We should perhaps note at the outset that the marvellous stories do not seem to have met with universal credence when first published. They seem indeed to have attracted very little attention. Augustine bitterly complains that so little was made of them.15 Each was known only in the spot where it was wrought, and even then only to a few persons. If some report of it happened to be carried to other places no sufficient authority existed to give it prompt and unwavering acceptance. He records how he himself had sharply rebuked a woman who had been miraculously cured of a cancer for not publishing abroad the blessing she had received. Her physician had laughed at her, she said ; and moreover she had not really concealed it. Outraged, however, on finding that not even her closest acquaintances had ever heard of it, he dragged her from her seclusion and gave the utmost publicity to her story. In odd parallelism to the complaint of his somewhat older contemporary, the heathen historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who in wistful regret for the portents which were gone, declared stoutly
DISBELIEF IN THE MIRACLES 45
that they nevertheless still occurred, only "nobody heeds them now,"16 Augustine asserted that innumerable Chris- tian miracles were constantly taking place, only no notice was taken of them.17
It was not merely indifference, however, which they en- countered, but definite disbelief. Many (plurimi) shook their heads at what Sulpitius Severus told in the second book of his Dialogues of the deeds of Martin of Tours — so many that he felt constrained carefully to give his authori- ties in the next book for each miracle that he recorded. "Let them accept," he says in announcing his purpose to do so,18 " the evidence of people still living, and believe them, seeing that they doubt my good faith." In the first book of his Dialogues,19 indeed, he represents his collocutor — his Gallic friend Postumianus — as saying to him frankly: "I shudder to tell what I have lately heard— that a miserable man (I do not know him) has said that you have told many lies in that book of yours" — that is, in his Life of Martin. The reason Postumianus gives for his shuddering, however, is what most interests us. It is that doubt of the actual occurrence of these miracles is a constructive assault upon the credibility of the Gospels. " For," Postumianus argues, "since the Lord Himself testified that such works as Mar- tin's were to be done by all the faithful, he who does not believe that Martin did them simply does not believe that Christ uttered such words." In point of fact, of course, Christ did not utter these words ; the appeal is to the spuri- ous "last twelve verses of Mark." We see, however, that the belief that Christ uttered these words was a powerful co-operating cause inducing belief in the actual occurrence of the alleged marvels. It seemed an arraignment of Christ to say that His most distinguished followers did not do the works which Christ had promised that all His followers should do. The actual occurrence of the miracles was proved quite as much by the fancied promise of the Gospel as by ocular evidence.20
46 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES