History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Volume One — Chap. 12 - From Magic to Chemistry and Physics - Section 2

II.

Just at the middle of the seventeenth century, and at the very centre of opposition to physical science, Robert Boyle began the new epoch in chemistry.

Strongly influenced by the writings of Bacon and the discoveries of Galileo, he devoted himself to scientific research, establishing at Oxford a laboratory and putting into it a chemist from Strasburg.

For this he was at once bitterly attacked.

In spite of his high position, his blameless life, his liberal gifts to charity and learning, the Oxford pulpit was especially severe against him, declaring that his researches were destroying religion and his experiments undermining the university.

Public orators denounced him, the wits ridiculed him, and his associates in the peerage were indignant that he should condescend to pursuits so unworthy.

But Boyle pressed on.

His discoveries opened new paths in various directions and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous investigators.

Thus began the long series of discoveries culminating those of Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, and Lavoisier, who ushered in the chemical science of the nineteenth century.

Yet not even then without a sore struggle against unreason.

And it must here be noticed that this unreason was not all theological.

The unreasoning heterodox when intrusted with irresponsible power can be as short-sighted and cruel as the unreasoning orthodox.

Lavoisier, one of the best of our race, not only a great chemist but a true man, was sent to the scaffold by the Parisian mob, led by bigoted "liberals" and atheists, with the sneer that the republic had no need of savants.

As to Priestley, who had devoted his life to science and to every good work among his fellow-men, the Birmingham mob, favoured by the Anglican clergymen who harangued them as "fellow-churchmen," wrecked his house, destroyed his library, philosophical instruments, and papers containing the results of long years of scientific research, drove him into exile, and would have murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon him.

Nor was it entirely his devotion to rational liberty, nor even his disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought on this catastrophe.

That there was a deep distrust of his scientific pursuits, was evident when the leaders of the mob took pains to use his electrical apparatus to set fire to his papers.

Still, though theological modes of thought continued to sterilize much effort in chemistry, the old influence was more and more thrown off, and truth sought more and more for truth's sake.

"Black magic" with its Satanic machinery vanished, only reappearing occasionally among marvel-mongers and belated theologians.

"White magic" became legerdemain.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical research, though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt in various ways the reaction which followed the French Revolution.

It was not merely under the Bourbons and Hapsburgs that resistance was offered; even in England the old spirit lingered long.

As late as 1832, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science first visited Oxford, no less amiable a man than John Keble--at that time a power in the university--condemned indignantly the conferring of honorary degrees upon the leading men thus brought together.

In a letter of that date to Dr. Pusey he complained bitterly, to use his own words, that "the Oxford doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did."

It is interesting to know that among the men thus contemptuously characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton.

Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted many years, and was especially shown on both sides of the Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where theology was dominant.

Down to a period within the memory of men still in active life, students in the sciences, not only at Oxford and Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were considered a doubtful if not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually and socially--to be relegated to different instructors and buildings, and to receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature.

To the State University of Michigan, among the greater American institutions of learning which have never possessed or been possessed by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of first breaking down this wall of separation.

But from the middle years of the century chemical science progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen, Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the century, led up to the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by which chemistry has become predictive, as astronomy had become predictive by the calculations of Newton, and biology by the discoveries of Darwin.

While one succession of strong men were thus developing chemistry out of one form of magic, another succession were developing physics out of another form.

First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line of thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical laws--a line extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton to Ohm and Faraday and Joule and Helmholtz.

These, by revealing more and more clearly the reign of law, steadily undermined the older theological view of arbitrary influence in nature.

Next should be mentioned the line of profound observers, from Galileo and Torricelli to Kelvin.

These have as thoroughly undermined the old theologic substitution of phrases for facts.

When Galileo dropped the differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he began the end of Aristotelian authority in physics.

When Torricelli balanced a column of mercury against a column of water and each of these against a column of air, he ended the theologic phrase that "nature abhors a vacuum."

When Newton approximately determined the velocity of sound, he ended the theologic argument that we see the flash before we hear the roar because "sight is nobler than hearing."

When Franklin showed that lightning is caused by electricity, and Ohm and Faraday proved that electricity obeys ascertained laws, they ended the theological idea of a divinity seated above the clouds and casting thunderbolts.

Resulting from the labour of both these branches of physical science, we have the establishment of the great laws of the indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and chemical affinity.

Thereby is ended, with various other sacred traditions, the theological theory of a visible universe created out of nothing, so firmly imbedded in the theological thought of the Middle Ages and in the Westminster Catechism.

(283) (283) For a reappearance of the fundamental doctrines of black magic among theologians, see Rev. Dr. Jewett, Professor of Pastoral Theology in the Prot.

Episc.

Gen. Theolog.

Seminary of New York, Diabolology: The Person and the Kingdom of Satan, New York, 1889. For their appearance among theosophists, see Eliphas Levi, Histoire de la Magie, especially the final chapters.

For opposition to Boyle and chemistry studies at Oxford in the latter half of the seventeenth century, see the address of Prof. Dixon, F. R.

S.

, before the British Association, 1894. For the recent progress of chemistry, and opposition to its earlier development at Oxford, see Lord Salisbury's address as President of the British Association, in 1894. For the Protestant survival of the mediaeval assertion that the universe was created out of nothing, see the Westminster Catechism, question 15. In our own time some attempt has been made to renew this war against the physical sciences.

Joseph de Maistre, uttering his hatred of them, declaring that mankind has paid too dearly for them, asserting that they must be subjected to theology, likening them to fire--good when confined and dangerous when scattered about--has been one of the main leaders among those who can not relinquish the idea that our body of sacred literature should be kept a controlling text-book of science.

The only effect of such teachings has been to weaken the legitimate hold of religion upon men.

In Catholic countries exertion has of late years been mainly confined to excluding science or diluting it in university teachings.

Early in the present century a great effort was made by Ferdinand VII of Spain.

He simply dismissed the scientific professors from the University of Salamanca, and until a recent period there has been general exclusion from Spanish universities of professors holding to the Newtonian physics.

So, too, the contemporary Emperor of Austria attempted indirectly something of the same sort; and at a still later period Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX discouraged, if they did not forbid, the meetings of scientific associations in Italy.

In France, war between theology and science, which had long been smouldering, came in the years 1867 and 1868 to an outbreak.

Toward the end of the last century, after the Church had held possession of advanced instruction for more than a thousand years, and had, so far as it was able, kept experimental science in servitude--after it had humiliated Buffon in natural science, thrown its weight against Newton in the physical sciences, and wrecked Turgot's noble plans for a system of public instruction--the French nation decreed the establishment of the most thorough and complete system of higher instruction in science ever known.

It was kept under lay control and became one of the glories of France; but, emboldened by the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the Church began to undermine this hated system, and in 1868 had made such progress that all was ready for the final assault.

Foremost among the leaders of the besieging party was the Bishop of Orleans, Dupanloup, a man of many winning characteristics and of great oratorical power.

In various ways, and especially in an open letter, he had fought the "materialism" of science at Paris, and especially were his attacks levelled at Profs.

Vulpian and See and the Minister of Public instruction, Duruy, a man of great merit, whose only crime was devotion to the improvement of education and to the promotion of the highest research in science.

(284) (284) For the exertions of the restored Bourbons to crush the universities of Spain, see Hubbard, Hist.

Contemporaine de l'Espagne, Paris, 1878, chaps.

i and ii.

For Dupanloup, Lettre a un Cardinal, see the Revue de Therapeutique of 1868, p. 221. The main attack was made rather upon biological science than upon physics and chemistry, yet it was clear that all were involved together.

The first onslaught was made in the French Senate, and the storming party in that body was led by a venerable and conscientious prelate, Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop of Rouen.

It was charged by him and his party that the tendencies of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to religion and morality.

Heavy missiles were hurled--such phrases as "sapping the foundations," "breaking down the bulwarks," and the like; and, withal, a new missile was used with much effect--the epithet "materialist."

The results can be easily guessed: crowds came to the lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room of Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation.

A siege was begun in due form.

A young physician was sent by the cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy.

Having heard one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party: he brought a terrible statement--one that seemed enough to overwhelm See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of public instruction in France--the statement that See had denied the existence of the human soul.

Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at once.

Rising in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent invective against the Minister of State who could protect such a fortress of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a climax, he asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof. See's lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his lecture of the day before, that so long as he had the honour to hold his professorship he would combat the false idea of the existence of the soul.

The weapon seemed resistless and the wound fatal, but M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard.

His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary proofs that Prof. See never made such a declaration.

He held the notes used by Prof. See in his lecture.

Prof. See, it appeared, belonged to a school in medical science which combated certain ideas regarding medicine as an ART.

The inflamed imagination of the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the lecture-notes proved, led him to mistake the word "art" for "ame," and to exhibit Prof. See as treating a theological when he was discussing a purely scientific question.

Of the existence of the soul the professor had said nothing.

The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet, dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors by Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their discomfiture.

Thus a well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in bringing ridicule on religion, and in thrusting still deeper into the minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all mistaken ideas: the conviction that religion and science are enemies.

(285) (285) For a general account of the Vulpian and See matter, see Revue des Deux Mondes, 31 mai, 1868, "Chronique de la Quinzaine," pp. 763-765. As to the result on popular thought, may be noted the following comment on the affair by the Revue, which is as free as possible from anything like rabid anti-ecclesiastical ideas: "Elle a ete vraiment curieuse, instructive, assez triste et meme un peu amusante."

For Wurtz's statement, see Revue de Therapeutique for 1868, p. 303. But justice forbids raising an outcry against Roman Catholicism for this.

In 1864 a number of excellent men in England drew up a declaration to be signed by students in the natural sciences, expressing "sincere regret that researches into scientific truth are perverted by some in our time into occasion for casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures."

Nine tenths of the leading scientific men of England refused to sign it; nor was this all: Sir John Herschel, Sir John Bowring, and Sir W. R.

Hamilton administered, through the press, castigations which roused general indignation against the proposers of the circular, and Prof. De Morgan, by a parody, covered memorial and memorialists with ridicule.

It was the old mistake, and the old result followed in the minds of multitudes of thoughtful young men.

(286) (286) De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 421-428; also Daubeny's Essays.

And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake was made.

In 1868 several excellent churchmen in Prussia thought it their duty to meet for the denunciation of "science falsely so called."

Two results followed: upon the great majority of these really self-sacrificing men--whose first utterances showed complete ignorance of the theories they attacked--there came quiet and widespread contempt; upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth and proclaimed views of the universe which he thought scriptural, but which most schoolboys knew to be childish, came a burst of good-natured derision from every quarter of the German nation.

(287) (287) See the Berlin newspapers for the summer of 1868, especially Kladderdatsch.

But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind, after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more and more futile.

While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe and America continued to insist that advanced education, not only in literature but in science, should be kept under careful control in their own sectarian universities and colleges, wretchedly one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all professors holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and Italy all holding unsafe views regarding the Immaculate Conception, and while Protestant clerical authorities in Great Britain and America were keeping out of professorships men holding unsatisfactory views regarding the Incarnation, or Infant Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or Ordination by Elders, or the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly weeding out of university faculties all who showed willingness to consider fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly in progress destined to take instruction, and especially instruction in the physical and natural sciences, out of its old subordination to theology and ecclesiasticism.

(288) (288) Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy advocated by President McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man must honor him for the large way in which he, at least, broke away from the traditions of that centre of thought; prevented, so far as he was able, persecution of scholars for holding to the Darwinian view; and paved the way for the highest researches in physical science in that university.

For a most eloquent statement of the opposition of modern physical science to mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac Newton, see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific Discovery, London, 1878, p. 247. The most striking beginnings of this movement had been seen when, in the darkest period of the French Revolution, there was founded at Paris the great Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, scientific and technical education spread quietly upon the Continent.

By the middle of the century France and Germany were dotted with well-equipped technical and scientific schools, each having chemical and physical laboratories.

The English-speaking lands lagged behind.

In England, Oxford and Cambridge showed few if any signs of this movement, and in the United States, down to 1850, evidences of it were few and feeble.

Very significant is it that, at that period, while Yale College had in its faculty Silliman and Olmsted--the professor of chemistry and the professor of physics most widely known in the United States--it had no physical or chemical laboratory in the modern sense, and confined its instruction in these subjects to examinations upon a text-book and the presentation of a few lectures.

At the State University of Michigan, which had even then taken a foremost place in the higher education west of the Great Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and virtually none in physics.

This being the state of things in the middle of the century in institutions remarkably free from clerical control, it can be imagined what was the position of scientific instruction in smaller colleges and universities where theological considerations were entirely dominant.

But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, began in Great Britain and America a movement in favour of scientific education; men of wealth and public spirit began making contributions to them, and thus came the growth of a new system of instruction in which Chemistry and Physics took just rank.

By far the most marked feature in this movement was seen in America, when, in 1857, Justin S. Morrill, a young member of Congress from Vermont, presented the project of a law endowing from the public lands a broad national system of colleges in which scientific and technical studies should be placed on an equality with studies in classical literature, one such college to be established in every State of the Union.

The bill, though opposed mainly by representatives from the Southern States, where doctrinaire politics and orthodox theology were in strong alliance with negro slavery, was passed by both Houses of Congress, but vetoed by President Buchanan, in whom the doctrinaire and orthodox spirit was incarnate.

But Morrill persisted and again presented his bill, which was again carried in spite of the opposition of the Southern members, and again vetoed in 1859 by President Buchanan.

Then came the civil war; but Morrill and his associates did not despair of the republic.

In the midst of all the measures for putting vast armies into the field and for saving the Union from foreign interference as well as from domestic anarchy, they again passed the bill, and in 1862, in the darkest hour of the struggle for national existence, it became a law by the signature of President Lincoln.

And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Amos Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an instructor in a little village of New York.

His ideas were embodied in the bill, and his efforts did much for its passage.

Thus was established, in every State of the American Union, at least one institution in which scientific and technical studies were given equal rank with classical, and promoted by laboratories for research in physical and natural science.

Of these institutions there are now nearly fifty: all have proved valuable, and some of them, by the addition of splendid gifts from individuals and from the States in which they are situated, have been developed into great universities.

Nor was this all.

Many of the older universities and colleges thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction.

The great physical and chemical laboratories founded by gifts from public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, or by enlightened State legislators, as in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, have also become centres from which radiate influences favouring the unfettered search for truth as truth.

This system has been long enough in operation to enable us to note in some degree its effects on religion, and these are certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that religion was necessarily bound up with the older instruction controlled by theology.

While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the colleges under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the most powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions.

While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion.

On the contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with the American colleges and universities during the last forty-five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards religion in its highest and best sense.

The reason is not far to seek.

Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable.

Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished.

Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learning down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for the religious culture of students was in the perfunctory presentation of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring up of what were called "revivals," which, after a period of unhealthy stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students in a state of religious and moral reaction and collapse.

This method is now discredited, and in the more important American universities it has become impossible.

Religious truth, to secure the attention of the modern race of students in the better American institutions, is presented, not by "sensation preachers," but by thoughtful, sober-minded scholars.

Less and less avail sectarian arguments; more and more impressive becomes the presentation of fundamental religious truths.

The result is, that while young men care less and less for the great mass of petty, cut-and-dried sectarian formulas, they approach the deeper questions of religion with increasing reverence.

While striking differences exist between the European universities and those of the United States, this at least may be said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority of the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and that, this being the case, the physical and natural sciences are henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without fear of being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesiasticism.

CHAPTER XIII. FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.

I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE.

Nothing in the evolution of human thought appears more inevitable than the idea of supernatural intervention in producing and curing disease.

The causes of disease are so intricate that they are reached only after ages of scientific labour.

In those periods when man sees everywhere miracle and nowhere law,--when he attributes all things which he can not understand to a will like his own,--he naturally ascribes his diseases either to the wrath of a good being or to the malice of an evil being.

This idea underlies the connection of the priestly class with the healing art: a connection of which we have survivals among rude tribes in all parts of the world, and which is seen in nearly every ancient civilization--especially in the powers over disease claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in Assyria by the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of Aesculapius, and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh.

In Egypt there is evidence, reaching back to a very early period, that the sick were often regarded as afflicted or possessed by demons; the same belief comes constantly before us in the great religions of India and China; and, as regards Chaldea, the Assyrian tablets recovered in recent years, while revealing the source of so many myths and legends transmitted to the modern world through the book of Genesis, show especially this idea of the healing of diseases by the casting out of devils.

A similar theory was elaborated in Persia.

Naturally, then, the Old Testament, so precious in showing the evolution of religious and moral truth among men, attributes such diseases as the leprosy of Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the dysentery of Jehoram, the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal illness of Asa, and many other ills, to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan; while, in the New Testament, such examples as the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of the person whom "the devil ofttimes casteth into the fire"--of which case one of the greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a truer description of epilepsy--and various other episodes, show this same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium through which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician were revealed to future generations.

In Greece, though this idea of an occult evil agency in producing bodily ills appeared at an early period, there also came the first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really scientific theory of medicine.

Five hundred years before Christ, in the bloom period of thought--the period of Aeschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato--appeared Hippocrates, one of the greatest names in history.

Quietly but thoroughly he broke away from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation, and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to this hour among the most precious possessions of our race.

His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there medical science was developed yet further, especially by such men as Herophilus and Erasistratus.

Under their lead studies in human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had weighed so long upon science, preventing that method of anatomical investigation without which there can be no real results, was cast aside apparently forever.

(289) (289) For extended statements regarding medicine in Egypt, Judea, and Eastern nations generally, see Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, and Haeser; and for more succinct accounts, Baas, Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 15-29; also Isensee; also Fredault, Histoire de la Medecine, chap.

i.

For the effort in Egyptian medicine to deal with demons and witches, see Heinrich Brugsch, Die Aegyptologie, Leipsic, 1891, p. 77; and for references to the Papyrus Ebers, etc. , pp. 155, 407, and following.

For fear of dissection and prejudices against it in Egypt, like those in mediaeval Europe, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p. 216. For the derivation of priestly medicine in Egypt, see Baas, pp. 16, 22. For the fame of Egyptian medicine at Rome, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. ii, pp. 151, 184. For Assyria, see especially George Smith in Delitzsch's German translation, p. 34, and F. Delitzsch's appendix, p. 27. On the cheapness and commonness of miracles of healing in antiquity, see Sharpe, quoting St. Jerome, vol. ii, pp. 276, 277. As to the influence of Chaldean ideas of magic and disease, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, p. 404 and note.

But, on the other hand, see reference in Homer to diseases caused by a "demon."

For the evolution of medicine before and after Hippocrates, see Sprengel.

For a good summing up of the work of Hippocrates, see Baas, p. 201. For the necessary passage of medicine in its early stages under priestly control, see Cabanis, The Revolution of Medical Science, London, 1806, chap.

ii.

On Jewish ideas regarding demons, and their relation to sickness, see Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 168 et seq.

For avoidance of dissections of human subjects even by Galen and his disciples, see Maurice Albert, Les Medecins Grecs a Rome, Paris, 1894, chap.

xi.

For Herophilus, Erasistratus, and the School of Alexandria, see Sprengel, vol. i, pp. 433, 434 et seq.

But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of events was set in motion which modified this development most profoundly.

The influence of Christianity on the healing art was twofold: there was first a blessed impulse--the thought, aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.

This spirit, then poured into the world, flowed down through the ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the sick and wretched.

Through all those succeeding centuries, even through the rudest, hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along this blessed stream.

Of these were the Eastern establishments for the cure of the sick at the earliest Christian periods, the Infirmary of Monte Cassino and the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons in the sixth century, the Hotel-Dieu at Paris in the seventh, and the myriad refuges for the sick and suffering which sprang up in every part of Europe during the following centuries.

Vitalized by this stream, all medieval growths of mercy bloomed luxuriantly.

To say nothing of those at an earlier period, we have in the time of the Crusades great charitable organizations like the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and thenceforward every means of bringing the spirit of Jesus to help afflicted humanity.

So, too, through all those ages we have a succession of men and women devoting themselves to works of mercy, culminating during modern times in saints like Vincent de Paul, Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, and Muhlenberg.

But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart of the Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after century, inspiring every development of mercy, there came from those who organized the Church which bears his name, and from those who afterward developed and directed it, another stream of influence--a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew and Christian sacred books.

The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in relation to the cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there was a new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical disease is produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan, or by a combination of both, which theology was especially called in to explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the Divine anger, or of thwarting Satanic malice.

Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the life of Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians, legends of miracles grew luxuriantly.

It would be utterly unphilosophical to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud.

Whatever part priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry discreditable developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends, Century after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as naturally as elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie.

II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.

--THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.

Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all great benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and devotees.

Throughout human history the lives of such personages, almost without exception, have been accompanied or followed by a literature in which legends of miraculous powers form a very important part--a part constantly increasing until a different mode of looking at nature and of weighing testimony causes miracles to disappear.

While modern thought holds the testimony to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as worthless, it is very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings who endow the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest hold upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise such influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or body are helped or healed.

We have within the modern period very many examples which enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles.

Out of these I will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity, one whose biography is before the world with its most minute details--in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies: this man is St. Francis Xavier.

From these sources I draw the facts now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant origin; every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and Roman, and published under the sanction of the Church.

Born a Spanish noble, Xavier at an early age cast aside all ordinary aims, devoted himself to study, was rapidly advanced to a professorship at Paris, and in this position was rapidly winning a commanding influence, when he came under the sway of another Spaniard even greater, though less brilliantly endowed, than himself--Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.

The result was that the young professor sacrificed the brilliant career on which he had entered at the French capital, went to the far East as a simple missionary, and there devoted his remaining years to redeeming the lowest and most wretched of our race.

Among the various tribes, first in lower India and afterward in Japan, he wrought untiringly--toiling through village after village, collecting the natives by the sound of a hand-bell, trying to teach them the simplest Christian formulas; and thus he brought myriads of them to a nominal Confession of the Christian faith.

After twelve years of such efforts, seeking new conquests for religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert island of San Chan.

During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly all the features of his life.

His own writings are very minute, and enable us to follow him fully.

No account of a miracle wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any contemporary document.

(290) At the outside, but two or three things occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by himself and his contemporaries, for which the most earnest devotee could claim anything like Divine interposition; and these are such as may be read in the letters of very many fervent missionaries, Protestant as well as Catholic.

For example, in the beginning of his career, during a journey in Europe with an ambassador, one of the servants in fording a stream got into deep water and was in danger of drowning.

Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed very earnestly, and that the man finally struggled out of the stream.

But within sixty years after his death, at his canonization, and by various biographers, this had been magnified into a miracle, and appears in the various histories dressed out in glowing colours.

Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed for the safety of the young man; but his biographers tell us that it was Xavier who prayed, and finally, by the later writers, Xavier is represented as lifting horse and rider out of the stream by a clearly supernatural act.

(290) This statement was denied with much explosive emphasis by a writer in the Catholic World for September and October, 1891, but he brought no FACT to support this denial.

I may perhaps be allowed to remind the reverend writer that since the days of Pascal, whose eminence in the Church he will hardly dispute, the bare assertion even of a Jesuit father against established facts needs some support other than mere scurrility.

Still another claim to miracle is based upon his arriving at Lisbon and finding his great colleague, Simon Rodriguez, ill of fever.

Xavier informs us in a very simple way that Rodriguez was so overjoyed to see him that the fever did not return.

This is entirely similar to the cure which Martin Luther wrought upon Melanchthon.

Melanchthon had broken down and was supposed to be dying, when his joy at the long-delayed visit of Luther brought him to his feet again, after which he lived for many years.

Again, it is related that Xavier, finding a poor native woman very ill, baptized her, saying over her the prayers of the Church, and she recovered.

Two or three occurrences like these form the whole basis for the miraculous account, so far as Xavier's own writings are concerned.

Of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word there is in these letters of his no mention.

Though he writes of his doings with especial detail, taking evident pains to note everything which he thought a sign of Divine encouragement, he says nothing of his performing miracles, and evidently knows nothing of them.

This is clearly not due to his unwillingness to make known any token of Divine favour.

As we have seen, he is very prompt to report anything which may be considered an answer to prayer or an evidence of the power of religious means to improve the bodily or spiritual health of those to whom he was sent.

Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any miracles wrought by him.

His brother missionaries, who were in constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no allusions to them in their communications with each other or with their brethren in Europe.

Of this fact we have many striking evidences.

Various collections of letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and the East generally, during the years of Xavier's activity, were published, and in not one of these letters written during Xavier's lifetime appears any account of a miracle wrought by him.

As typical of these collections we may take perhaps the most noted of all, that which was published about twenty years after Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta.

The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his associates not only from Goa, which was the focus of all missionary effort and the centre of all knowledge regarding their work in the East, but from all other important points in the great field.

The first of them were written during the saint's lifetime, but, though filled with every sort of detail regarding missionary life and work, they say nothing regarding any miracles by Xavier.

The same is true of various other similar collections published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In not one of them does any mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a letter from India or the East contemporary with him.

This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any "evil heart of unbelief."

On the contrary, these good missionary fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of the Divine favour: it is indeed touching to see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things which could be thus construed.

Their ample faith was fully shown.

One of them, in Acosta's collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles are imputed by his associates during his life or during several years after his death.

On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully confirmed by his brother workers.

It is interesting, for example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.

Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries continued without any indication of miracles performed by the saint.

Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of these miraculous manifestations.

But this negative evidence is by no means all.

There is also positive evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order itself--that Xavier wrought no miracles.

For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest correspondence with those who knew most about the saint, a member of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of its accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none.

This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of the University of Salamanca.

In 1571, nineteen years after Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him up as an ideal and his work as an example.

But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no longer produce apostolic results "lies in the missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles."

He then asks, "Why should our age be so completely destitute of them?"

This question he answers at great length, and one of his main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that "in the early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not."

This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly to Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and that of the other great missionaries of his time.

That the Jesuit order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.

(291) Nothing shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of any land and time, and how independent it is of fact.

(291)The work of Joseph Acosta is in the Cornell University Library, its title being as follows: De Natura Novi Orbis libri duo et De Promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De Procuranda Indorum Salute, libri sex, autore Jesepho Acosta, presbytero Societis Jesu.

I. H.

S.

Salmanticas, apud Guillelmum Foquel, MDLXXXIX.

For the passages cited directly contradicting the working of miracles by Xavier and his associates, see lib.

ii, cap.

ix, of which the title runs, Cur Miracula in Conversione gentium non fiant nunc, ut olim, a Christi praedicatoribus, especially pp. 242-245; also lib.

ii, cap.

viii, pp. 237 et seq.

For a passage which shows that Xavier was not then at all credited with "the miraculous gift of tongues," see lib.

i, cap.

vii, p. 173. Since writing the above, my attention has been called to the alleged miraculous preservation of Xavier's body claimed in sundry letters contemporary with its disinterment at San Chan and reinterment at Goa.

There is no reason why this preservation in itself need be doubted, and no reason why it should be counted miraculous.

Such exceptional preservation of bodies has been common enough in all ages, and, alas for the claims of the Church, quite as common of pagans or Protestants as of good Catholics.

One of the most famous cases is that of the fair Roman maiden, Julia, daughter of Claudius, over whose exhumation at Rome, in 1485, such ado was made by the sceptical scholars of the Renaissance.

Contemporary observers tell us enthusiastically that she was very beautiful, perfectly preserved, "the bloom of youth still upom her cheeks," and exhaling a "sweet odour"; but this enthusiasm was so little to the taste of Pope Innocent VIII that he had her reburied secretly by night.

Only the other day, in June of the year 1895, there was unearthed at Stade, in Hanover, the "perfectly preserved" body of a soldier of the eighth century.

So, too, I might mention the bodies preserved at the church of St. Thomas at Strasburg, beneath the Cathedral of Bremen, and elsewhere during hundreds of years past; also the cases of "adiposeration" in various American cemeteries, which never grow less wonderful by repetition from mouth to mouth and in the public prints.

But, while such preservation is not incredible or even strange, there is much reason why precisely in the case of a saint like St. Francis Xavier the evidence for it should be received with especial caution.

What the touching fidelity of disciples may lead them to believe and proclaim regarding an adored leader in a time when faith is thought more meritorious than careful statement, and miracle more probable than the natural course of things, is seen, for example, in similar pious accounts regarding the bodies of many other saints, especially that of St. Carlo Borromeo, so justly venerated by the Church for his beautiful and charitable life.

And yet any one looking at the relics of various saints, especially those of St. Carlo, preserved with such tender care in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, will see that they have shared the common fate, being either mummified or reduced to skeletons; and this is true in all cases, as far as my observation has extended.

What even a great theologian can be induced to believe and testify in a somewhat similar matter, is seen in St. Augustine's declaration that the flesh of the peacock, which in antiquity and in the early Church was considered a bird somewhat supernaturally endowed, is incorruptible.

The saint declares that he tested it and found it so (see the De Civitate dei, xxi, c. 4, under the passage beginning Quis enim Deus).

With this we may compare the testimony of the pious author of Sir John Mandeville's Travels, that iron floats upon the Dead Sea while feathers sink in it, and that he would not have believed this had he not seen it.

So, too, testimony to the "sweet odour" diffused by the exhumed remains of the saint seem to indicate feeling rather than fact--those highly wrought feelings of disciples standing by--the same feeling which led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on his heap of ordure, and other hermits unwashed and living in filth, to dwell upon the delicious "odour of sanctity" pervading the air.

In point, perhaps, is Louis Veuillot's idealization of the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to which the present writer and thousands of others can testify, that under Papal rule Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in Christendom.

For the case of Julia, see the contemporary letter printed by Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien, p. 120, note 167; also Infessura, Diarium Rom.

Urbis, in Muratori, tom.

iii, pt.

2, col. 1192, 1193, and elsewhere; also Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Age of Despots, p. 22. For the case at Stade, see press dispatch from Berlin in newspapers of June 24, 25, 1895. The copy of Emanuel Acosta I have mainly used is that in the Royal Library at Munich, De Japonicus rebus epistolarum libri iii, item recogniti; et in Latinum ex Hispanico sermone conversi, Dilingae, MDLXXI.

I have since obtained and used the work now in the library of Cornell University, being the letters and commentary published by Emanuel Acosta and attached to Maffei's book on the History of the Indies, published at Antwerp in 1685. For the first beginnings of miracles wrought by Xavier, as given in the letters of the missionaries, see that of Almeida, lib.

ii, p. 183. Of other collections, or selections from collections, of letters which fail to give any indication of miracles wrought by Xavier during his life, see Wytfliet and Magin, Histoire Universelle des Indes Occidentales et Orientales, et de la Conversion des Indiens, Douay, 1611. Though several letters of Xavier and his fellow-missionaries are given, dated at the very period of his alleged miracles, not a trace of miracles appears in these.

Also Epistolae Japonicae de multorum in variis Insulis Gentilium ad Christi fidem Conversione, Lovanii, 1570. These letters were written by Xavier and his companions from the East Indies and Japan, and cover the years from 1549 to 1564. Though these refer frequently to Xavier, there is no mention of a miracle wrought by him in any of them written during his lifetime.

For, shortly after Xavier's heroic and beautiful death in 1552, stories of miracles wrought by him began to appear.

At first they were few and feeble; and two years later Melchior Nunez, Provincial of the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions, with all the means at his command, and a correspondence extending throughout Eastern Asia, had been able to hear of but three.

These were entirely from hearsay.

First, John Deyro said he knew that Xavier had the gift of prophecy; but, unfortunately, Xavier himself had reprimanded and cast off Deyro for untruthfulness and cheatery.

Secondly, it was reported vaguely that at Cape Comorin many persons affirmed that Xavier had raised a man from the dead.

Thirdly, Father Pablo de Santa Fe had heard that in Japan Xavier had restored sight to a blind man.

This seems a feeble beginning, but little by little the stories grew, and in 1555 De Quadros, Provincial of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, had heard of nine miracles, and asserted that Xavier had healed the sick and cast out devils.

The next year, being four years after Xavier's death, King John III of Portugal, a very devout man, directed his viceroy Barreto to draw up and transmit to him an authentic account of Xavier's miracles, urging him especially to do the work "with zeal and speedily."

We can well imagine what treasures of grace an obsequious viceroy, only too anxious to please a devout king, could bring together by means of the hearsay of ignorant, compliant natives through all the little towns of Portuguese India.

But the letters of the missionaries who had been co-workers or immediate successors of Xavier in his Eastern field were still silent as regards any miracles by him, and they remained silent for nearly ten years.

In the collection of letters published by Emanuel Acosta and others no hint at any miracles by him is given, until at last, in 1562, fully ten years after Xavier's death, the first faint beginnings of these legends appear in them.

At that time the Jesuit Almeida, writing at great length to the brethren, stated that he had found a pious woman who believed that a book left behind by Xavier had healed sick folk when it was laid upon them, and that he had met an old man who preserved a whip left by the saint which, when properly applied to the sick, had been found good both for their bodies and their souls.

From these and other small beginnings grew, always luxuriant and sometimes beautiful, the vast mass of legends which we shall see hereafter.

This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous and less critical brethren in Europe until it had become enormous; but it appears to have been thought of little value by those best able to judge.

For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a solemn oration on the condition and glory of the Church, before the papal legates and other fathers assembled at the Council of Trent, while he alluded to a multitude of things showing the Divine favour, there was not the remotest allusion to the vast multitude of miracles which, according to the legends, had been so profusely lavished on the faithful during many years, and which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church.

The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours vouchsafed to the Church, or at least of any belief in them, appears in that great Council of Trent among the fathers themselves.

Certainly there, if anywhere, one might on the Roman theory expect Divine illumination in a matter of this kind.

The presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it was especially claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual as well as material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own friend and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not the slightest sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles.

We have the letters of Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these fathers assembled at Trent, from 1557 onward for a considerable time, and we have also a multitude of letters written from the Council by bishops, cardinals, and even by the Pope himself, discussing all sorts of Church affairs, and in not one of these is there evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these reports, which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles, were worthy of mention.

Here, too, comes additional supplementary testimony of much significance.

With these orations and letters, Eugubinus gives a Latin translation of a letter, "on religious affairs in the Indies," written by a Jesuit father twenty years after Xavier's death.

Though the letter came from a field very distant from that in which Xavier laboured, it was sure, among the general tokens of Divine favour to the Church and to the order, on which it dwelt, to have alluded to miracles wrought by Xavier had there been the slightest ground for believing in them; but no such allusion appears.

(292) (292) For the work referred to, see Julii Gabrielii Eugubini orationum et epistolarum, etc. , libri duo (et) Epitola de rebus Indicis a quodam Societatis Jesu presbytero, etc. , Venetiis, 1569. The Epistola begins at fol.

44. So, too, when in 1588, thirty-six years after Xavier's death, the Jesuit father Maffei, who had been especially conversant with Xavier's career in the East, published his History of India, though he gave a biography of Xavier which shows fervent admiration for his subject, he dwelt very lightly on the alleged miracles.

But the evolution of miraculous legends still went on.

Six years later, in 1594, Father Tursellinus published his Life of Xavier, and in this appears to have made the first large use of the information collected by the Portuguese viceroy and the more zealous brethren.

This work shows a vast increase in the number of miracles over those given by all sources together up to that time.

Xavier is represented as not only curing the sick, but casting out devils, stilling the tempest, raising the dead, and performing miracles of every sort.

In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome.

Among the speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal Monte.

In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them minutely.

He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed the sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a lost boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the offenders in cinders from a volcano: this was afterward still more highly developed, and the saint was represented in engravings as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying the town.

The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the cardinal's list.

Regarding this he states that, Xavier having during one of his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was restored to him after he had reached the shore by a crab.

The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's relics after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps placed before the image of the saint and filled with holy water burned as if filled with oil.

This latter account appears to have deeply impressed the Pope, for in the Bull of Canonization issued by virtue of his power of teaching the universal Church infallibly in all matters pertaining to faith and morals, His Holiness dwells especially upon the miracle of the lamp filled with holy water and burning before Xavier's image.

Xavier having been made a saint, many other Lives of him appeared, and, as a rule, each surpassed its predecessor in the multitude of miracles.

In 1622 appeared that compiled and published under the sanction of Father Vitelleschi, and in it not only are new miracles increased, but some old ones are greatly improved.

One example will suffice to show the process.

In his edition of 1596, Tursellinus had told how, Xavier one day needing money, and having asked Vellio, one of his friends, to let him have some, Vellio gave him the key of a safe containing thirty thousand gold pieces.

Xavier took three hundred and returned the key to Vellio; whereupon Vellio, finding only three hundred pieces gone, reproached Xavier for not taking more, saying that he had expected to give him half of all that the strong box contained.

Xavier, touched by this generosity, told Vellio that the time of his death should be made known to him, that he might have opportunity to repent of his sins and prepare for eternity.