Perhaps I ought to mention before leaving Newman's book that it has been subjected to a very thorough examina- tion, and has been given a very complete refutation by Edwin A. Abbott, in a volume devoted wholly to it, pub- lished under the significant title of Philomythus.50 And, having mentioned this book, perhaps I ought to say further that the same writer has also published a very extended discussion of the miracles of Thomas a Becket,51 under the impression that some sort of a parallel might be drawn between them and the miracles of the New Testament, to the disadvantage of the acknowledgment of the truly miraculous character of the latter. Nothing further need be said of this than what has been briefly said by A. G. Headlam in the course of a discussion of miracles, which he read at the Church Congress at Middlesbrough (1912).52 "Reference has been made to miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury," he says, "and it is maintained that those miracles are supported by as good evidence as the Gospel narratives, and that they represent just the same strong ethical character that our Lord's work did. I do not think that any one who makes assertions of this sort can have looked at the evidence for a moment. We have very full accounts of the life of Thomas a Becket, and we have many letters written by him. In none whatever of the early narratives is there any reference to miracles per- formed in his lifetime. Neither he himself nor his contem- poraries claimed that he could work miracles. The stories of miraculous happenings are entirely confined to the mir- acles believed to have been worked by his dead body after
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his death, and these narratives are exactly of the same char- acter as those recorded at Lourdes, for example, at the present day. Many of them represent answers to prayers which were offered up in different parts of the world in the name of St. Thomas, many of them are trivial, and some repellent. Some doubtless represent real cures, which were worked among those who went on a pilgrimage, just as there can be no doubt that real cures are experienced by those who go to Lourdes. What their character may be we need not discuss at this moment, but the whole tone of the narrative represents something quite different from anything that we experience when reading the story of the Gospel."
We return now to the main question: What are we to think of these miracles? There is but one historical an- swer which can be given. They represent an infusion of heathen modes of thought into the church. If we wish to trace this heathen infusion along the line of literary devel- opment, we must take our start from those Apocryphal Acts of Encratite tendency which, in a former lecture, we had occasion to point to as naturalizing the heathen wonder- tales — then a fashionable literary form — in the church. Once naturalized in the church, these Christian wonder- tales developed along the line of the church's own develop- ment. As time went on, E. von Dobschiitz explains, the church drew ever closer to the Encratite ideals which were glorified in the Apocryphal Acts, and it was this which gave their tendency to the new Christian romances which began to multiply in the later fourth century, and are represented to us especially by Athanasius' Life of Antony, and Jerome's Lives of Paul, Eilarion, and Malchus. "Whether there is any historical kernel in them or not," remarks Von Dob- schiitz,53 "they are exactly like the older Christian ro- mances, described already, in their fundamental traits — • loose structure, miraculousness and asceticism." The state of the case is fairly brought before us by R. Reitzen-
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stein, when, after expounding at length the relevant details, he states his conclusion thus:54 "I think I may now ven- ture to say that the prophet and philosopher aretalogies supplied the literary model for the Christian Acts of the Apostles. . . . But in order properly to feel the extent and influence of this literature, we must follow the Chris- tian aretalogy a step further. . . . This new literature arose, as is well known, when, after the victory of Chris- tianity, the interest of the community shifted from the portrait of the ideal missionary to the strange figures of the hermits and monks. For us there come especially into consideration Athanasius' Life of Antony, and the two great collections of the Historia Monachorum and the Eistoria Lausiaca; only in the second rank, the Lives of Paul and Hilar ion by Jerome."