We have pointed out the affiliation of this whole develop- ment of relic-veneration with heathenism. We are afraid that, as we survey its details, the even uglier word, fetich- ism, rises unbidden to our lips: and when we find J. A. Mac- Culloch, for example, writing of miracles at large, speaking incidentally of "the use of relics" as "at bottom a species of fetichism," 86 we cannot gainsay the characterization.87 Heinrich, naturally, repels such characterizations. There is no heathenism, fetichism, in the cult of relics, he insists,88 because that cult is relative, and that with a double rela- tivity. "Our cult terminates really on God, whom we venerate in the saints," he says, "and thus the cult becomes actually a religious one; it is a relative cult in a double relation: it does not stop with the relics but proceeds to the saints; it does not stop with the saints but proceeds to God Himself." We are afraid, however, that this reason- ing will not go on all fours with Heinrich's fundamental argument for the propriety of venerating relics. "The veneration of the saint," he argues,89 "terminates on the ■person as the total object, more particularly, of course, on the soul than on the body; for the formal object, that is, the ground of the veneration, is the spiritual excellences of the saint. . . . But during life the body also shares in the veneration of the person to which it belongs. It must, therefore, be esteemed holy also after death; the venera- tion always terminates on the person." We may miss the logical nexus here; it may not seem to us to follow that, because the body shared in the veneration offered to the saint while it was part of the living person, it ought there- fore— Heinrich actually says "therefore" — to share in this veneration when it is no longer a part of the living person — any more than, say, the exuvim during life, which, how-
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ever, the relic-worshippers, it must be confessed, do make share in it. But Heinrich not only professes to see this logical nexus, but hangs the whole case for the propriety of the veneration of relics upon it. In that case, however, the veneration of the relic is not purely relative; there is something in the relic as such which calls for reverence. It is not merely a symbol through which the saint, now separated from it, is approached, but a part of the saint, though an inferior part, in which the saint is immediately reached. "The Christian," says Heinrich himself,90 " recog- nizes in the body of the martyr, of the saint, more than a mere instrument of the soul; it is, as our faith teaches us, the temple of the Holy Ghost ; it was the sacred vessel of grace in life; it is to be glorified in unity again with the glorified soul." Such scholastic distinctions as that be- tween direct and relative worship — like that between doulia, hyperdoulia, and latria — are, in any event, matters purely for the schools. They have no real meaning for the actual transactions, and nothing can be more certain than that throughout the Catholic world the relics, as the saints, have been continuously looked upon by the actual worship- pers, seeking benefits from them, as themselves the vehicles of a supernatural power of which they may hopefully avail themselves.91
We have said that relics stand at the centre of the miracle- life of the church of Rome. Many are prepared to go further. Yrjo Hirn, for example, wishes to say that they stand at the centre of the whole religious life of the church of Rome. He does not mean by this merely that all Catholic religious life and thought centre in and revolve around the miraculous. This is true. The world-view of the Catholic is one all his own, and is very expressly a miraculous one. He reckons with the miraculous in every act ; miracle suggests itself to him as a natural explanation of every event ; and nothing seems too strange to him to be true.92 It is a correct picture which a recent writer draws
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