knows this to be a fact. With such a disposition regarding
the wildest stories, it is not surprising that the assertion of St.
Gregory of Nazianzen, during the second century, as to the cures wrought
by the martyrs Cosmo and Damian, was echoed from all parts of Europe
until every hamlet had its miracle-working saint or relic.

The literature of these miracles is simply endless. To take our own
ancestors alone, no one can read the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, or
Abbot Samson's Miracles of St. Edmund, or the accounts given by Eadmer
and Osbern of the miracles of St. Dunstan, or the long lists of those
wrought by Thomas a Becket, or by any other in the army of English
saints, without seeing the perfect naturalness of this growth. This
evolution of miracle in all parts of Europe came out of a vast preceding
series of beliefs, extending not merely through the early Church but far
back into paganism. Just as formerly patients were cured in the temples
of Aesculapius, so they were cured in the Middle Ages, and so they are
cured now at the shrines of saints. Just as the ancient miracles were
solemnly attested by votive tablets, giving names, dates, and details,
and these tablets hung before the images of the gods, so the medieval
miracles were attested by similar tablets hung before the images of the
saints; and so they are attested to-day by similar tablets hung before
the images of Our Lady of La Salette or of Lourdes. Just as faith in
such miracles persisted, in spite of the small percentage of cures at
those ancient places of healing, so faith persists to-day, despite the
fact that in at least ninety per cent of the cases at Lourdes prayers
prove unavailing. As a rule, the miracles of the sacred books were
taken as models, and each of those given by the sacred chroniclers was
repeated during the early ages of the Church and through the medieval
period with endless variations of circumstance, but still with curious
fidelity to the original type.

It should be especially kept in mind that, while the vast majority
of these were doubtless due to the myth-making faculty and to that
development of legends which always goes on in ages ignorant of the
relation between physical causes and effects, some of the miracles of
healing had undoubtedly some basis in fact. We in modern times have
seen too many cures performed through influences exercised upon the
imagination, such as those of the Jansenists at the Cemetery of St.
Medard,