reply to the latter suggestion has been already given, and elsewhere his views as to the general question of the danger of people mistaking the nature of the honour shown to images of the saints have been stated at length. With regard to his approval of the principle of pilgrimages there is no room for doubt.

"If the thing were so far from all frame of right religion," he says, "and so perilous to men's souls, I cannot perceive why the clergy, for the gain they get thereby, would suffer such abuses to continue. For, first, if it were true that no pilgrimage ought to be used, no image offered to, nor worship done nor prayer offered to any saint, then-if all these things were all undone (if that were the right way, as I wot well it were wrong), then to me there is little question but that Christian people who are in the true faith and in the right way Godward would not thereby in any way slack their good minds towards the ministers of His church, but their devotion towards them would more and more increase. So that if by this way they now get a penny they would not then fail to receive a groat; and so should no lucre be the cause to favour this way if it be wrong, whilst they could not fail to win more by the right."

Moreover, look through Christendom and you will find the fruit of those offerings a right small part of the living of the clergy, and such as, though some few places would be glad to retain, yet the whole body might easily forbear without any notable loss. Let us consider our own country, and we shall find that these pilgrimages are for the most part in the hands of such religious persons or of such poor parishes as have no great authority in the convocations. Besides this you will not find, I suppose, that any Bishop in England has the profit of even one groat from any such offering in his diocese. Now, the continuance or breaking of this manner and custom stands them specially in the power of those who take no profit by it. If they believed it to be (as you call it) superstitious

and wicked they would never suffer it to continue to the perishing of men's souls (something whereby they themselves would destroy their own souls and get no commodity either in body or goods). And beyond this, we see that the bishops and prelates themselves visit these holy places and pilgrimages, and make as large offerings and (incur) as great cost in coming and going as other people do, so that they not only take no temporal advantage, but also bestow their own money therein. And surely I believe this devotion so planted by God's own hand in the hearts of the whole Church, that is to say, not the clergy only, but the whole congregation of all Christian people, that if the spirituality were of the mind to give it up, yet the temporality would not suffer it."

It would be impossible, without making extensive quotations, to do justice to Sir Thomas More's argument in favour of the old Catholic practice of pilgrimages. He points out that the whole matter turns upon the question whether or no Almighty God does manifest His power and presence more in one place of His world than in another. That He does so, he thinks cannot be questioned; why He should do so, it is not for us to guess, but the single example of the Angel and the pool of Bethsaida related in St. John's Gospel is sufficient proof of the fact-at least to Sir Thomas More's intelligence. Moreover, he thinks also that in many cases the special holiness of a place of pilgrimage has been shown by the graces and favours, and even miracles, which have been granted by God at that particular spot, and on the "objector" waiving this argument aside on the plea that he does not believe in modern miracles, More declares that what is even more than miracles in his estimation is the "common belief in Christ's Church " in the practice.

As to believing in miracles; they, like every other fact, depend on evidence and proof. It is unreasonable in the highest degree to disbelieve everything which we have

not seen or which we do not understand. Miracles, like everything else, must be believed on the evidence of credible witnesses. What in their day, he says, is believed in by all would have been deemed impossible a century or two before; for example, that the earth is round and "sails in mid-air," and that "men walk on it foot to foot" and ships sail on its seas "bottom to bottom." Again, It is not fifty years ago," he says, "since the first man, as far as men have heard, came to London who ever parted the silver gilt from the silver, consuming shortly the silver into dust with a very fair water." At first the gold and silver smiths laughed at the suggestion as absurd and impossible. Quite recently also More had been told that it was possible to melt iron and make it "to run as silver or lead doeth, and make it take a print." More had never, he says, seen this, but he had seen the new invention of drawing out silver into thread-like wires. The "objector" was incredulous, and when More went on to tell him that if a piece of silver had been gilded, it could be drawn out with the gilding into gilt wires, he expressed his disbelief in the possibility of such a thing, and was hardly more satisfied that he was not being deceived when the process was shown to him the next day.

These and such like things, argues More, show us that our knowledge is, after all, very limited, and that while some supposed miracles may be doubted, it is most unreasonable to doubt or deny the possibility of miracles generally. If nature and reason tell us there is a God, the same two prove that miracles are not impossible, and that God can act when He wills against the course of nature. Whether He does in this or that case is plainly a matter of evidence. The importance of Sir Thomas More's opinion on the matter of Pilgrimage does not, of course, rest upon the nature of his views, which were those naturally of all good Catholic sons of Holy Church, but upon the fact that, in face of the objections which were then made and which were of the kind to which

subsequent generations have been accustomed, so learned and liberal a man as he was, did not hesitate to treat them as groundless, and to defend the practice as it was then known in England. That there may have been "abuses he would have no doubt fully admitted, but that the "abuses" were either so great or so serious as to afford any reasonable ground against the "use" he would equally have indignantly denied.

No less clear and definite are his opinions as to "relics" and the honour shown them. The "adversary" in the Dyalogue takes up the usual objections urged against the reverence shown to the remains of the saints, and in particular to the wealth which was lavished upon their shrines, "May the taking up of a man's bones," he says, "and setting his carcase in a gay shrine, and then kissing his bare scalp, make a man a saint? And yet are there some unshrined, for no man knoweth where they lie. And men doubt whether some ever had any body at all or not, but to recompense that again some there are who have two bodies, to lend one to some good fellow that lacketh his. For some one body lies whole in two places asunder, or else the monks of the one be beguiled. For both places plainly affirm that it lieth there, and at either place they show the shrine, and in the shrine they show a body which they say is the body, and boldly allege old writings and miracles also for the proof of it. Now must he confess that either the miracles at the one place be false and done by the devil, or else that the same saint had indeed two bodies. It is therefore likely that a bone worshipped for a relic of some holy saint in some place was peradventure ‘a bone (as Chaucer says) of some holy Jew's sheep.'" More's “ More's "adversary" then goes on to say that our Lord in reproving the Pharisees for "making fresh the sepulchres of the prophets" condemns the "gay golden shrines made for saints' bodies, especially when we have no certainty that they are saints at all."

1 p. 190.

What all this really amounts to, replies More, is not that your reasons would condemn honour and worship to true relics of the saints, but that "we may be deceived in some that we take for saints-except you would say that if we might by any possibility mistake some, therefore we should worship none." Few people would say this, and "I see," says More, "no great peril to us from the danger of a mistake. If there came, for example, a great many of the king's friends into your country, and for his sake you make them all great cheer; if among them there come unawares to you some spies that were his mortal enemies, wearing his badge and seeming to you and so reported as his familiar friends, would he blame you for the good cheer you made his enemies or thank you for the good cheer you gave his friends?" He then goes on at great length to suggest that, as in the case of the head of St. John the Baptist in which portions only existing in each place are each called "the head," so, very frequently, only a portion of the body of a saint is called "the body.” He mentions having himself been present at the abbey of Barking thirty years before (i.e., in 1498), when a number of relics were discovered hidden in an old image, which must have been put there four or five hundred years since "when the abbey was burned by the infidels." He thinks that in this way the names of relics are frequently either lost or changed. But he adds, "the name is not so very requisite but that we may mistake it without peril, so that we nevertheless have the relics of holy men in reverence."

In replying to Tyndale also, More declares that he had never in all his life held views against relics of the saints or the honour due to their holy images. Tyndale had charged him with being compromised by the words used by Erasmus in the Encomium Moria, which was known to have been composed in More's house, and was commonly regarded as almost the joint work of the two scholars. If there were anything like this in the Moria-any words that could mean or seem to mean anything against the