' There are more things in heaven and enrth Thau are dreamt of in our philosophy' " {Ch. Hist, iii, 463-465).
If we institute a direct and careful comparison be- tween the Biblical and the ecclesiastical miracles, we find, besides matter of fact, as to the certainty of the thing and the reasons of credibility, there is a great difference in the force and efficacy of the former and a confirmation of that for which it is produced, while it is not so in the case of the latter. "Those Biblical miracles," says Butler, "were generally very beneficial to human nature,. doing mighty offices of kindness towards those who were the subjects of them, such as healing the sick, raising the dead, restor- ing the deaf, the lame, and the blind, etc.; all which bore an excellent proportion to the great design of re- deeming and saving mankind. And if at any time there were any mixture of severity in the very act, such as striking some dead by a word spoken, or putting others in the immediate possession of the devil by ex- communication ; yet was even this done either in kind- ness to posterity, by fixing, in the first institution of
things, one or two standing pillars of salt, that might be for example and admonition to after-ages, against some practices that might othenvise in time destroy Christianitj' ; as, in the first instance, of Ananias and Sapphira, against the sin of hypocrisy ; or else to some good purposes for the persons themselves, as in the last instance of excommunication ; so in the case of the in- cestuous person, it was adjudged bj' Paul, 'to deliver - such a one imto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Je- sus' (1 Cor. V, 5). None of these miracles were such useless, ludicrous actions as the Eomish authors have filled their histories with ; such as that of St. Berinus, who, ' being under full sail for France, and half his voy- age over, finding he had forgot something, walks out upon the sea, and returns back dryshod ;' such as St. Mo- chua, by his prayer and staff hindering the poor lambs from sucking their dams, when they were running to- wards them with full appetites ; such, again, as St. Francis bespeaking the ass in the kind compellation of brother, ' to stand quiet till he had done preaching, and not disturb the solemnity ;' and such as St. Fiutanus keeping the calf from the cow, that they should neither of them move towards one another ; such, in a word, as St. Frimianus and St. Euadanus, sporting their miracles with each other, as if they had the power given them for no other end but mere trial of skill, or some pretty diversion of bystanders" {Notes, p. 252-258). The Bre- viary (q. V.) teems with descriptions of all manner of mi- raculous manifestations, but we have not room to enu- merate others here, and must refer the reader to it and to Elliott {Delineation of Romanism, p. 527-543). On the most important so-called miracles claimed by the Church of Eome in modern days, see the articles St. Fkancis; Holy Coat of Treves; St. Januakius; LouRDEs ; Xaviek, etc. See also Superstition ; Vis- ions.
It appears, moreover, from the writings of many dis- tinguished Eoman Catholic authors that the post-Ni- cene miracles are not generally accepted. Thus Peter, abbot of Cluny, as far back as the 13th centurj', says: "You know how much those Church sonnets grieve me" (lib. v, Epist. xxix). He mentions one of Benedict which he declares contained no less than twenty-four lies. Ludovicus Vives, speaking of the Leyenda A urea, observes : " How unworthy both of God and man is the story of their saints, which, I do not know why, was called the Golden Legend, it having been written by one who had an iron mouth and a leaden heart" (lib. ii, De Currnpt. Artih., in fine). And Espencius declares: " No stable is fuller of dung than their legends are of fables" {in 2 Tim. iv, Digress. 21). These authorities might be multiplied to a great extent. We must con- tent ourselves with a few of the leading minds since the reformatory ideas took root in the Church of Eome, First among these we must place the learned French chancellor Gerson, of Paris University, who, when, in the Council of Constance, the canonization of St. Bridget (q. v.) was proposed, thus spoke out : " It cannot be said how much this curiosity for knowing future and hidden things, and for seeing miracles and performing them, hath deluded most persons, and constantly turned them awa}' from true religion. Hence all those'superstitions among the people which destroy the Christian religion, while, like the Jews, they only seek a sign, exhibiting to images the worship due to God, and attaching their faith to men yet uncanonized, and to apocryphal writ- ings, more than to the Scriptures themselves."
In the 15th century the appearance of a rival to the Franciscan visionary in the person of St. Catharine of Sienna as the champion of the more powerful Domini- cans, provoked the following utterance from cardinal Cajetan, utterly nullifying the former declarations of the Church in her favor : " It is alleged," he writes, '■ that St. Bridget had a revelation that the Blessed Vir- gin was preserved from original sin. But the probabil- ity of this opinion is very slender, for it is opposed to