88. Op. cit., vol. X, p. 799. Yet it is not merely God who is venerated in the saints, he says; there is an honor due to the saints in themselves, and accordingly Alexander VIII condemned the proposition: The honor that is offered to Mary as Mary is vain. On the other hand it is said that it is merely the saint and through him God that is venerated in the relic, according to the explanation of Thomas Aquinas: "We do not adore the sensible body on its own account, but on account of the soul which was united with it, which is now in the enjoyment of God, and on account of God, whose ministers they were." Why then continue to adore the body when it is no longer united with the soul, on account of its union with which alone it is adored?
89. P. 794-
90. P. 794.
91. What Pfister says, p. 610, although not free from exaggera- tions, is in its main assertion true. In the Christian religion, he says, the presence in the relics of a supernatural, in a certain degree magical, power is accustomed to be emphasized even more than it is in the heathen. For, according to the Greek belief, the graves were thought of chiefly as the protection of the heroes, without the bones themselves being thought able to work miracles — for they rest in the grave; the miracle, the help, comes in general from the hero himself, not from an anonymous, impersonal, magical power which dwells in the relics. According to the Christian belief the relics themselves, on the other hand, can perform miracles, and the power residing in them can by contact be directly transferred and produce effects. Thus artificial relics can be produced by contact with genuine ones. The habit of relic-partition is connected with this: a part of the object filled with magical power may act like the whole. Compare Hirn, p. 490, note 2: "We deliberately leave out of consideration here the assertion of educated Catholics that in the relics was really worshipped the saint in the same way that God is worshipped in a picture or a symbol (cf. Esser, art., 'Reliquien,' in Wetzer-Welte, Kirchenlexicon). It cannot be doubted that relic worship — for the earlier Christians as for the mass of be- lievers to-day — was based on utilitarian ideas of the help that might be had from the sacred remains."
92. See the characterization of the Catholic world-view, by E. Schmidt in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 1736.
93. Baumgarten, in Schiele and Zscharnack's Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 2162.
ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLES 273
94. The Sacred Shrine, chaps, i-iv.
95. Compare Smith and Cheatham, Dictionary of Christian Archeology, I, pp. 62, 429; II, p. 1775, and especially I, p. 431: "As churches built over the tombs of martyrs came to be regarded with peculiar sanctity, the possession of the relics of some saint came to be looked upon as absolutely essential to the sacredness of the building, and the deposition of such relics in or below the altar henceforward formed the central portion of the consecration rite." The succeeding account of the ritual of the consecration should be read.
96. The literature of relics and relic-veneration is sufficiently indicated in the bibliographies attached to the articles on the sub- ject in the encyclopedias: Herzog-Hauck, New Schaff-Herzog, Schiele-Zscharnack. The exhibition of the Holy Coat at Treves from August 20 to October 3, 1891, with the immense crowd of pil- grims which it brought to Treves, created an equally immense lit- erature, a catalogue of which may be derived from the Theologischer Jahresbericht of the time, and a survey of which will give an insight into the whole subject of the veneration of relics in the nineteenth century.