n childbirth; and he reserved to himself and his
successors the manufacture of it. Even as late as 1517 Pope Leo X
issued, for a consideration, tickets bearing a cross and the
following inscription: 'This cross measured forty times makes the
height of Christ in his humanity. He who kisses it is preserved for
seven days from falling-sickness, apoplexy, and sudden death.'"[49]

The enormous revenues procured through the means of relics, and the
lack of certain means of identifying them, would naturally encourage
the imposition of fraud. The crime would not appear so great after one
experience, for the perpetrators could readily see that it really made
no difference so far as efficacy in the cure of diseases was
concerned, whether or not the relics were genuine. The history of some
of the relics unfortunately proves them not to be relics at all, or at
least not to be the relics which the faithful supposed them to be.
Notice a few instances. In a magnificent shrine in the cathedral at
Cologne are the skulls of the three kings, or wise men from the East,
who brought gifts to the infant Lord. They have rested here since the
twelfth century and have been the source of enormous wealth and power
to the cathedral chapter. Not to be outdone by the cathedral, for the
church of St. Gereon a cemetery has been depopulated, and the bones
thus procured have been placed upon the walls and are known as the
relics of St. Gereon and his Theband band of martyrs! Further
competition arose in the neighboring church of St. Ursula. Another
cemetery was despoiled and the bones covering the interior of the
walls are known as the relics of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand
virgin martyrs. Anatomists now declare that many of the bones are
those of men, but this made no more difference in their healing
efficacy in the Middle Ages than the fact that the relics of St.
Rosalia at Palermo, famed for their healing power, have lately been
declared by Professor Buckland, the eminent osteologist, to be the
bones of a goat.

Two different investigations have been conducted by the French courts
concerning the fountain of La Salette, and in both cases the miracles
which make the shrine famous were pronounced to be fraudulent. The
recent restoration of the cathedral at Trondhjem has revealed a tube
in the walls, not unlike the apparatus discovered in the Temple of
Isis at Pompeii; the healing power of this sacred spring was augmented
by angelic voices which i