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 weakly
subjects, the jaws slipped suddenly back into place, perhaps in
consequence of a jolt, as the woman rode towards the church. (Cap. v.
53.)[42]

There is also a good deal said about a very questionable blind
man--one Albricus (Alberich?)--who, having been cured, not of his
blindness, but of another disease under which he laboured, took up his
quarters at Seligenstadt, and came out as a prophet, inspired by the
Archangel Gabriel. Eginhard intimates that his prophecies were
fulfilled; but as he does not state exactly what they were, or how
they were accomplished, the statement must be accepted with much
caution. It is obvious that he was not the man to hesitate to "ease" a
prophecy until it fitted, if the credit of the shrine of his favourite
saints could be increased by such a procedure. There is no impeachment
of his honour in the supposition. The logic of the matter is quite
simple, if somewhat sophistical. The holiness of the church of the
martyrs guarantees the reality of the appearance of the Archangel
Gabriel there; and what the