. Hanna, as cited, p. 204. He adds: "This does not change my mind as to what the endowment of the church is, if she had faith, but it changes me as to the present estimate that I form of her condition."
44. In March, 1834, after hearing in Edinburgh "the utterances" through Cardale and Drummond, he speaks of his scepticism regarding them, despite his agreement (except in two instances) with the matter delivered in them, and the pleasingness of their form. "The shake which I have received on this matter," he writes (Hanna, as cited, p. 209), "is, I find very deep; or rather it would be a truer expression of my feelings to say that I am now convinced that I never did actually believe it." He adds: "My conviction that the gifts ought to be in the church is not in the least degree touched, but a faith in any one instance of manifestation which I have witnessed, like the faith which I have in the righteousness and faithfullness of God, I am sure I have not and never have had, as far as I can judge on looking back—that is, the only true faith, even 'the substance of things hoped for.'"
45. Hanna, as cited, p. 233: "James Macdonald is to be buried to-day at one o'clock. . . . This event has recalled many things to my remembrance. I lived in the house with them for six weeks, I believe, and I found them a family united to God and to each other. James especially was an amiable and clean character, perfectly true. And those manifestations which I have so often witnessed in him were indeed most wonderful things and most mighty, and yet—I am thoroughly persuaded—delusive." This was written February 6, 1835. George Macdonald died the year following— both of consumption, the disease which carried off Isabella Campbell, and from which both Mary Campbell and Margaret Macdonald were supposed to be suffering when they were "healed."
46. P. 279.
47. P. 304.
48. Life of Story of Rosneath, by his son, p. 231, note, quoted by Henry F. Henderson, The Religious Controversies of Scotland, 1905, p. 126.
49. Scottish Divines 1303-1873, etc., 1883, being a series of "St. Giles Lectures," Lecture VII, Edward Irving, by R. Herbert Story, P- *54
50. Henderson, as cited, p. 126. "Story concluded by confessing," continues Henderson, "that he had greatly sinned in not exposing her earlier, but he had been restrained from doing this by feelings of affection. What change this letter might have wrought on Irving had he received it we cannot tell. Probably not even Story's voice could have now recalled him." Mary Campbell had in 1831 married a young clerk in a writer's office in Edinburgh, of the name of W. R. Caird, and was residing at Albury (not without interruptions for journeys) as the guest of Henry Drummond; she died in 1840 (see Edward Miller, The History and Doctrines of Irvingism, 1878, vol. I, pp. 58 ff.). Caird, who was acting as a lay-evangelist, undertook in 1841 an Irvingist mission in south Germany, and in i860 was raised to the "apostolic" office. On the 27th of January, 1832, Irving wrote to Story announcing the new developments which had been introduced by Baxter, and concluding with the remarkable appeal: "Oh, Story, thou hast grievously sinned in standing afar off from the work of the Lord, scanning it like a skeptic instead of proving it like a spiritual man! Ahl brother, repent, and the Lord will forgive theel" To this letter, as a postscript, he adds this single unprepared-for line: "Mrs. Caird is a saint of God, and hath the gift of prophecy." We cannot miss the air of defiant assertion, or fail to read behind it a feeling of the need of something in Mrs. Caird's defense. Mrs. Oliphant (p. 450) justly comments: "The sentence of approval pronounced with so much decision and brevity at the conclusion of this letter addressed to him was living's manner of avoiding controversy, and making his friend aware that, highly as he esteemed himself, he could hear nothing against the other, whose character had received the highest of all guarantees to his unquestioning faith." The cause of Irvingite gifts was indeed bound up in one bundle with the trustworthiness of Mary Campbell's manifestations. Thomas Bayne, writing on Robert Story, in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. LIV, p. 430), condenses the story thus: "In 1830 his parishioner, Mary Campbell, professed to have received the 'gift of tongues,' and though Story exposed her imposture, she found disciples in London, and was credited by Edward Irving, then in the maelstrom of his impassioned fanaticism. On the basis of her predictions arose the 'Holy Catholic Apostolic Church' (see Carlyle, Life, II, 204)."
51. Hanna, as cited, p. 209.
52. P. 213.
53. The nearest he came to it seems to be expressed in the sentence (p. 208): "I have a witness within me which, I am conscious, tries truth; but I do not know a witness within me which tries power." With this inner infallible sense compare Mrs. Eddy's assertion [Christian Science History, ed. 1, p. 16): "I possess a spiritual sense of what the malicious mental practitioner is mentally arguing which cannot be deceived; I can discern in the human mind thoughts, motives, and purposes; and neither mental arguments nor psychic power can affect this spiritual insight." An infallible spiritual insight is a dangerous thing to lay claim to, and what we take to be its deliverance a still more dangerous thing to follow.
54. Pp. 507 ff.
55. Erskine in his tract, On the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, 1830, writes: "For the languages are distinct, well-inflected, well-compacted languages; they are not random collections of sounds, they are composed of words of various lengths, with the natural variety, and yet possessing that commonness of character which marks them to be one distinct language. I have heard many people speak gibberish, but this is not gibberish, it is decidedly wellcompacted language."—(Quoted in Hanna, Chalmers, vol. III, p. 253; Erskine, p. 392.)
56. As quoted in The Edinburgh Review, June, 1831, p. 275: "The tongues spoken by all the several persons who have received the gift are perfectly distinct in themselves, and from each other. J. Macdonald speaks two tongues, both easily discernible from each other. I easily perceived when he was speaking in the one, and when in the other tongue. J. Macdonald exercises his gift more frequently than any of the others; and I have heard him speak for twenty minutes together, with all the energy of action and voice of an orator addressing his audience. The language which he then, and indeed generally, uttered is very full and harmonious, containing many Greek and Latin radicals, and with inflections also much resembling those of the Greek language. I also frequently noticed that he employed the same radical with different inflections; but I do not remember to have noticed his employing two words together, both of which, as to root and inflection, I could pronounce to belong to any language with which I am acquainted. G. Macdonald's tongue is harsher in its syllables, but more grand in general expression. The only time I ever had a serious doubt whether the unknown sounds which I heard on these occasions were parts of a language, was when the Macdonalds' servant spoke during the first evening. When she spoke on subsequent occasions, it was invariably in one tongue, which not only was perfectly distinct from the sounds she uttered at the first meeting, but was satisfactorily established to my conviction, to be a language." "One of the persons thus gifted, we employed as our servant while at Port Glasgow. She is a remarkably quiet, steady, phlegmatic person, entirely devoid of forwardness or of enthusiasm, and with very little to say for herself in the ordinary way. The language which she spoke was as distinct as the others; and in her case, as in the others (with the exceptions I have before mentioned), it was quite evident to a hearer that the language spoken at one time was identical with that spoken at another time." Perhaps it ought to be added that when Mary Campbell's written-tongue (for she wrote as well as spoke) was submitted to the examination of Sir George Staunton and Samuel Lee, they pronounced it no tongue at all (Hanna, Chalmers, vol. Ill, p. 266).
57. Mrs. Oliphant, Life, p. 430.
58. Ibid.
50. Ibid., p. 431.
60. Ibid.
61. Reminiscences, p. 252.
62. The British Weekly, January 18, 1889. We have purposely drawn these descriptions from the more sympathetic sources. We must add, however, that the more competent the observer was the less favorable was the impression made upon him. J. G. Lockhart writes to "Christopher North," in 1824 (Christopher North, A Memoir of John Wilson, by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon. Am. ed., New York, 1863, p. 271): "Irving, you may depend upon it, is a pure humbug. He has about three good attitudes, and the lower notes of his voice are superb, with a fine manly tremulation that sets women mad, as the roar of a noble bull does a field of kine; but beyond this he is nothing, really nothing. He has no sort of real earnestness; feeble, pumped-up, boisterous, overlaid stuff is
his staple;' he is no more a Chalmers than is a Jeffrey." That
is a vignette from a competent hand of Irving as a preacher, in the first flush of his popularity in London—before the arrival of the "gifts." And here, now, is a full-length portrait, from an equally competent hand, of a service ten years afterwards (spring of 1833), at Newman Street. It is taken from the intimate journal of Joseph Addison Alexander (The Life of Joseph Addison Alexander, D.D., by Henry Carrington Alexander, New York, 1870, vol. I, pp. 289 ff.): "After breakfast, having learned that Edward Irving was to hold a meeting at half-past eleven, we resolved to go; but without expecting to hear the tongues, as they have not been audible of late. Mr. Nott, who had called before breakfast, conducted us to Newman Street, where Irving is established since he left the house in Regent Square. As we walked along we saw a lady before us arm in arm with a tall man in black breeches, a broad-brimmed hat, and black hair hanging down his shoulders. This, Mr. Nott informed us, was Irving himself with his cara sposa. We followed them to the door of the chapel in Newman Street, where Mr. Nott left us, and we went in. The chapel is a room of moderate size, seated with plain wooden benches, like our recitation rooms. The end opposite the entrance is semicircular, and filled with amphitheatrical seats. In front of these there is a large arch, and immediately beneath it a reading-desk in the shape of an altar, with a large arm-chair beside it. From this point there are several steps descending toward the body of the house, on which are chairs for the elders of the church. I mention these particulars because I think the pulpit and its appendages extremely well contrived for scenic effects. . . .
"Soon after we were seated, the chairs below the pulpit were occupied by several respectable men, one of them quite handsome and well dressed. Another man and a woman took their seats upon the benches behind. While we were gazing at these, we heard a heavy tramp along the aisle, and the next moment Irving walked up to the altar, opened the Bible, and began at once to read. He has a noble figure, and his features are not ugly, with the exception of an awful squint. His hair is parted right and left, and hangs down on his shoulders in affected disorder. His dress is laboriously old-fashioned—a black quaker coat and small clothes. His voice is harsh, but like a trumpet; it takes hold of one, and cannot be forgotten. His great aim appeared to be to vary his attitudes and appear at ease. He began to read in a standing posture, but had scarcely finished half a dozen verses when he dropped into the chair and sat while he read the remainder. He then stepped forward to the point of bis stage, dropped on his knees and began to pray in a voice of thunder; most of the people kneeling fairly down. At the end of the prayer he read the Sixty-sixth Psalm, and I now perceived that his selections were designed to have a bearing on the persecutions of his people and himself. The chapter from Samuel was that relating to Shimei. He then gave out the Sixty-sixth Psalm in verse; which was sung standing, very well, Irving himself joining in with a mighty bass. He then began to read the Thirty-ninth of Exodus, with an allegorical exposition, after a short prayer for divine assistance. The ouches of the breastplate he explained to mean the rulers of the church. While he was dealing this out, he was interrupted in a manner rather startling. I had observed that the elders who sat near him kept their eyes raised to the skylight overhead, as if wooing inspiration. One in particular looked very wild. His face was flushed, and he occasionally turned up the white of his eyes in an ominous style. For the most part, however, his eyes were shut. Just as Irving reached the point I have mentioned and was explaining the ouches, this elder . . . burst out in a sort of wild ejaculation, thus, 'Tarantihoiti-faragmi-santi' (I do not pretend to recollect the words); 'O ye people—ye people of the Lord, ye have not the ouches—ye have not the ouches—ha-a-a; ye must have them—ye must have them —ha-a-a; ye cannot hear—ye cannot hear.' This last was spoken in a pretty loud whisper, as the inspiration died away within him. When he began, Irving suspended his exposition and covered his face with his hands. As soon as the voice ceased, he resumed the thread of his discourse, till the 'tongue' broke out again 'in unknown strains.' After these had again come to an end, Irving knelt and prayed, thanking God for looking upon the poverty and desolation of his church amidst her persecutions/ After he had finished and arisen from his knees, he dropped down again, saying, 'one supplication more,' or 'one thanksgiving more.' He now proceeded to implore the Divine blessing on the servant who had been ordained as a prophet in the sight of the people. After this supplementary prayer, he stood up, asked a blessing in a few words, and began to read in the sixth John about feeding on Christ's flesh. In the course of his remarks he said: 'The priests and churches in our day have denied the Saviour's flesh, and therefore cannot feed upon him.' He then prayed again (with genuflexion), after which he dropped into his chair, covered his face with his hands, and said, 'Hear now what the elders have to say to you.' No sooner was this signal given than the 'tongue' began anew, and for several minutes uttered a flat and silly rhapsody, charging the church with unfaithfulness and rebuking it therefor. The 'tongue' having finished, an elder who sat above him rose, with Bible in hand, and made a dry but sober speech about faith, in which there was nothing, I believe, outrt. The handsome, well-dressed man, whom I have mentioned, at Irving's left hand, now rose and came forward with his Bible. His first words were, 'Your sins which are many are forgiven you.' His discourse was incoherent, though not wild, and had reference to the persecution of the church. The last preacher on the occasion was a decent, ministerial-looking man in black, who discoursed on oneness with Christ. A paper was now handed to Irving, which he looked at, and then fell upon his knees. In the midst of his prayer he took the paper and read it to the Lord, as he would have read a notice. It was a thanksgiving by Harriet Palmer for the privilege of attending on these services to-day. After the prayer, they sang a Psalm, and then the meeting was dismissed by benediction. The impression made on my mind was one of unmingled contempt. Everything which fell from Irving's lips was purely flat and stupid, without a single flash of genius, or the slightest indication of strength or even vivacity of mind. I was confirmed in my former low opinion of him, founded on his writings. . . . Dr. Cox and I flattered ourselves that he observed us, and preached at us. I saw him peeping through his fingers several times, and I suppose he was not gratified to see us gazing steadfastly at him all the time, for he took occasion to tell the people that it would profit them nothing without the circumcision of the ear. This he defined to be the putting away of all impertinent curiosity and profane inquisitiveness—all gazing and prying into the mysteries of God, and all malicious reporting of his doings in the church."
63. Robert Baxter, Narrative of Facts, ed. 2, 1833, p. xxviii; cf. C. Kegan Paul, op. cit., p. 29, as above in note 39.
64. Baxter, as cited.
65. Baxter, op. cit., p. 133.
66. Baxter, op. cit., p. 95.
67. Can the mind help going back to the vivid description which Irenaeus gives us of how Marcus the Magician made his women prophesy (Irenxus, Adv. Hcer., I, 13, 3)? "Behold," he would say after rites and ceremonies had been performed fitted to arouse to great expectations, "grace has descended upon thee; open thy mouth and prophesy!" "But when the woman would reply,'I have never prophesied and do not know how!' he would begin afresh with his incantations so as to astonish the deluded victim, and command her again, 'Open thy mouth, and speak whatever occurs to thee and thou shalt prophesy.' She then, vainly puffed up and elated by these words and greatly excited by the expectation of prophesying, her heart beating violently, reaches the requisite pitch of audacity, and idly as well as impudently utters some nonsense as it happens to occur to her, such as might be expected from one heated by an empty spirit. And then she reckons herself a prophetess."
68. Henderson, op. cit., p. 125.
69. The literature on Edward Irving and Irvingism will be found noted with sufficient fulness in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. II, p. 459, and vol. VI, p. 34; and at the head of the article on Irving in Herzog-Eauck. The primary literature on the Scotch movement is given in the footnotes to the brief account of it inserted by William Hanna at pp. 175-183 of his Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen from 1800 till 1845, 1877. For an almost world-wide recent recurrence of phenomena similar to the Irvingite "gifts," especially "speaking with tongues," see the informing article of Frederick G. Henke, "The Gift of Tongues and Related Phenomena at the Present Day," in The American Journal of Theology, April, 1000, XIII, 2, pp. 193-206. Henke gives references to the primary literature. For a first-hand account of some related phenomena in connection with a great revival in Kentucky in 1801-1803, see the letter of Thomas Cleland on "Bodily Affections produced by Religious Excitement," printed in The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review for 1834, vol. VI, pp. 336 ff.; references to further first-hand accounts of the Kentucky phenomena are given by William A. Hammond, M.D., Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 232 ff. See also Catherine C. Cleaveland, The Great Revival in the West, I79S~T8oj, 1916. The judicious remarks of Charles Hodge on "The Disorders Attending the Great Revival of 1740-1745," in his The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1857, vol. II, pp. 65 ff., should be read along with the account of them given by Jonathan Edwards. On the physical accompaniments of John Wesley's preaching at Bristol, chiefly in 1739, see an account in Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley,11880, vol. I, pp, 255-270. Compare note 7, on p. 288. NOTES TO LECTURE V
FAITH-HEALING
1. The Natural History of Immortality, by Joseph William Reynolds, M.A., rector of St. Anne and St. Agnes with St. John Zachary, Gresham St., London, and prebendary of St. Paul's Cathedral, 1801, p. 286.
2. These facts are taken from a paper by R. Keiso Carter, The Century Magazine, March, 1887, vol. XI, p. 780.
3- P-13.
4. January, 1884; vol. V, p. 49.
5. How natural this attitude is, in the circumstances, is interestingly illustrated by its appearance even among the pre-Christian Jews. A. Schlatter, in his Der Glaube im Neuen Testament, 1885, when discussing the conception of faith in the synagogue, remarks upon the tendency which showed itself to push the duty of faith (for faith was conceived in the synagogue as a duty, and therefore as a work) to extremes. The Jerusalem Targum on Gen. 40 : 23 blames Joseph for asking the chief butler to remember him; he should have depended on God's grace alone. Any one who, having food for to-day, asks, What am I to eat? fails in faith (Tanch., fol. 29, 4). All means are to be excluded. He then continues (pp. 46 ff.): "Philo blames the employment of a physician as lack of faith; if anything against their will befalls doubters, they flee, because they do not believe in a helping God, to the sources of help which the occurrence suggests—to physicians, simples, physics, correct diet; to all the aids offered to a dying race; and, if any one suggests to them, Flee in your miseries to the sole physician of the ills of the soul, and leave the aids falsely so-called to the creature subjected to suffering, they laugh, and scoff, and say, Good Morrow! —and are unwilling to flee to God if they can find anything to protect them from the coming evil; to be sure, if nothing that man does suffices but everything, even the most highly esteemed, shows itself injurious, then they renounce in their perplexity the help of others, and flee, compelled, the cowards, late and with difficulty, to God, the sole Saviour (Z>e Sacrifici Abel, Mang., I, 176,-23 ff.). In this Philo does not express an idea peculiar to himself; the Son of Sirach, xxxviii, 1 ff., shows that in the Palestinian Synagogue also, from of old, the question was discussed, whether the help of a physician was to be sought in sickness: 'The Lord has created medicines out of the earth, and he that is wise will not abhor them; was not the water made sweet with a word that the virtue thereof might be known? . . . My son, in thy sickness be not negligent; but pray unto the Lord and He will make thee whole. Leave off from sin and order thy hands aright, and cleanse thy heart from all wickedness; give a sweet savor and a memorial of fine flour, and make a fat offering, as not being. Then give place to the physician, for the Lord has created Him; let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him. There is a time when in their hands there is good success, for they shall also pray unto the Lord, that He would prosper that which they give, for ease and remedy to prolong life* (38 : 4 f., 9 ff.). Sickness, as a judicial intrusion of God into the life of man, presupposes sin and calls therefore the sick to repentance and sacrifice; nevertheless, for the cool intellect of the Son of Sirach, this does not exclude the use of a physician; but the way in which he expressly places medical help in connection with God's working, and also calls the Scriptures to witness for it, shows that he had before his eyes religious doubts against it, thoughts, as Philo expresses them, that a stronger faith would turn only to God."
6. P. 193.
7. Jellett, Efficacy of Prayer, p. 41.
8. P. 193.
9. Op. cit., p. 303.
10. Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 19x0, pp. 209 ff.
11. Inaugural Address, 1891, ed. 2, p. 37.
12. That our Lord's miracles of healing were certainly not faith-cures, as it has become fashionable among the "Modernists" to represent, has been solidly shown by Doctor R. J. Ryle, "The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing," The Hibbert Journal, April, 1007, vol. V, pp. 572 ff.
13. See p. 41.
14. Loc. cit., p. 68.
15. Of course this implication of the passage is not neglected by interested parties. We find for example C. H. Lea in his A Plea for . . . Christian Science, 1915, pp. 57-58, writing, on the supposition of the genuineness of this passage quite justly: "All Christendom believes that He gave His followers—not only those of His own time but of all succeeding time—the injunction to preach the Gospel and to heal the sick. Now, the giving of the injunction clearly and definitely implies . . . that the mark of one's being a Christian is that he has, or should have, this knowledge and the corresponding power to heal."
16. See above, p. 22.
17. Op. cit., pp. 22 ff.
18. Pp. 52 ff.
19. I have briefly stated the evidence for the spuriousness of the passage in An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 1886, pp. 199 ff. But see especially F. J. A. Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Introduction, Appendix, 1881, pp. 28 ff. of the Appendix.
20. The passages between inverted commas may be found in Gordon, op. cit., pp. 29, 31, 33, 34.
21. Science el Religion, p. 189.
22. We say two; for a third, suggested as a possible alternative by John Lightfoot (Works, 8 vols, ed., vol. III, p. 316), does not appear to us possible, viz., that the reference is to a common Jewish custom of anointing, in connection with the use of charms, to heal the sick. Lightfoot quotes the Jerusalem Talmud (Shab., fol. 14, col. 3): "A man that one channeth, he putteth oil upon his head and charmeth." His comment is: "Now, this being a common, wretched custom, to anoint some that were sick, and to use charming with the anointing—this apostle, seeing anointing was an ordinary and good physic, and the good use of it not to be extinguished for that abuse—directs them better: namely, to get the elders or ministers of the church to come to the sick and to add to the medicinal anointing of him their godly and fervent prayers for him, far more available and comfortable than all charming and enchanting, as well as far more warrantable and Christian."
23. Oil was a remedy in constant use, notably for wounds (Isaiah 1:6; Luke 10 : 34), but also for the most extended variety of diseases. Its medicinal qualities are commended by Philo (Somn. M., I, 666), Pliny (N. H., 23 : 34-50), and Galen (Med. Temp., Bk. II). Compare the note of J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of James,1 1892, p. 158. John Lightfoot gives (vol. Ill, p. 315) some apposite passages from the Talmud. His comment seems to be thoroughly justified (p. 316): "Now if we take the apostle's counsel to be referring to this medicinal practice, we may construe it that he would have this physical administration to be improved to the best advantage; namely that, whereas 'anointing with oil' was ordinarily used to the sick, by way of physic—he adviseth that they should send for the elders of the church to do it; not that the anointing was any more in their hands than in another's, as to the thing itself, for it was still but a physical application—but that they with the applying of this corporeal physic, might also pray with and for the patient, and supply the spiritual physic of good admonition and comforts to him. Which is much the same as if in our nation, where this physical anointing is not so in use, a sick person should send for the minister at taking of any physic, that he might pray with him, and counsel and comfort him."
24. The sacrament of extreme unction, grounded on this text on the understanding that the anointing was intended in a ceremonial sense, has oddly enough (since the primary promise of the text is bodily healing) become in the church of Rome, the sacrament of the dying. According to the Council of Trent (14th session) it is to be esteemed as totius Christiana? vits consummativum; according to Thomas Aquinas, it is the ultimum et quodammodo consummativum totius spirituals curationis (Conl. Gent., 14, c 73). It is according to the Council of Trent to be given especially to those who seem to be in peril of death, unde et sacramentum exeuntium nuncupatur. Its effects are described (reversing the implications of the passage in James) as primarily spiritual healing, and only secondarily and solely in subordination to the spiritual healing, bodily healing. Bodily healing, therefore, only very occasionally results from it. As J. B. Heinrich explains (Dogmatische Theologie, X, 1904, p. 225): "Since it is generally more profitable, and more in accordance with the divine dispositions, for Christians in articulo or periculo mortis to take the last step, than to resume the battle of life again for a time, there ordinarily follows no healing." See in general the exposition of the doctrine by Heinrich as cited, pp. 197 ff. The popular expositions follow the scientific, but often with some ameliorations. "Extreme Unction," we read in one of the most widely used manuals for the instruction of English Catholics, "was instituted by our Lord to strengthen the dying, in their passage out of this world into another" (A Manual of Instructions in Christian Doctrine, published by the St. Anselm's Society, London, and having the imprimatur of Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, p. 363). Even in this Manual, however, the provision of the passage in St. James is not wholly forgotten. We read (p. 365): "If God sees it expedient, this sacrament restores bodily health. . . . Some persons are anxious to put off the reception of Extreme Unction to the last moment, because they seem to regard it as a prelude to certain death; while in truth, if it had been received earlier it might have led to their recovery. It cannot be doubted that miraculous cures are sometimes effected by Extreme Unction; but the beneficial effects which it generally exercises on bodily health are produced in an indirect way. The grace of the sacrament soothes the soul, lessens the fear of death, and brings on such calm and peace of mind as often to lead to the restoration of health. If God be pleased to work a direct miracle it is never too late for Him to do so; but if the sacrament is to act as a natural remedy, indirectly restoring health in the way just explained, it must be received in due time, otherwise, like ordinary remedies, it will not produce its effects." In a similar spirit Deharbe's Catechism (A Full Catechism of the Catholic Religion, translated from the German of the Reverend Joseph Deharbe, S. J., . . . revised, enlarged, and edited by the Right Reverend P. N. Lynch, D.D., bishop of Charleston, 1891, pp. 206, 297), after declaring that Extreme Unction "often relieves the pains of the sick person, and sometimes restores him even to health, if it be expedient for the salvation of his soul," asks: "Is it not unreasonable for a person, from fear of death, to defer, or even neglect, the receiving of Extreme Unction until he is moribund?" and replies: "Certainly; for (1) Extreme Unction has been instituted even for the health of the body; (2) The sick person will recover more probably, if he employs in time the remedy ordained by God, than if he waits until he cannot recover except by a miracle; and (3) If his sickness be mortal what should he wish for more earnestly than to die happy, which this holy sacrament gives him grace to do?" "As many of those sick persons who were anointed by the Apostles were healed," we read in The Catechumen3 by J. G. Wenham, 1892, p. 358, "so this is often the effect of this sacrament now—that those that receive it obtain fresh force and vigor, and recover from their illness." Although, therefore, Extreme Unction is "given to us in preparation for death," it is ordinarily explained, in deference to its biblical foundation-passage, as (as Bellarimine puts it, following the language of the Council of Trent) "also assisting in the recovery of bodily health, if that should be useful to the health of the soul." Father W. Humphrey, S.J., The One Mediator, ed. 2, 1894, chap. VH, explains the matter more strictly in accordance with the authoritative declaration of Trent thus: "Hence one end, and that the principal end, of this sacrament is to strengthen and to comfort the dying man. . . . Another and a secondary end of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction is proximately to dispose and prepare the parting soul for the new life in which it is about to enter. . . . There is a third and a contingent end of Extreme Unction, and that is the bodily healing of the sick man under certain conditions." On the origin of this teaching and the history of the rite of Extreme Unction, see Father F. W. Puller, The Anointing of the Sick in Scripture and Tradition, London, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1904; and cf. Percy Dearmer, Body and Soul,* 1912, pp. 217 ff.
The movement forming nowadays in the Anglican churches, with a view to "the restoration to the Church of the Scriptural Practice of Divine Healing," also bases the "office" of anointing, which it proposes, on James 5 : 14, 15. See, for example, F. W. Puller, Anointing of the Sick, 1004, chap, rx; Percy Dearmer, Body and Soul,9 1912, esp. chap, xxrx, with Appendix in; Henry B. Wilson, B.D., The Revival of the Gift of Healing, Milwaukee, The Young Churchman Company, 1914. Mr. Wilson is the director of the "Society of the Nazarene," and writes in its interest, printing also suitable prayers and an office for the anointing of the sick. His contention is that the gift of healing was never withdrawn from the church, and that the church must recover "her therapeutic ministry" by means of this formal ritual act. See also Mr. Wilson's later book, Does Christ Still Heal? New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917.
25. It is sometimes suggested that a miraculous healing is promised indeed, but that this promise applied only to those miraculous days, and is no longer to be claimed. Even J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James,11892, p. 218, appears to lean to this view; and it seems to have never been without advocates among leading Protestants. Luther writes to the Elector of Brandenburg, December 4, 1539 (Miss Currie's translation of Luther's Letters, p. 378): "For Christ did not make anointing with oil a Sacrament, nor do St. James's words apply to the present day. For in those days the sick were often cured through a miracle and the earnest prayer of faith, as we see in James and Mark 6." Thorndike (Works, vol. VT, p. 65, Oxford edition) writes: "This is laid aside in all the reformed churches upon presumption of common sense, that the reason is no longer in force, being ordained, as you see, to restore health by the grace of miracles that no more exist." J. A. Hessey (Sunday, i860, p. 42) agrees with Thorndike. Nevertheless the view will scarcely approve itself.
26. Op.cit.,p.sTj. This is the way the common sense of Martin Luther met the question of the use of remedies in disease: "Our burgomaster asked me whether it was against God's will to use medicine, for Carlstadt publicly preached tha,t the sick should not use drugs, but should only pray to God tfiat His will be done. In reply I asked the burgomaster if he ate when he was hungry, and when he answered in the affirmative, I said,'You may then use medicine, which is God's creature as much as food, drink, and other bodily necessities.'"—(The Life and Letters of Martin Luther. By Preserved Smith, Ph.D., 1911, pp. 327-328.)
27. "Je le pansay et Dieu le guarit," quoted by A. T. Schofield, The Force of Mind, 1908, p. 176.
28. The New Church Review, vol. XV, 1908, pp. 415 f.
29. For example Percy Dearmer, Body and Soul,* 1912, pp. 174 f., calmly sets the "nature miracles" aside as "quite exceptional occurrences," and declares that it may be safely assumed that "it was not to such exceptional occurrences that Christ was here referring." On the basis of Mark 6:7; Luke 9 : 1, 10 : 1, and the nature of the miracles recorded in Acts, he asserts that "it must have been clearly understood that Christ did not commission His disciples to exercise authority over the powers of nature." Meanwhile, on his own showing, the greatest "works" which Christ did were these "nature miracles"; and it remains inexplicable how Faith-Healings in His disciples can have been declared by Him to be greater than they.
30. So, for example, Luthardt, Godet, Westcott and Milligan and Moulton; see especially the discussion in W. Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly High-Priesthood oj Our Lord, 1892, pp. 250 ff.
31. Op. cit., pp. 16 ff.
32. P. 163.
33. As cited.
34. A very little consideration will suffice to show that these attempts so to state the doctrine of the atonement as to obtain from it a basis on which a doctrine of Faith-Healing can be erected, betray us into a long series of serious errors. They imply, for example, that, Christ having borne our sicknesses as our substitute, Christians are not to bear them, and accordingly all sickness should be banished from the Christian world; Christians are not to be cured of sickness, but ought not to get sick. They imply further, that, this being so, the presence of sickness is not only a proof of sin, but argues the absence of the faith which unites us to Christ, our Substitute, that is saving faith; so that no sick person can be a saved man. They imply still further that, as sickness and inward corruption are alike effects of sin, and we must contend that sickness, because it is an effect of sin, is removed completely and immediately by the atoning act of Christ, taking- away sin, so must also inward corruption be wholly and at once removed; no Christian can be a sinner. Thus we have full-blown "Perfectionism." Stanton writes: "In so far as the soul may be delivered from sin during life, the body may be delivered from sickness and disease, the fruit of sin"; "in short, if the full deliverance of the soul from sin may be at any time reached on this side of death, so may the body be freed from disease." Perfectionism and Faith-Healing, on this ground, stand or fall together. We wonder why, in his reasoning, Stanton leaves believers subject to death. The reasoning which proves so much too much, proves, of course, nothing at all.
35. Gordon remarks: "It is obvious that our Redeemer cannot forgive and eradicate sin without in the same act disentangling the roots which sin has struck into our mortal bodies." Are these three terms synonymous: forgive sin, eradicate sin, disentangle the roots of sin? And are the forgiveness of sin, the disentangling of the roots of sin, the eradication of sin, all accomplished in one "act"? There is through all this reasoning a hopeless confusion of the steps of the process of salvation and of the relations of the several steps to one another. If we lay down the proposition that our salvation is completed in a single act, in all its relations—why, then, of course, we are not in process of salvation, but we are already wholly saved.
36. Gordon, op. cit., p. 18.
37. The New Church Review, vol. XV, 1008, p. 414.
38. Here is, however, one illustration. Doctor Alfred T. Schofield (A Study of Faith-Healing, 1872, p. 38) relates the following incident. "Knowing a Christian doctor, favorable to faith-healing, I asked him if he could tell me any genuine cures of organic disease. But he only shook his head. . . . The principal case at the faith-healing centre near him was that of a woman who was really dying and had continual fits, and who, the doctor said, was indubitably cured by faith. Here, then, was an authenticated case at last of some sort. This woman gave great testimony as to her cure at various meetings, but as she had been my friend's patient, he was able to tell me the secret of it. God had cured her by saving her soul, and thus delivering her from the love and constant excessive use of strong drink that had been the sole cause of her illness and fits, and that the doctor had told her would end her life!" The annals of faith-healing are rich in such instances. Doctor Schofield records a touching instance (p. 42) of a young woman who, by trusting in the Lord, was freed from a nervous terror of the sea, and gradually from other disabilities.
39. Literature and Dogma, chap. v. Arnold bases really on the notion that all illness is due to sin and that the proper method of attacking it is, therefore, by "moral therapeutics." Christ as the source of happiness and calm cured diseases by eliminating their moral cause; hence what we call His miracles, which were, of course, no miracles but the most natural effects in the world; "miracles do not happen."
40. P. 62.
41. P. 192.
42. Cf. W. W. Patton, Prayer and Its Remarkable Answers; Being a Statement of Facts in the Light of Reason and Revelation, ed. 20, 1885, pp. 214 ff., drawing on the booklet, Dorothea Triidel, or the Prayer of Faith, 1865, and (pp. 237 ff.) Doctor Charles Cullis's report of a visit to Mannedorf.
43. Doctor A. T. Schofield, op. cit., pp. 23 ff., who gives an interesting account of a visit which he made to Zeller's House at Mannedorf. He found that very many came there for rest and quiet, and many grew no better while there, but rather worse. He could not, on inquiry at the House or from the physicians in the town, assure himself of the cure there of any truly organic disease; and came away with the conviction that "the bulk at any rate of the cases benefited are clearly mental, nervous, and hysterical" (p. 28).
44. Christian Thought, February, 1890, p. 289. Another eminent physician, J. M. Charcot (The New Review, 1893, vol. VIII, p. 19), writes: "On the other hand, the domain of faith-healing is limited; to produce its effects it must be applied to those cases which demand for their cure no intervention beyond the power which the mind has over the body—cases which Hack Tuke (Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease, designed to elucidate the Action of the Imagination, London: Churchill, 1872) has analyzed so admirably in his remarkable work. No intervention can make it pass these bounds, for we are powerless against natural laws. For example, no instance can be found amongst the records sacred to so-called miraculous cures where the faith-cure has availed to restore an amputated limb. On the other hand, there are hundreds of recorded cases of the cure of paralysis, but I think these have all partaken of the nature of those which Professor Russell Reynolds has classified under the heading of paralysis 'dependent on idea' ('Remarks on Paralysis and other Disorders of Motion and Sensation Dependent on Idea . . .' in British Medical Journal, November, 1869)."
45. They are sufficiently illustrated by J. M. Buckley, FaithHealing, Christian Science, and Kindred Phenomena, 1892. To the account of Faith-Healing by the Mormons, which he gives on pp. 35 ff., add what is said of this practice among the Mormons by Florence A. Merriam, My Summer in a Mormon Village, pp. 1156.: "To an outsider, one of the most appalling features of Mormonism is the rooted opposition of the people to Medical Science, their distrust of skilled physicians, and their faith in the Biblical ceremonial of anointing or laying on of hands. . . ." She gives some instructive instances. Cf. also W. A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Kindred Phenomena.
46. Buckley, as cited, p. 3; The Century Magazine, vol. X, p. 222. 47. Buckley, op. cil., p. 27; The Century Magazine, vol. X, p.
230.
48. Buckley, Faith-Healing, p. 25; The Century Magazine, vol. X, p. 229.
49. Op. cit., p. 25.
50. Buckley, op. cit., p. 9. Cf. A. T. Schofield, The Force of Mind, 1908, pp. 256 ff. "Phantom Tumors," says Doctor J. R. Gasquet (The Dublin Review, October, 1894, pp. 355, 356), "deceive even the elect." See also Doctor Fowler's paper, "Neurotic Tumors of the Breast," read before the New York Neurological Society, Tuesday, January 7, 1890, in the Medical Record, February 19, 1890, p. 179, and cf. Charcot's remarks on it, op. cit., p. 29. Doctor Fowler's tumors were actual, not "phantom," neurotic tumors, and yet, on being subjected to a course of treatment, "in which, so to speak, the psychical element was made the chief point, vanished as if by magic."
51. Reynolds, op. cil., pp. 325-326.
52. "Doctor Cabot's figures," derived from a comparison of a test series of instances of clinical diagnoses with post-mortem findings, have become famous. In this test "the average percentage of correctness of these diagnoses in these cases, taken as a whole, was 47.3. In 1913 the Committee of Inquiry into the Department of Health, Charities and Bellevue and Allied Hospitals in the City of New York compared the autopsy findings in Bellevue Hospital with the clinical diagnoses, and the comparison revealed the fact that clinical diagnoses were confirmed in only 52.3 per cent of the cases." Cf. the remarks of Doctor Schofield, op. cit., pp. 30-40, on the difficulties which come to physicians in connection with cases of alleged faith-cure. In examining into a case of reputed tumor healed at once on faith, he wrote to the physicians who had charge of the case and learned that it never was of much importance, and that it had not disappeared after its alleged cure. But one of the physicians added: "I am sorry I am not able to answer your question more satisfactorily. As a Christian, I am greatly interested in 'faith-healing,' but have come to the conclusion that it is wiser for me not to examine patients, or pronounce on their condition, when they state that the Lord has healed them, for I feel it too solemn a thing to shake a person's faith by too critical pathological knowledge."
53. Op. cit., p. 158.
54. Buckley, op. cit., pp. 54-55; The Century Magazine, vol. XI, p. 784.
55. These citations are taken from L. T. Townsend, Faith Work, Christian Science and Other Cures, pp. 160 ff., where the matter is discussed at large.
56. P. 196.
57- Pp. 197-198.
58. Cf. G. M. Pachtler, Biographische Nolizen tiber . . . Prinzen Alexander, Augsburg, 1850; S. Brunner, Aus dent NachlUsse des Filrsten . . . Hohenlohe, Regensburg, 1851; F. N. Baur, A Short and Faithful Description of the Remarkable Occurrences and Benevolent Holy Conduct of . . . Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe . . . during his residence of Twenty-five Days in the City of Wilrzburg . . ., London, 1822; John Badeley, Authentic Narrative of the Extraordinary Cure performed by Prince Hohenlohe, London, n. d.; James Doyle, Miracles said to have been wrought by Prince Hohenlohe on Miss Lalor in Ireland, London, 1823.
59. Cf. J. F. Maguire, Father Matthew, 1864.
60. The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 113, note; Blumhardt is spoken of by James as a "singularly pure, simple and nonfanatical character," who "in this part of his work followed no previous example." His life was written by F. ZUndel, Pfarrer J. C. Blumhardt, 1887; see a short notice with Bibliography, in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, sub. nom. (II, 206).
61. See The New Schaff-Herzog, sub. nom., and sub. voc., "Christian and Missionary Alliance."
62. See C. W. Heisler, "Denver's Messiah Craze," in The Independent, October 3,1895; Henry Kingman, "Franz Schlatter and his Power over Disease," in The Congregationalist, November 1, 1895. The New York daily press for the late summer and early autumn of 1916 (e. g., The Evening Sun for September 28) tells of the sordid final stages of Schlatter's "practice."
63. There are articles on Dowie and on the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, to the latter of which a full Bibliography is attached. To this Bibliography we may add Annie L. Muzzie, "One Man's Mission. True or False?" in The Independent, September 17, 1896; "New Sects and Old," chap, xn of "Religious Life in America," by E. H. Abbott, Outlook, September 15, 1002, and afterwards published in book form; James Orr, "Dowie and Mrs. Eddy," London Quarterly Review, April, 1004.
64. See an analysis of Dowie's healing work in American Journal of Psychology, X, pp. 442, 463.
65. The literature of Faith-Healing is very extensive. We mention only, along with Doctor Gordon's Ministry of Healing, among its advocates: George Morris, Our Lord's Permanent Healing Office in His Church; W. E. Boardman, The Great Physician; The Lord That Healeth Thee, 1881; and Faith Work under Doctor Cullis in Boston; A. B. Simpson, The Gospel of Healing, 1884; The Holy Spirit or Power from on High, 1899; and Discovery of Divine Healing, 1902. The doctrines involved are discussed by A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, 1887, pp. 107-116; cf. also A. F. Schauffler, The Century Magazine, December, 1885, pp. 274 ff. The whole question is admirably canvassed in L. T. Townsend, Faith Work, Christian Science and Other Cures, 1885; J. M. Buckley, Faith-Healing, Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena, 1892; A. T. Schofield, A Study of Faith-Healing, 1892; W. S. Plummer Bryan, Prayer and the Healing of Disease, 1896; W. R. Hall, "Divine Healing or Faith-cure," Lutheran Quarterly, New Series, vol. XXVII (1897), pp. 263-276. The literatures attached to the articles, "Faith-healing," in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, and "Psychotherapy," in The New SchaffHerzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, will suggest the works on the action of the mind on the body. P. Dearmer's Body and Soul. An Inquiry into the effects of Religion upon Health, with a Description of Christian Work of Healing from the New Testament to the Present Day, 1009 (9th ed., 1912), deserves perhaps special mention, as presenting the matter from a high Anglican standpoint, and on the basis of pantheizing theories of being which leave no room for real miracles, whether in the records of the New Testament or in the healings of subsequent times. See also J. M. Charcot, "The Faith-cure," in The New Review, VIII (1893), pp. 18-31, which discusses the matter, however, with Lourdes particularly in mind.
NOTES TO LECTURE VI
MIND-CURE
1. Intermediate positions are, of course, possible in the abstract, in which the cure is ascribed both to faith and to God acting reinforcingly or supplementarily. But these possible abstract points of view may be safely left out of account.
2. Ecclus. 38 : 1 ff.
3. This is, of course, the common representation. Thus, for example: H. H. Goddard, The American Journal of Psychology, vol. X, 1898-1899, p. 432: "As a matter of fact the principle is as old as human history"; H. R. Marshall, The Hibbert Journal, vol. VH, 1909, p. 293: "Were the complete history of medical science written, it would without doubt appear that the treatment of disease through what seems to be mental influences has prevailed in one form or another ever since man began to realize that certain illnesses are curable."
4. How little they can be ascribed to it has been shown by R. J. Ryle, in an article entitled "The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing," in The Hibbert Journal, vol. V, April, 1007, pp. 572-586.
5. Sir William Osier, The Treatment of Disease, 1009, speaks of the necessity in all cases of "suggestion in one of its varied forms —whether the negation of disease and pain, the simple trust in Christ of the Peculiar People, or the sweet reasonableness of the psychotherapist." Cf. especially William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience,21 1911, pp. 712 ff.; Stephen Paget, The Faith and Works of Christian Science, 1909, pp. 204 ff.; Henry H. Goddard, The American Journal of Psychology, vol. X, 1898-1899, p. 481. That this is not the account given by the practitioners themselves lies in the nature of the case. Consult, e. g., C. H. Lea, A Plea for . . . Christian Science,* 1915, pp. xv, 70 ff., who appeals to "an ever-operative principle of good, or spiritual law, underlying all life which is here and now available for all mankind." For that matter consult Elwood Worcester, Religion and Medicine, p. 72; on pp. 67 ff. Worcester speaks quite in the spirit of the Spiritual Healers spoken of above.
6. Samuel McComb, The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, 1009, p. 117: "It does not believe that its cures are due to any miraculous agency . . ."; Religion and Medicine, 1908, p. 311: "We dare not pray to God to work a miracle, that is, to violate one of those general laws by which He rules the physical world."
7. Religion and Medicine, p. 14, note; The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 99.
8. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 39. The remedy which Wesley proposed, however, was not that the minister should turn physician, but that the physician should become Christian: "It follows," he writes, "that no man can be a thorough physician without being an experienced Christian."
9. McComb says expressly, The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 92: "In many instances it does not matter what the object of the faith may be; it is not the object but the faith that heals." The matter is more fully stated in Religion and Medicine, p. 293: "Faith simply as a psychical process, or mental attitude . . . has healing virtue"; "Faith as a mere mental state has this power"—in accordance with Feuchterleben's saying, "Confidence acts like a real force." Elwood Worcester, p. 57, agrees with his colleague. Of course it is allowed that if we are seeking moral as well as physical effects it is better that the faith employed should have God rather than Mumbo-jumbo for its object. The plane on which McComb's chapter on "Prayer and Its Therapeutic Value" (Religion and Medicine, pp. 302-319) moves is the same. The therapeutic value of prayer resides in its subjective effects. As it is clearly stated in a leading 'article in the British Medical Journal for June 18, 1010: "Prayer inspired by a living faith is a force acting within the patient, which places him in the most favorable condition for the stirring of the pool of hope that lies, still and hidden it may be, in the depths of human nature." McComb does not utterly exclude the prayer of desire or deny that it has an effect on God; even, if it be a desire in behalf of others, an effect on them. We are organically related to God, he says: "We exist in Him spiritually somewhat as thoughts exist in the mind," and "a strong desire in our soul communicates itself to Him and engages His attention just as a thought in our soul engages ours." God may resist this desire of ours, thus entering His consciousness; but "the stronger the thought, the more frequently it returns, the more likely it is to be acted upon." If now we have a desire in behalf of others, "our soul not only acts on that soul," telepathically we suppose, "but our prayer arising to the mind of God directs His will more powerfully and more constantly to the soul for which we pray." This is very ingenious and very depressing. We hope there is no truth in it.
10. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 10. The leaders of the Emmanuel Movement are very insistent that the Christianity which they employ is that of the "critical interpretation" of the New Testament.
11. It seems almost as difficult for clerics to recognize frankly the limits of their functions as spiritual guides with respect to medicine, as with respect to the state. They repeatedly show a tendency not only to intrude into but to seek to dominate the one alien sphere as the other. Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896, II, p. 37, recounts how the mediaeval church sought to secure that physicians should always practise their art in conjunction with ecclesiastics. Pius V ordered "that all physicians before administering treatment should call in 'a physician of the soul,' on the ground, as he declares, that 'bodily infirmity frequently arises from sin.'" Clear differentiation of functions—"division of labor" the economists call it—lies in the line of advance.
12. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 99. See above, note 7.
13. These citations are derived from Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, pp. 35, 64, 73. Cf. what Stephen Paget says on the general question in The Faith and Works of Christian Science, 1909, pp. 180-190.
14. The primary literature on the Emmanuel Movement is comprised in the two books by its founders: Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, Isador H. Coriat, Religion and Medicine, the Moral Control of Nervous Disorders, 1008; and Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, The Christian Religion as a Healing Power: A Defense and Exposition of the Emmanuel Movement, 1909. See also Robert MacDonald, Mind, Religion and Health, with an Appreciation of the Emmanuel Movement, 1909; C. R. Brown, Faith and Health, 1910. A very good criticism of the movement will be found in the article by Doctor Henry Rutgers Marshall, on "Psychotherapeutics and Religion," in The Hibbert Journal, January, 1909, vol. Ill, pp. 295-313. The most recent literature includes: Loring W. Batten, The Relief of Pain by Mental Suggestion, 1917; Isador H. Coriat, What is Psychoanalysis? 1917.
15. Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. V, p. 700b. He has explained himself more at large in his book Spiritual Healing, London, 1914, and quite in this sense. But a certain amount of ambiguity in this matter is not unnatural, and may be met with in many writers. Elwood Worcester, for example, gives expression occasionally to a mystical theory which assimilates him to the theory of spiritual healing described by Cobb («. g., Religion and Medicine, pp. 67 ff.). On the other hand, Percy Dearmer (Body and Soul," 1912, p. 318), who also holds to a mystical theory of the universe, must be classed distinctly as an advocate of "Mindcure"; although he lays all the stress on religion, and refers everything to God as the ultimate actor, he yet is thoroughly naturalistic in his analysis. "All power is of God," he says, "—whether it be electricity or neurokym, or grace; and to him who does not believe in God, all power must be left unexplained. On the other hand, the high power of religion can quite fairly be called mental; no one would be less ready to deny this than the Christian for whom, as I have said, the very operations of the Spirit of God, his gifts and his fruits, are mental phenomena which are habitually obtained in a lower form without the special aid of religion. There is no ultimate barrier then between what is sacred and what is secular, since all things come of God and of his own do we give him; the difference is one of degree and not of kind."
16. Two other important movements, tracing their impulse back to P. P. Quimby, deserve mention here—the "Mind-cure Movement," the best representative of which is probably Warren F. Evans; and the "New Thought Movement," the best representative of which is probably Horatio W. Dresser. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience,11 1911, pp. 94 ff., gives an adequate account of the "New Thought Movement"; a good brief account of both streams of development will be found in Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science, 1909, pp. 255 ff. Some details of W. F. Evans's career may be found in McClure's Magazine, vol. XXX, pp. 300 ff. A useful bibliography of out-ofthe-way books on "New Thought" is given in The New SchaflIlerzog Encyclopedia, vol. VIII, p. 148, but the best books are missed. See, especially, Horatio W. Dresser, Handbook of New Thought, 1917.
17. "The truth, therefore, about Christian Science," says W. F. Cobb (Mysticism and the Creed, 1914, p. 316), "seems to be that the power displayed in the cures which it indubitably performs is not peculiar to it, that is, is not Christian Science at all, but that which is its peculiar glory is the bad philosophy by which it seeks to set forth the power which comes from the Spirit, and is under the guardianship of religion."
18. "Many imagine," she says, Science and Health, 161st ed., 1899, p. xi, "that the phenomena of physical healing in Christian Science only present a phase of the action of the human mind, which, in some unexplained way, results in the cure of sickness." This, she declares, is by no means the case. She condemns the several books "on mental healing" which have come under her notice as wrong and misleading, precisely because "they regard the human mind as a healing agent, whereas this mind is not a factor in the Principle of Christian Science" (p. x). The phrase "human mind" in passages like this probably is to be read as equivalent to "mortal mind," a cant phrase in the system, as, for example, on p. 303: "History teaches that the popular and false notions about the Divine Being and character have originated in the human mind. As there really is no mortal mind, this wrong notion about God must have originated in a false supposition, not in immortal Mind." This "mortal mind," we are told (p. 45), "claims to govern every organ of the mortal body," but the claim is false; "the Divine Mind" is the true governor. There "really is no mortal mind." Of course this distinction between mind-cure and Mind-cure is not maintained, and endless confusion results. Thus the Christian Science writer quoted in the American Journal of Psychology, X, p. 433, in the same breath repudiates the ascription of their healings to a "material, mental or bodily cause," and affirms that "the only agency ever effective in curing diseases is some faculty of mind."
19. Science and Health, 1890, p. xi; cf. p. 5: "Christian Science is natural but not physical. The true Science of God and man is no more supernatural than is the science of numbers"; p. 249: "Miracles are impossible in Science." Even the resurrection of Christ was not supernatural: "Can it be called supernatural for the God of nature to sustain Jesus, in his proof of man's truly derived power? It was a method of surgery beyond material art, but it was not a supernatural act. On the contrary, it was a distinctly natural act . . ." (p. 349). "Mary Baker Eddy," says a writer in the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, "has worked out before us as on a blackboard every point in the temptations and demonstrations—or so-called Miracles—of Jesus, showing us how to meet and overcome the one, and how to perform the other." All is natural in Mrs. Eddy's universe.
20. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 19. 31. Christian Thought, February, 1890.
33. On "the pedigree of Christian Science," see the admirable article under that title by Frank Podmore in The Contemporary Review for January, 1909, vol. XCV, pp. 37-49; and, of course, more at large, Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science : a Short History of Mental Healing, 1909.
33. Mrs. Eddy herself speaks with contempt of Faith-Healing as "one belief casting out another—a belief in the unknown casting out a belief in disease." "It is not Truth itself which does this," she declares; "nor is it the human understanding of the divine healing Principle" (Science and Health, 1899, p. 317).
24. These admissions are greatly modified in Science and Health, 1899, p. 397. Here it is taught, as the Index puts it, that faithcure "often soothes but only changes the form of the ailment." "Faith removes bodily ailments for a season; or else it changes those ills into new and more difficult forms of disease, until at length the Science of Mind comes to the rescue and works a radical cure."
25. Christian Science Healing, its Principles and Practice, 1888, p. 102.
26. Retrospection and Introspection," 1900, p. 38 (first printed in 1891).
27. Ibid. In Science and Health, 1899, p. 107, she writes: "In the year 1866 I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science. God had been graciously preparing me during many years for the reception of this final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific mental healing."
28. Mrs. Eddy's relations to P. P. Quimby have been made quite clear and placed on a firm basis by Georgine Milmine in a series of articles published in McClure's Magazine for 1907-1908, and afterward in book form, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, 1909; and by Lyman P. Powell, Christian Science, the Faith and its Founder, 1907; see also Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science, 1909, chap, xrv, "The Rise of Mental Healing," and Annetta Gertrude Dresser, The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, 1895. Quimby's fundamental principle is summed up in his conviction that the cause and cure of disease lie in mental states. His practice was to talk with his patients about their diseases, to explain to them that disease is an error, and to "establish the truth in its place, which, if done, was the cure." "I give no medicines," he says, "I simply sit by the patient's side and explain to him what he thinks is his disease, and my explanation is the cure; . . . the truth is the cure." "My way of curing," he writes in 1862, the year in which Mrs. Eddy went to him as a patient, "convinces him (the patient) that he has been deceived; and, if I succeed, the patient is cured." The Pantheistic background appears to have been less prominently thrust forward by Quimby than by Mrs. Eddy, and it would seem that her "discovery" consists wholly in this possible change of emphasis.
29. This is sufficiently characteristic to deserve emphasis. Mrs. Eddy (who describes herself as "the tireless toiler for the truth's new birth") ever assumed the r61e of thinker and teacher rather than of healer; the healing she delegated to her pupils. "I have never made a specialty of treating disease," she writes, "but healing has accompanied all my efforts to introduce Christian Science." By taking the course she did, she understood herself to be assuming the more difficult task: "Healing," she said, "is easier than teaching, if the teaching is faithfully done" (Science and Health, 1899, p. 372). She was accustomed to print at the end of the preface to Science and Health this: "Note.—The author takes no patients and declines medical consultation." Nevertheless, in a by-law of 1903, she declares "healing better than teaching" (McClure's Magazine, May, 1908, p. 28).
30. The Christian Scientist writer quoted in the American Journal of Psychology, vol. X, p. 436, declares with great emphasis: "The only text-book of genuine, unadulterated Christian Science is Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Rev. Mary Baker Eddy." Mr. Bailey, editor of the Christian Science Journal, wrote that he considered "the Bible and Science and Health as one book—the sacred Scriptures."
31. Science and Health, 1899, p. 4.
32. Christian Science Journal, January, 1001: cf. Miscellaneous Writings, p. 311: "The words I have written on Christian Science contain absolute Truth. ... I was a scribe under orders, and who can refrain from transcribing what God indites?"
33. In the Christian Science Journal, April, 1895, Mrs. Eddy abolished preaching and ordained that the service should be as here described. "In 189s," she says, "I ordained the Bible and Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, as the Pastor, on this planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science denomination" (McClure's Magazine, May, 1908, p. 25).
34. This was not the original order, but was subsequently introduced.
35. Mrs. Eddy says in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897: "The Bible, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, and my other published works are the only proper instructions for this hour. It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to sell as many of these books as they can."
36. G. C. Mars, The Interpretation of Life, in which is shown the relation of Modern Culture and Christian Science, 1008. It is related that Mrs. Eddy herself, with, no doubt, a rare display of humor, said once that Bronson Alcott, on reading Science and Health, pronounced that no one but a woman or a fool could have written it (McClure's Magazine, August, 1897, p. 47).
37. The Dublin Review, July, 1908, vol. CXLIII, p. 62.
38. P. N. F. Young, The Interpreter, October, 1908, vol. V, p. 91.
39. So say many of the readers of the book with serio-comic emphasis; see three such expositions of the effect of trying to read it given in Stephen Paget's The Faith and Works of Christian Science, pp. 205 ff.
40. McClure's Magazine for October, 1907, p. 699.
41. God, says Mrs. Eddy, in Science and Health, ed. 1875, "is Principle, not Person"; God, she says, in ed. 1881,1, p. 167; II, p. 97, "is not a person, God is Principle"; God, she says still in No and Yes, 1006, "is Love, and Love is Principle, not person." In later editions of Science and Health the asperity of the assertion is somewhat softened without any change of meaning, e. g., ed. 1899, p. 10: "If the term personality applied to God means infinite personality, then God is personal Being—in this sense, but not in the lowest sense," i. e., in the sense of individuality (cf. what is said on the supposition that God should be spoken of as person on p. 510). The entry in the Index referring to this passage (p. 10) is phrased simply, "Person, God is not"; and throughout the text God is represented not as "Person" but as "Principle." To approach God in the prayer of petition is to "humanize" Him. "Prayer addressed to a person prevents our letting go of personality for the impersonal Spirit to whom all things are possible" (ed. 1875). The whole foundation of Mrs. Eddy's theory and practice alike was denial of the personality of God; see the curious deposition printed in McClure's Magazine, 1907, p. 103, bearing that this denial was made by Mrs. Eddy the condition of entrance into her classes. "There is really nothing to understand in Science and Health," says Wiggin truly, "except that God is all." That is the beginning and middle and end of Mrs. Eddy's philosophy. Accordingly, the writer in the Christian Science Sentinel for September 25, 1007, p. 57, quoted by Powell, Christian Science, p. 242, is quite right when she declares: "principle and not personality is the only foundation upon which we can build safely."
42. Ed. 1875; in ed- 1899, p. 3: "the divine Mind and idea"; cf. p. 8: "In Science Mind is one—including noumena and phenomena, God and His thoughts," i. e., everything. Accordingly, C. H. Lea, A Plea for . . . Christian Science, p. 23, says: "The individual man is a part of God, in the sense that a ray of light is a part of the sun."
43- Ed. 1905, p. 331.
44. Ed. 1899, p. 7.
45. Op. cit., p. 23.
46. P. 74. 47- P-8i.
48. P. 412.
49. It is these "cross currents," we are told, which form the chief difficulty in the way of Christian Science practice. Mrs. Carrie Snider even reports in The Journal of Christian Science (McClure's Magazine, 1907, pp. 692-693) the case of her husband, who, being "under the treatment of two healers, whose minds were not in accord," was caught in this cross current and died, or, as Mrs. Eddy would express it, "showed the manifestation of the death symptoms" ("symptoms" themselves being "shadows of belief"). "The thought from the one," explains Miss Milmine, "confused thought from the other, leaving him to die in the crossfire." The interested reader will find the precepts of Elwood Worcester on "Suggestion" (Religion and Medicine, p. 64) running very closely parallel to Mrs. Eddy's on all such matters: "It is necessary as far as possible to guard against counter-suggestions"; "suggestions . . . contained in books are often of great curative value"; "in order to avoid the danger of opposition and countersuggestion some practitioners prefer to treat the patient silently."
50. Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, P- 293
51. Sin is, of course, in Mrs. Eddy's system, like disease, an illusion; there is no such thing. "The belief" of it is in the beginning "an unconscious error" (ed. 1899, p. 81), it "exists only so long as the material illusion remains" (p. 207), and what "must die" is "not the sinful soul" but "the sense of sin" (ibid.). It is amusing to observe as we read Science and Health, how often, in the preoccupation with sickness as the thing from which we look to Christian Science for relief, sin comes in as an afterthought. The book itself, it is to be noticed, is a treatise on "Science and Health"; and what the author professes to have discovered is "the adaptation of Truth to the treatment of disease"—to which is added, plainly as an afterthought, "as well as of sin." "The question of What is Truth," she adds in the next paragraph, "is answered by demonstration—by healing disease"—"and sin" she adds again as an afterthought. Consequently she goes on to say, "This shows that Christian healing confers the most health," "and," she adds weakly, "makes the best men." This preoccupation with sickness rather than sin is grounded, no doubt, in part, in the historical genesis of the system and of the book in which it is presented. It was not as a religious leader but as a healer that Mrs. Eddy came forward, treading in the footsteps of Quimby, who was not a religious leader but a healer. Her theories were religious only because, pushing Quimby's suggestions into express declarations, she found his "all is mind" completing itself in "all mind is God." Her religion, in other words, existed for its healing value, and her interest in it was as a curative agent. Sickness and healing were the foci around which the ellipse of her thought was thrown. Christian Scientists, therefore, teach that there is no such thing as sin; and sin, like disease, is to be treated by denial. C. H. Lea, A Plea for . . . Christian Science,* 1915, p. 29, says that God, being perfect, all His creations must also be perfect; "consequently that He did not and could not create a sinful man, or even a man that could become sinful." We can never be separated from God; "the apparent separation of man from God is, according to Christian Science teaching, due to the false human consciousness or mortal's sense of sin" (p. 39).
52. One gains the impression that Mrs. Eddy was even exceptionally troubled by sickness. In the Christian Science Journal for June, 1902 (McClure's Magazine, February, 1908, p. 399), a contributor very sensibly writes: "Do not Scientists make a mistake in conveying the impression, or, what is the same thing, letting an impression go uncorrected, that those in Science are never sick, that they never have any ailments or troubles to contend with? There is no Scientist who at all times is wholly exempt from aches and pains or from trials of some kind." The "Scientists," of course, are between the two horns of a dilemma, for how can they "deny" sickness without "denying" it! A physician gives this account of an experience of his own with this stoicism of denial (The New Church Review, 1908, vol. XV, p. 419): "I was called to a Christian Scientist who was supposed to be sick. I found her hard at work in the kitchen, for she was a boarding-house keeper. I asked her where she felt sick, and she said 'nowhere.' I asked her if she had any pain, and she replied, 'none,' and that she felt as well as usual. I found her carrying a high fever and both lungs becoming solid with pneumonia. I called her husband aside and told him she was probably nearly through, but that she ought to go to bed and be cared for. She insisted upon remaining up and making some biscuit for supper, and did so. She soon lapsed into unconsciousness, and passed away. Just before her consciousness left her, she told me she did have pains and did feel sick, but was taught not to say so, and what was more, to persuade herself it was not so, and that her disease was only an illusion." And then this physician adds: "I speak frankly, as the need is, but I have seen those of this belief with heart disease, saying they were well, yet suffering week after week, till death released them. I have seen them with malignant growths becoming steadily worse, but as I inquired about them I was told they were getting better, and the growth was disappearing; but only for the undertaker to inform me a little later of their loathsome condition. I have seen children . . . hurried down to an untimely grave with appendicitis, while being told practically that there was nothing the matter with them."
53. Observe the case of permitting a baby to die, reprinted in McClure's Magazine, October, 1007, pp. 693 ff., from the Christian Science Journal of March, 1889, p. 637; but most people will be satisfied if they will but glance over the sixty-eight cases of Christian Science treatments collected by Stephen Paget in pp. 151-180 of his The Faith and Works of Christian Science. He closes with a scathing arraignment based on what he, as a physician, finds in them (p. 180): "Of course, to see the full iniquity of these cases, the reader should be a doctor, or should go over them with a doctor. But everybody, doctor or not, can feel the cruelty, born of fear of pain, in some of these Scientists—the downright madness threatening not a few of them—and the appalling self-will. They bully dying women, and let babies die in pain; let cases of paralysis tumble about and hurt themselves; rob the epileptic of their bromide, the syphilitic of their iodide, the angina cases of their amylnitrate, the heart cases of their digitalis; let appendicitis go on to septic peritonitis, gastric ulcer to perforation of the stomach, nephritis to uraemic convulsions, and strangulated hernia to the miserere met of gangrene; watch day after day, while a man or a woman slowly bleeds to death; compel them who should be kept still to take exercise; and withhold from all cases of cancer all hope of cure. To these works of the devil they bring their one gift, wilful and complete ignorance; and their 'nursing' would be a farce if it were not a tragedy. Such is the way of Christian Science, face to face, as she loves to be, with bad cases of organic disease." For the legal questions involved, see William A. Furrington, Christian Science, an Exposition of Mrs. Eddy's wonderful Discovery, including the Legal Aspects: a Plea for Children and other helpless Sick, 1900.
54. Ed. 1006, p. 12.
55. Ed. 1899, p. 34.
56. American Journal of Psychology, X, 1908-1909, p. 435.
57. See McClure's Magazine, May, 1907, p. 103, cited above, note 41.
58. Ed. 1899, p. 443.
59. Ibid.
60. Ed. 1899, pp. 49-51.
61. P. 70.
62. Marcus Aurelius says: "Do not suppose you are hurt and your complaint ceases. Cease your complaint and you are not hurt."
63. Mesmerism and Christian Science, p. 282.
64. McClure's Magazine, June, 1908, p. 184.
65. Ed. 1899, p. 118.
66. Ed. 1881, I, p. 269.
67. Ed. 1899, p. 411.
68. Ed. 1903, p. 174.
69. McClure's Magazine, June, 1908, p. 184; cf. Science and Health, ed. 1906, pp. 382-383; ed. 1899, P- 381.
70. Miscellaneous Writings, p. 288.
71. P. 289.
73. Science and Health, ed. 1891, p. 529, and subsequent editions up to and including 1906. 73. Ed. 1881, II, p. 152: "Until the spiritual creation is discerned and the union of male and female apprehended in its soul sense, this rite should continue"; ed. 1890, p. 274: "Until it is learned that generation rests on no sexual basis, let marriage continue."
74. On this whole subject, see especially Powell, op. cit., chap, vm; Podmore, op. cit., pp. 294 ff.; Paget, op. cit., pp. 18 ff. When it is declared in the later editions of Science and Health, e. g., 1007, p. 68, that Mrs. Eddy does not believe in "agamogenesis," that must be understood as consistent with teaching asexual generation, or else taken merely for "the present distress"; in these same editions she teaches asexual generation for the better time to come. Cf. the commentators already mentioned.
75. The materiality of Mrs. Eddy's golden age seems to be made very clear from the teaching that not sin and disease merely but death itself is non-existent, and will finally cease on due "demonstration." When Miss Milmine says that "a sensationless body" is, according to Mrs. Eddy, the ultimate hope of Christian Science (McClure's Magazine, June, 1008, p. 184), she apparently accurately expresses the fact. It seems that we are never to be without a body. It is, though illusion, nevertheless projected with inevitable certainty by "mortal mind." But it is to be a perfect body in the end, free from all the defects with which it is unfortunately now projected. The excitement which Mrs. Eddy manifested, and her manner of speech at Mr. Eddy's death, show her point of view very clearly. "My husband," she wrote to the Boston Post, June 5, 1882 (McClure's Magazine, September, 1007, p. 570), "never spoke of death as something we are to meet, but only as a phase of mortal being."
76. As quoted by Powell, op. cit., p. 127.
77. Op. cit., p. 106.
78. Ed. 1899, p. 387.
79. This is the conventional mode of speech among Christian Scientists, and may be read afresh any day. Thus Margaret Wright, answering some inquiries in the New York Evening Sun of October 17, 1916, quite simply writes: "As to eating, if one feels hungry and can get good food, the sensible thing to do is eat. If they did not do so Christian Scientists would be thought sillier than they already are. Also, if one can't see without eyeglasses one must have them until one's understanding of truth enables one to dispense with them. That is practical, and Christian Scientists are a practical people, or should be." Cf. note 8s on p. 325.
80. See particularly, Richard C. Cabot, M.D., "One Hundred Christian Science Cures," in McClure's Magazine, August, 1908, pp. 472-476, in which a hundred consecutive "testimonies" published in the Christian Science Journal are analyzed from the physician's point of view; and Stephen Paget, The Faith and Works of Christian Science, 1900, pp. 00-120, in which two hundred consecutive "testimonies" are brought together; also A. T. and F. W. H. Myers, "Mind-Cure, Faith-Cure and the Miracles of Lourdes," in the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. IX (1893), pp. 160-176.
81. Luther T. Townsend, Faith Work, Christian Science and Other Cures, p. 56.
82. Ed. 1899, p. 400.
83. Powell, op. cit., p. 174.
84. Powell, op. cit., pp. 174-175, and notes 6 and 7, p. 246; Paget, op. cit., pp. 70 and 231-232; both going back to W. H. Muldoon, Christian Science Claims Unscientific and Non-Christian, 1001, pp. 30-31, who cites Mrs. Eddy herself, in Boston Herald, December, 1000 (c/. Literary Digest, December 29, 1900).
85. The natural embarrassment of Mrs. Eddy in the presence of physical need is equally amusingly illustrated by a story told by Miss Milmine of the days of her earlier teaching in Boston (1878). "Occasionally," she says (McClure's Magazine, August, 1907, p. 456), "a visitor would ask Mrs. Eddy why she used glasses instead of overcoming the defect in her eyesight by mind. The question usually annoyed her, and on one occasion she replied sharply that she 'wore glasses because of the sins of the world,' probably meaning that the belief in failing eyesight (due to age) had become so firmly established throughout the ages, that she could not at once overcome it." This, too, was concession to "mortal mind." Compare note 79, p. 324.
86. The Treatment of Disease, 1909, quoted by H. G. G. Mackensie, in Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, p. 122.
87. Charlotte Lilias Ramsay, who writes the article "Christian Science," in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. Ill, pp. 576-579, in lieu of adding the ordinary "Literature" to the article, informs us that "there is no authorized Christian Science literature except that which issues from the Christian Science Publishing House in Boston, Mass." "The Student of Christian Science," she adds, "must be warned not to accept any other as genuine." Nevertheless, she gives us, here, this brief sketch. Lewis Clinton Strang gives us a similar one in The New Schajf-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. X, pp. 288-291, which would appear to be even more authoritative, as bearing at its head this "Note," signed by Mrs. Eddy: "I have examined this article, edited it, and now approve it." The New Schaff-Herzog article is rendered more valuable by the adjunction to it of two others, a "Judicial Estimate of the System," by Lyman P. Powell, and a "Critical View of the Doctrines," by J. F. Carson—the whole closing with an extensive bibliography. There is nevertheless added at vol. XII, p. 550, as a "Statement from the Christian Science Committee on Publication of the First Church, Boston," a bio graphical article on Mrs. Eddy, signed by Eugene R. Cox. Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, is, of course, the source-book for the system of teaching. First issued in 1875 (pp. 564) it has gone through innumerable editions; the first edition of the text revised by J. H. Wiggin was published in 1885; but the book has undergone much minor revision since. According to the trust-deed by which the site of "the Mother Church" in Boston is held, all the editions, since at least the seventy-first, are equally authoritative. We have used chiefly the one hundred and sixty-first (1899, pp. 663). Besides the suggestions given by C. Lilias Ramsay, a list of Mrs. Eddy's writings and of the "Publications of the Christian Science Publishing Society" may be found in Appendix H to C. H. Lea's A Plea for the Thorough and Unbiased Investigation of Christian Science, and a Challenge to its Critics, second edition, 1915. A good classified bibliography is prefixed to Lyman P. Powell's Christian Science: the Faith and its Founder, 1907. The authorized life of Mrs. Eddy is Sibyl Wilbur's Life of Mary Baker Eddy, 1008. Georgine Milmine's Life of Mary Baker Eddy and History of Christian Science, first published in McClure's Magazine for 1907-1908, was issued in book form in 1009; it gives the ascertained facts, and forms the foundation for a critical study of the movement. The books which, along with it, we have found, on the whole, most useful, are Powell's, Podmore's, and Paget's; but the literature is very extensive and there are many excellent guides to the study of the system. Even fiction has been utilized. Clara Louise Burnham's The Right Princess (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1902), for example, is a very attractive plea for Christian Science; and Edward Eggleston's The Faith Doctor (a story of New York), 1891, is a strong presentation of the social situation created by it. An interesting episode in the history of Christian Science may be studied in two books published through G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, by Augusta E. Stetson, entitled respectively: Reminiscences, Sermons, and Correspondence Proving Adherence to the Principles of Christian Science as Taught by Mary Baker Eddy, and Vital Issues in Christian Science, a Record, etc. A good recent discussion of the inner meaning of Christian Science will be found in the article by L. W. Snell, entitled "Method of Christian Science," in The Hibbert Journal for April, 1015, pp. 620-629. Walter S. Harris, Christian Science and the Ordinary Man, 1917, seeks to argue afresh the fundamental question. Among the most recent books, see also: George M. Searle (a Paulist Father), The Truth about Christian Science, 1916; and W. McA. Goodwin (a " Christian Science Practitioner, Teacher, and Lecturer"), A Lecture entitled The Christian Science Church, 1916.