CHAPTER XX.

THE SUPERNATURALISM OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

From ungrounded belief, gross superstition, by which true religion is not a little infected and adulterated, hath proceeded; but from the contrary, right down Atheism. MERIC CASAUBON Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, Civil and Divine, 1668.

Those who hate the very name of a miracle, in reality suppose the greatest of all miracles; the tying up the hands of the Almighty from disposing events according to His will.

THE

BISHOP BURNET's History of his own Times, Book ii.

THE Church of Rome has, in all times, held so firmly and openly the doctrine of the heritage of the miraculous in it from Christ, that it seems scarcely necessary to do more, so far as it is concerned, than to state the fact. In truth, the Roman Church has so run riot in this belief that it is to it that we owe the total revulsion of Protestantism from this doctrine. The thorough corruption of the church previous to the Protestant era, and the terrible as well as degrading deeds which it perpetrated in that corruption, I believe no truly pious Catholic of to-day will be found to deny. It has been the fate of every church, Christian or Pagan, which has been made political, or which has been placed in possession of absolute power, to become tyrannous and demoralised. As no church ever for a long period enjoyed such absolute dominion, spiritual and temporal-dominion over the purses, the property, and the opinions of mankind-as the Roman Catholic Church; so none ever rose to such a pitch of sheer secularisation, of immorality, of the teaching and practice of

CATHOLIC FAITH IN MIRACLE.

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delusions, as this church. The frightful tale of its persecutions, its wholesale martyrdoms, its trampling on every opposing thought and principle in the heart of man, its turning the sacred uses of religion into a trade for money, and its suppression of the use of the Bible to the laity, are all matters of unquestionable and notorious history. The enlightened professors of this faith do not attempt to deny these things, but, like enlightened Protestants, they attribute them to the natural abuses of the truth attendant on worldly power and its inevitable corruptions. The great principles of the Roman Catholic religion are, for the most part, true and gospel principles, which have been abused by priestcraft for selfish purposes. The doctrines of miracles and of an intermediate state, which Protestantism has abandoned, are founded ineradicably on both the Old and New Testaments; but have been so abused by the Catholic Church in past ages, when it had the Christian world wholly to itself, that Protestantism has, in its indignation, renounced them, and renounced them to its cost. The abuse of the doctrines of purgatory and of miracle, and demoniacal possession, in the later ages of Catholicism, were, in truth, so enormous that, operating on the ignorance which the exclusion of the Bible and the discouragement of learning produced, and which the church thought favourable to absolute power, the Christian world was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries overrun with absurd legends of diabolism and lying miracles. Rival orders of monks and friars manufactured miracles, and cast out pretended devils to obtain popularity and preference over each other, till the whole of the public mind was debauched by these acts, and the ignorant people saw devils and ghosts, and miraculous events everywhere. It was high time that a reform took place, but the Protestants, in their impetuous zeal, were not content with reform, they demanded a revolution, in which some great and imperishable principles were, for a time, swept away amid the rubbish of superstition and priestcraft. The truth lay midway betwixt Credulity and Incredulity; but the Reformers were in no mood to take any middle

way; to destroy one extreme, they rushed to another. In the reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts even, they abused the same political power as the Catholics had done, and burnt, destroyed, imprisoned, and banished those who differed from them in religious belief. We shall have more to say on these heads when we come to Protestantism. For the present, it is only necessary to remark that, though the Roman Catholics received a severe chastisement for their abuse of the great principles of Christianity during their enjoyment of a power grown licentious, they have never for a moment abandoned their faith in the eternal truths of sensible spiritual communion with humanity; in other words, in the communion of saints;' in the existence of an intermediate state, the scheol of the Old and the hades of the New Testament; nor in the power of the church and of its worthy servants to work miracles. They behold with a certain satisfaction the consequences to Protestantism from the abandonment of these truths, consequences which they have always foretold-namely, a sterile deadness of faith, an incapacity for the higher spiritual receptivity of evidence, a wide-spread and ever-spreading infidelity, disguised as rationalism; a materialism fast enveloping the world, and in its rear the inevitable soul-frost of atheism.

Punished by the great onslaught and giant breach of Protestantism, the Roman Catholics, nevertheless, hold their faith in these truths, though somewhat quietly, before the world. Deeply sensible that their lavish feigning of diabolic agency was a crime which brought its severe penalty, their priests are now affected by a demonophobia, which is equally mischievous. Whatever does not arise in the bosom of this church, however holy in its nature and salutary in its effects, is calmly assigned to diabolism. When spiritualism again lifts its head to crush the bloated hydra of materialism, its only competent antagonist, they join the Protestant sceptic in denouncing it. But in the bosom of their own church miracle still holds its onward, though silent, career, and this they acknowledge, though they do not proclaim it.

MIRACULOUS ACCOUNTS.

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The miraculous powers of healing and other features of a living spiritualism are continually appearing amongst them, to some instances of which I shall, anon, advert. We will now pass cursorily over the face of the spiritualistic history of Romanism.

In the chapter on the Early Church I brought down my notice of its spiritualism to the seventh century. The Roman Church may be said to have acquired the title of Roman in A.D. 323, when Constantine made it the religion of the empire. When Boniface III., in A.D. 606, assumed the title of Universal Bishop, its character of Roman Catholic Church may be said to have become complete. It is to this point that I have carried down my notice of its spiritualism, and from this point I might go on quoting whole volumes of the miraculous from its annals. But neither does the proof of the matter require this, nor will my space permit it. The reader may turn to Mosheim, Döllinger, Milner, and other historians of the church, to Ranke's History of the Popes,' and, above all, to Alban Butler's two massive volumes of the Lives of the Saints,' to Newman's 'Lives of the British Saints,' and Görres' 'Christliche Mystik.' Every page of these latter works teems with the miraculous. The narratives are of a character to startle a faith not perfectly Roman. That there is much that is true in them the noble and sacred characters of many of the actors and assertors forbids us to deny; that there is much that is exaggerated, if not absolutely false, the very nature of all history compels us to believe. But we are bound to take the whole as we take all other history, as true with exceptions and embellishments, and as having in it a substantial mass of reality. As I have touched on many facts included in Alban Butler's first volume, we will open the second, and there we find the following, amid a host of similar statements.

St. Dominic, when the Lord Napoleon was killed by a fall from his horse, and was carried into a neighbouring church, by his prayers restored him to life. He also restored a deceased child. St. Francis of Assissium had the five

wounds of Christ in his hands, feet, and sides. These stigmata are said to have been impressed on a great many saints, male and female, down to the present time. St. Tarachus, when upbraided with his folly in not avoiding death by sacrificing to idols, said, 'This folly is expedient for us who hope in Jesus Christ. Earthly wisdom leads to eternal death.' He wrought miracles. St. Winifred had his life prolonged at the prayers of his friends four years. Six blind men recovered their sight by praying at the tomb of Edward the Confessor, besides other miracles being thus performed. His body was quite fresh nearly forty years after his death. St. Malachy restored a lady to life. St. Hubert and many others cast out evil spirits. Wonderful miracles of healing are recorded of St. Winifreda at her well, in North Wales. St. Charles Boromeo was fired at whilst performing mass, but the bullet only struck on his rochet and fell to the ground. He cured the Duke of Savoy only by showing himself to him when given over by the physicians. St. Martin of Tours restored, at different times, three or four dead persons to life; caused a tree that was falling on him to fall another way, by making the sign of the cross, &c. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus stopped a terrible flood that was sweeping away houses, people and cattle, by striking down his staff, which also struck root and became a large tree, known to all the country round, for a vast many years, as the Staff-tree; and when it fell through age, a monument was built on the spot, which some of the early historians, already quoted, say they saw. He also turned a lake into dry land by his prayers. Numerous miracles were performed at the tomb of St. Elizabeth; the blind recovering their sight, the dead recovering life, &c.

St. Columban, in truth a saint of the old British church, foretold to Clotaire that the whole French monarchy would come into his hands in less than three years, which was so. He also blew upon an image of the god Woden, and thus shivered it to splinters. St. Francis Xavier raised several people from the dead. When a ship in which he was, struck