S3. Among the many anomalies of the legends of the saints, the question asks itself why the saints, many of whom had severe sufferings to undergo, many of whom were lifelong invalids, never rescued or healed themselves by the exercise of their miraculous powers? Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, when in extremities, needed to be saved from without — by the intervention of Mary, who gave him her breast. Christina Mirabilis, it is true, nourished herself with her own virgin milk; but this is an exception to the general rule. It is a proverb, "Physician, heal thyself"; yet even the most diseased of the saints did not do it — and all of them ap- parently died. That the Martyr-heroes of the Martyr-aretalogies ultimately succeeded in dying is a standing wonder. They are de- livered apparently from every imaginable, and often unimaginable, peril, at the cost of every imaginable, and often unimaginable, miracle; fire will not burn them, nor steel cut their flesh; the sea will not drown them, nor will chains bind them. They bear a charmed life and walk unscathed through every conceivable danger. And then suddenly their heads are simply chopped off as if it were the most natural thing in the world — and they are dead. The reader catches his breath and cannot believe his eyes: the exceeding sang-froid with which the author kills at the end those whom nothing can harm in the meantime produces nothing less than an enormous anticlimax. Has the miracle-power of the martyr given suddenly out — been all used up in its wonderful action hitherto? Or is it merely that the invention of the author has been exhausted, and he has to close thus lamely because he can think of nothing else to say? We have something of the same feeling when we contem- plate sick saints healing others with wonderful facility, while ap- parently wholly without power to heal themselves. Is it adequate to say with Percy Dearmer (Body and Soid, p. 133): "And often, when they healed others they did not spare the strength to heal themselves; often they endured without thinking of themselves the infirmities which they could not bear to see unhelped in others. They thought so much of One of whom it is said, 'He saved others;
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Himself He cannot save.'" The suggested comparison with Christ is, of course, offensive. The sufferings of the saints are not expia- tory sacrifices offered to God in behalf of a sinful world — although it must be sadly acknowledged that many of them (e. g., the Stig- matics) fancied they were. Christ could not save Himself, not because He lacked the power to do so, but because the work which He came to do was precisely suffering — to give His life a ransom for many. There was no more reason in the nature of things, on the other hand, why the saints should suffer than others. And the description which Dearmer gives of the saints is not true to life, in many instances at least. They do not seem to have borne their sufferings without thinking of them; they apparently thought a great deal of them, either to bewail them or, by a spiritual perver- sion, to glory in them as a mark of spiritual distinction. And how does it do to say in one sentence, "The saints have always seemed to regard their healing works as easy things, done by the way and out of compassion"; and then in the next, "They did not spare the strength to heal themselves"? If it cost them nothing to heal — if they did it with a passing wave of the hand — why should they have not healed themselves? The sicknesses of the saints is a standing puzzle.
34. Horstman, Richard Rolle of Hampole, vol. II, p. xxviii.
35. Cf. H. Giinter, Die christliche Legende des Abendlandes, 1910, p. 187, who cites the Vita of St. Gongolf at the end of the ninth century, and Gislebert of Sens, about 1150, as declaring that in the absence of good merit miracles are nothing, since they are per- formed by many evil men; as also the archdeacon Robert of Ostre- vand in his life of Aybert, of the same age, who remarks that the virtue of love which belongs to the good alone is of far more worth than the virtue of miracles which belongs alike to good and evil. Cf. also the like citation from Thomas of Reuil. Giinter refers on the general matter to L. Zopf, Das Heilegen-Leben in 10 Jahrh. in "Beitrage z. Kulturgesch. des Mittelalters u. des Renaissance," herausgegeben von W. Gotz, Heft 1 (1908), pp. 62 f., pp. 181 ff.
36. This is of course the established doctrine; cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 351, where Benedict XIV is quoted (on Heroic Virtue, 1851, III, p. 130) to the effect that, since the gift of miracle-working is a grace gratis data, it is independent of the merit of the recipient; even bad men might be granted it (for God's own purposes) and good men denied it. It forms no ground of inference then to saintliness. But do not difficulties arise then with reference to the customs of "canonization"?
37. Vol. II, p. 2049. On miracles connected with the host, see