none among the
professed teachers of science and religion. If the statements of the
celebrated scholar and printer, Robert Etienne, or Stephens, seem almost
incredible, they nevertheless come from a witness of unimpeachable
veracity. Referring to the period of his boyhood or early youth--he was
born in 1503--Etienne sketched the biblical attainments of the doctors
of the Sorbonne after this fashion: "In those times, as I can affirm
with truth, when I asked them in what part of the New Testament some
matter was written, they used to answer that they had read it in Saint
Jerome or in the Decretals, but that they did not know what the New
Testament was, not being aware that it was customary to print it after
the Old. What I am going to state will appear almost a prodigy, and yet
there is nothing more true nor better proven: Not long since, a member
of their college used daily to say, 'I am amazed that these young people
keep bringing up the New Testament to us. _I was more than fifty years
old before I knew anything about the New Testament!_'"[111]

[Sidenote: Miracles to stimulate the popular faith.]

[Sidenote: The "ghost of Orleans."]

The absence of teaching founded upon a rational exposition of the Holy
Scriptures was not less marked than was the abundance of reported
miracles, by means of which the popular faith was stimulated and
sustained. Above all, the doctrine of transubstantiation was fortified
by the circulation of stories of wonders such as that which took place
at Poitiers, in 1516, when the consecrated wine, spilled by a crazy man,
from white instantly became red.[112] At other times imposture was
resorted to in support of such profitable beliefs as the existence of
purgatorial fires, or to inculcate the advantage accruing from masses
for the souls of the dead. The "ghost of Orleans" has become historic.
The wife of the provost of the city having died, was buried, as she had
requested, without any pomp and without the customary gifts to the
church. Thereupon the Franciscans conceived the scheme of making use of
her example to warn others against following a course so detrimental to
monastic and priestly interests. The mysterious knockings by means of
which the deceased was supposed to give intimation of her miserable doom
and of her desire that her body, as of one that had been tainted with
heresy, should be removed from the holy ground wherein it had been
interred, were listened to with amazement by the