God: and he who goes crowned with a diadem, offers his prayers to the
tent-maker and the fisher-man as his Protestors._ And in [10] another
place: _The cities run together to the sepulchres of the Martyrs, and the
people are inflamed with the love of them_.

This practice of sending reliques from place to place for working miracles,
and thereby inflaming the devotion of the nations towards the dead Saints
and their reliques, and setting up the religion of invoking their souls,
lasted only till the middle of the reign of the Emperor _Theodosius_ the
great; for he then prohibited it by the following Edict. _Humatum corpus,
nemo ad alterum locum transferat; nemo Martyrem distrahat, nemo mercetur:
Habeant vero in potestate, si quolibet in loco sanctorum est aliquis
conditus, pro ejus veneratione, quod _Martyrium_ vocandum sit, addant quod
voluerint fabricarum. Dat. _iv._ Kal. Mart. Constantinopoli, Honorio nob.
puero & Euodio Coss._ A.C. 386. After this they filled the fields and
high-ways with altars erected to Martyrs, which they pretended to discover
by dreams and revelations: and this occasioned the making the fourteenth
Canon of the fifth Council of _Carthage_, A.C. 398. _Item placuit, ut
altaria, quae passim per agros aut vias, tanquam memoriae Martyrum
constituuntur, in quibus nullum corpus aut reliquiae Martyrum conditae
probantur, ab Episcopis, qui illis locis praesunt, si fieri potest,
evertantur. Si autem hoc propter tumultus populares non sinitur, plebes
tamen admoneantur, ne illa loca frequentent, ut qui recte sapiunt, nulla
ibi superstitione devincti teneantur. Et omnino nulla memoria Martyrum
probabiliter acceptetur, nisi aut ibi corpus aut aliquae certae reliquiae
sint, aut ubi origo alicujus habitationis, vel possessionis, vel passionis
fidelissima origine traditur. Nam quae per somnia, & per inanes quasi
revelationes quorumlibet hominum ubique constituuntur altaria, omnimode
reprobentur._ These altars were for invoking the Saints or Martyrs buried
or pretended to be buried under them. First they filled the Churches in all
places with the reliques or pretended reliques of the Martyrs, for invoking
them in the Churches; and then they filled the fields and high-ways with
altars, for invoking them every where: and this new religion was set up by
the Monks in all the _Greek_ Empire before the expedition of the Emperor
_Theodosius_ against _Eugenius_, and I think before his above-mentioned
Edict, A.C. 386.

The