r Roman obscurity.

It is an aggravation of my grief and a reopening of my wound, that
our vows have been of no avail, and that the faith which we placed
in the merits and intervention of the martyrs has been utterly
disappointed.

We may admit, then, without impeachment of Eginhard's sincerity, or of
his honour under all ordinary circumstances, that when piety,
self-interest, the glory of the Church in general, and that of the
church at Seligenstadt in particular, all pulled one way, even the
workaday principles of morality were disregarded; and, _a fortiori_,
anything like proper investigation of the reality of alleged miracles
was thrown to the winds.

And if this was the condition of mind of such a man as Eginhard, what is
it not legitimate to suppose may have been that of Deacon Deusdona,
Lunison, Hunus, and company, thieves and cheats by their own confession,
or of the probably hysterical nun, or of the professional beggars, for
whose incapacity to walk and straighten themselves there is no guarantee
but their own? Who is to make sure that the exorcist of the demon Wiggo
was not just such another priest as Hunus; and is it not at least
possible, when Eginhard's servants dreamed, night after night, in such a
curiously coincident fashion, that a careful inquirer might have found
they were very anxious to please their master?

Quite apart from deliberate and conscious fraud (which is a rarer thing
than is often supposed), people whose mythopoeic faculty is once
stirred, are capable of saying the thing that is not, and of acting as
they should not, to an extent which is hardly imaginable by persons who
are not so easily affected by the contagion of blind faith. There is no
falsity so gross that honest men and, still more, virtuous women,
anxious to promote a good cause, will not lend themselves to it without
any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing.
The cases of miraculously-effected cures of which Eginhard is ocular
witness appear to belong to classes of disease in which malingering is
possible or hysteria presumable. Without modern means of diagnosis, the
names given to them are quite worthless. One "miracle," however, in
which the patient, a woman, was cured by the mere sight of the church in
which the relics of the blessed martyrs lay, is an unmistakable case of
dislocation of the lower jaw; and it is obvious that, as not
unfrequently happens in such accidents in