admit that the miracles of the first three centuries happened, slightly and only generally witnessed as they are, we should in all reason go on and admit that the much more numerous and much better attested miracles of the fourth century happened too— and those of the fifth, and of the sixth, and of every subsequent century down to our day.
The force of this reasoning is interestingly illustrated by the conversion by it of Edward Gibbon, in his youth, to Roman Catholicism. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen gives a somewhat caustic account of the circumstances. "At Oxford," he says,1 "'the blind activity of idleness' impelled him to read Middleton's Free Inquiry. Yet he could not bring himself to follow Middleton in his attack on the early Fathers, or to give up the notion that miracles were worked in the early church for at least four or five centuries. 'But I was unable to resist the weight of historical evidence that within the same period most of the leading doctrines of Popery were already introduced in theory and practice; nor was the conclusion absurd that miracles are the test of truth, and that the church must be orthodox and pure which was so often approved by the visible interposition of the Deity.'
"From the miracles affirmed by Basil, Chrysostom, Au- gustine, and Jerome, he inferred that celibacy was superior to marriage, that saints were to be invoked, prayers for the dead said, and the real presence believed in; and whilst in this frame of mind he fell in with Bossuet's Exposition and his History of the Variations. 'I read,' he says in his affected way, 'I applauded, I believed'; and he adds with truth in reference to Bossuet, 'I surely fell by a noble hand.' 'In my present feelings it seems incredible that I ever should have believed in transubstantiation ; but my con- queror oppressed me with the sacramental words, and dashed against each other the figurative half-meanings of the Protestant sects. . . .'
"No one, we will venture to say, has been converted in
ABOUNDING MARVELS 37
the nineteenth century by a belief that, as a fact, miracles were worked in the early church, and that, as a consequence, the doctrines professed at the time must be true. As a rule the doctrines have carried the miracles. . . . The fact that the process began at the other end with Gibbon is characteristic both of the man and of the age ; but it is put in a still stronger light by the account which he gives of his reconversion. . . . The process from first to last was emphatically an intellectual one. . . . Gibbon him- self observes: 'I still remember my solitary transport at the discovery of a philosophical argument against the doc- trine of transubstantiation : that the text of Scripture which seems to inculcate the real presence is attested only by a single sense — our sight; while the real presence itself is disproved by three of our senses — the sight, the touch, and the taste.'"
Only a brief account will be necessary of the state of the case for the fourth and later centuries. When we pass from the literature of the first three into that of the fourth and succeeding centuries, we leave at once the region of indefinite and undetailed references to miraculous works said to have occurred somewhere or other — no doubt the references increase in number and definiteness as the years pass — and come into contact with a body of writings sim- ply saturated with marvels. And whereas few writers were to be found in the earlier period who professed to be eye- witnesses of miracles, and none who wrought them were named to us, in the later period everybody appears to have witnessed any number of them, and the workers of them are not only named but prove to be the most famous mission- aries and saints of the church. Nor must we imagine that these marvels are recounted only by obscure and otherwise unknown hero-worshippers, whose only claim to be remem- bered by posterity is that they were the overenthusiastic admirers of the great ascetics of their time. They are rather the outstanding scholars, theologians, preachers,
38 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
organizers of the age. It is Jerome, the leading biblical scholar of his day, who wrote the distressing lives of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus; Gregory of Nyssa, one of "the three great Cappadocians," who narrates the fantastic doings of his thaumaturgic namesake;2 the incomparable Athanasius himself, who is responsible for the life of An- tony. And not to be left behind, the greatest preacher of the day, Chrysostom; the greatest ecclesiastic, Am- brose; the greatest thinker, Augustine, — all describe for us miraculous occurrences of the most incredible kind as hav- ing taken place within their own knowledge. It will be not only interesting but useful for our purpose, as well, if a specimen instance be brought before us of how these great men dealt with miracles.