ics were frivolous or impossible, and that the same members
of some favorite saint were reproduced at points widely distant, might
well speculate upon the probable benefits to Christendom from a complete
inventory of the contents of the churches of two or three thousand
bishoprics, of twenty or thirty thousand abbeys, and of more than forty
thousand convents.[88] He might find difficulty in believing that our
Lord was crucified with fourteen nails; that "an entire hedge" should
have been requisite to plait the crown of thorns; that a single spear
should have begotten three others; or that from a solitary napkin there
should have issued a whole brood of the same kind.[89] He would be
scandalized on learning that each apostle had more than four bodies, and
the saints at least two or three apiece.[90] And his faith in the
genuineness of the objects of popular adoration would be still further
shaken, if, on subjecting them to a closer examination, he discovered
that, as was the case at Geneva, he had been worshipping a bone of a
deer as the arm of Saint Anthony, or a piece of pumice for the brain of
the apostle Peter.[91]

But, whatever sceptical conclusions might be reached by the learned and
discerning, the devotion of the common people showed no signs of
flagging. In the parish church of St. Stephen at Noyon, it was not the
Christian proto-martyr alone that was decorated with a cap and other
gewgaws, when his yearly festival came around, but likewise the
"tyrants," as they were styled by the people, who stoned him. And the
poor women, seeing them thus adorned, took them to be companions of the
saint, and each one had his candle. The devil with whom St. Michael
contended fared equally well.[92] The very stones that were the
instruments of St. Stephen's death were adored at Arles and
elsewhere.[93] It was, however, to the Parisians that the palm in this
species of superstition rightfully belonged. The knife wherewith an
impious Jew had stabbed a consecrated wafer was held in higher esteem
than the wafer itself! And so marked was the preference that it aroused
the displeasure of one of the most bigoted doctors of the Sorbonne, De
Quercu, who reproached the Parisians for being worse than the Jews
themselves, "inasmuch as they adored the knife that had served to rend
the precious body of Jesus Christ."[94]

[Sidenote: The consecrated wafer.]

When such superstitious respect was paid to the relics of saints, it is
not surpr