the moment chosen by Divine Providence to give, as
it were, signal to His Church, that, though years passed on, He was
still what He had been from the beginning, a living and a faithful God,
wonder-working as in the lifetime of the Apostles, and true to His word
as spoken by His prophets unto a thousand generations. There was in
Milan a man of middle age, well known in the place, by name Severus,
who, having become blind, had given up his trade, and was now supported
by charitable persons. Being told the cause of the shoutings in the
streets, he persuaded his guide to lead him to the sacred relics. He
came near; he touched the cloth which covered them; and he regained his
sight immediately.

This relation deserves our special notice from its distinct
miraculousness and its circumstantial character; but numerous other
miracles are stated to have followed. Various diseases were cured and
demoniacs dispossessed by the touch of the holy bodies or their
envelopments.

3.

Now for the evidence on which the whole matter rests. Our witnesses are
three: St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and Paulinus, the secretary of the
latter, who after his death addressed a short memoir of his life to the
former.

1. St. Augustine, in three separate passages in his works, two of which
shall here be quoted, gives his testimony. First, in his City of God, in
an enumeration of miracles which had taken place since the Apostles'
time. He begins with that which he himself had witnessed in the city of
St. Ambrose:--

"The miracle," he says, "which occurred at Milan, while I was
there, when a blind man gained sight, was of a kind to come to the
knowledge of many, because the city is large, and the Emperor was
there at the time, and it was wrought with the witness of a vast
multitude, who had come together to the bodies of the martyrs
Protasius and Gervasius; which, being at the time concealed and
altogether unknown, were discovered on the revelation of a dream to
Ambrose the bishop; upon which that blind man was released from his
former darkness, and saw the day."--xxii. 8.

And next in his sermon upon the feast-day of the two martyrs:--

"We are celebrating, my brethren, the day on which, by Ambrose the
bishop, that man of God, there was discovered, precious in the
sight of the Lord, the death of His Saints; of which so great glory
of the martyrs, then accruing, even I was a witne