the Church, is that such objects
are beneficent in their action when employed for any given purpose.
Thus, as Henderson says of the North of England, "a belief in the
efficacy of the sacred elements in the Eucharist for the cure of
bodily disease is widely spread." Silver rings, made from the
offertory money, are very generally worn for the cure of epilepsy.
Water that had been used in baptism was believed in West Scotland to
have virtue to cure many distempers; it was a preventive against
witchcraft, and eyes bathed with it would never see a ghost. Dalyell
puts the evidence very succinctly. "Everything relative to sanctity
was deemed a preservative. Hence the relics of saints, the touch of
their clothes, of their tombs, and even portions of structures
consecrated to divine offices were a safeguard near the person. A
white marble altar in the church of Iona, almost entire towards the
close of the seventeenth century, had disappeared late in the
eighteenth, from its demolition in fragments to avert shipwreck." And
so what has been consecrated, must not be desecrated. In
Leicestershire and Northamptonshire there is a superstitious idea that
the removal or exhumation of a body after interment bodes death or
some terrible calamity to the surviving members of the deceased's
family.[268]

In the West of Ireland there were usually found upon the altars of the
small missionary churches one or more oval stones, either natural
waterwashed pebbles or artificially shaped and very smooth, and these
were held in the highest veneration by the peasantry as having
belonged to the founders of the churches, and were used for a variety
of purposes, as the curing of diseases, taking oaths upon them,
etc.[269] Similarly the using of any remains of destroyed churches for
profane purposes was believed to bring misfortune,[270] while the land
which once belonged to the church of St. Baramedan, in the parish of
Kilbarrymeaden, county Waterford, "has long been highly venerated by
the common people, who attribute to it many surprising virtues."[271]
In 1849 the people of Carrick were in the habit of carrying away from
the churchyard portions of the clay of a priest's grave and using it
as a cure for several diseases, and they also boiled the clay from the
grave of Father O'Connor with milk and drank it.[272] One of the
superstitious fancies of the Connemara folk in 1825 was credulity with
respect to the gospels, as they are called, which "they w