which is in question. But the process went on on the largest scale. Every religious possession the heathen had, indeed, the Christians, it may be said broadly, transferred to themselves and made their own. As one of the results, the whole body of heathen legends, in one way or another, reproduced themselves on Christian ground. The re- markable studies of the Christian legends which Heinrich Giinter has given us,24 enable us to assure ourselves of the fact of this transference, and to observe its process in the large. On sketching the legendary material found in the pagan writers, he exclaims:25 " After this survey it will be seen that there is not much left for the Middle Ages to in- vent. They only present the same ideas in variations and Christianized forms, and perhaps also expanded on one side or another. There is no doubt as to the agreement of the conceptions." "With the sixth century," he says again,26 "we find the whole ancient system of legends Christianized, not only as anonymous and unlocalized va- grants, but more and more condensed, in a unitary picture, into a logical group of conceptions, and connected with real relations of historical personalities, whose historical figures they overlie. . . . The transference of the legend became now the chief thing, the saint of history gave way to that of the popular desire." "Hellenism — Pythagore- anism — Neo-Platonism — Christian Middle Ages," — thus he sums up27 — "the parallelism of these has made it very clear that the legend in the grotesque forms of a Nicholas Peregrinus or Keivinos or of the Mary legend is not a specif- ically Christian thing." In one word, what we find, when we cast our eye over the whole body of Christian legends, growing up from the third century down through the Mid- dle Ages, is merely a reproduction, in Christian form, of the motives, and even the very incidents, which already meet us in the legends of heathendom. We do not speak now of the bodily taking over of heathen gods and goddesses and the transformation of them into Christian saints; or
84 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
of the invention of saints to be the new bearers of locally persisting legends; or of the mere transference to Christi- anity of entire heathen legends, such as that of Barlaam and Joasaph, which nobody nowadays doubts is just the story of Buddha.28 What we have in mind at the moment is the complete reproduction in the conception-world of the Christian legends of what is already found in the heathen. In this respect the two are precise duplicates. We may still, no doubt, raise the question of the ultimate origin of this conception-world. That, remarks Giinter, "is not determined by the fact that it is the common pos- session of all. In the last analysis," he declares,29 "it has come out of the belief of mankind in the other world. It is scarcely possible now to determine how old it is, or where it originated. The manner in which it flowered, and es- pecially in which it discharged itself into Christianity, however, gives an intimation also of the explanation of its first origin." It is this mass of legends, the Christianized form of the universal product of the human soul, working into concrete shape its sense of the other world, that the church of Rome has taken upon its shoulders. It is not clear that it has added anything of importance to it.30
There is one type of miracle, it is true, which is new to Christianity, though not to the church of Rome; for it was invented by the mediaeval church, and has been taken from it with the rest. We refer to stigmatization. The heathen world had no stigmatics; they are a specifically Christian creation,31 deriving their impulse from the con- templation of the wounds of Christ. The first stigmatic known to history is Francis of Assisi.32 After him, however, there have come a great multitude, extending in unbroken series down to our own day. The earliest of these is Catharine of Siena (1370), who, however, possessed the stigmata only inwardly, not in outward manifestation;33 the latest the fame of whom has reached the general public is a certain Gemma Galgani of Lucca, who received the
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