A more entertaining incident of the same kind occurred in France in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Jansenists had their miracles, you will understand, as well as the Jesuits. A young Jansenist cleric, Francois de Paris, was a particularly warm opponent of Clement XIV's bull Unigenitus. This did not prevent his acquiring a great reputation for sanctity. He died in 1727. Scarcely was this admirable man dead, says Mosheim,67 than an immense crowd flocked around his body, kissing his feet, securing locks of his hair, books, and clothing he had used, and the like ; and immediately the wonder-working power that was expected, appeared. Neither the excitement nor the miraculous phenomena showed any sign of ceasing after the burial of the good abbe. His tomb in the church- yard of St. Medard became the resort of the Jansenist convulsionnaires , and the constant scene of at once the most marvellous and the most fantastic miracles. In a few years his grave had grown into a famous shrine to which men came in crowds from all over France to be cured of their diseases, and at which prophecies, speaking with tongues, and ecstatic phenomena of all sorts daily took place. This could not be other than gravely displeasing to the Jesuits, and as the Jesuits were the power behind the throne, it could not be permitted to continue. To check it seemed, however, difficult if not impossible. At last the expedient was adopted of enclosing the tomb so that none might approach it. This, no doubt, brought mira- cles at the grave itself to an end, though it could not calm the general excitement. And some wag turned the tables on the Jesuits by chalking in great letters on the
WARNING GOD OFF 69
enclosure, after the manner of a royal proclamation, these words:68
De par le Roy, defence a. Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.
The whole incident of the miracles of St. Medard is full of instruction for us as to the origin and character of the miracle-working69 which fills the annals of the patristic and mediaeval church.70
ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLES
ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLES
It would be natural to suppose that the superstitions which flourished luxuriantly in the Middle Ages would be unable to sustain themselves in the clearer atmosphere of the twentieth century. "We shall have no repetition of mediaeval miracles," says W. F. Cobb with some show of conviction,1 "for the simple reason that faith in God has ousted credulity in nature." When we speak thus, how- ever, we are reckoning without the church of Rome. For the church of Rome, while existing in the twentieth cen- tury, is not of it. As Yrjo Hirn crisply puts it:2 "The Catholic Church is a Middle Age which has survived into the twentieth century." Precisely what happened to the church of Rome at that epoch in the history of Christianity which we call the Reformation, was that it bent its back sturdily to carry on with it all the lumber which had ac- cumulated in the garrets and cellars of the church through a millennium and a half of difficult living. It is that part of the church which refused to be reformed ; which refused, that is, to free itself from the accretions which had attached themselves to Christianity during its long struggle with invading superstition. Binding these closely to its heart, it has brought them down with it to the present hour.3 The church of Rome, accordingly, can point to a body of miracles, wrought in our own day and generation, as large and as striking as those of any earlier period of the church's history. And when the annals of the marvels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries come to be collected, there is no reason to suppose that they will compare unfa- vorably in point either of number or marvellousness with those of any of the "ages of faith" which have preceded
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74 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
them. This continuous manifestation of supernatural pow- ers in its bosom constitutes one of the proudest boasts of the church of Rome; by it, it conceives itself differen- tiated, say, from the Protestants; and in it it finds one of its chief credentials as the sole organ of God Almighty for the saving of the wicked world.4