ssued from the supposedly solid walls.[50]

While the golden age of the therapeutic use of relics was from the
sixth to the sixteenth centuries, modern times, with its physicians,
hospitals, and drugs, has not been deprived of this method of cure.
Mackay, writing in the latter half of the past century, touches this
subject.

At Port Royal, in Paris, is kept with great care a thorn, which the
priests of that seminary assert to be one of the identical thorns
that bound the holy head of the Son of God. How it came there, and by
whom it was preserved, has never been explained. This is the famous
thorn which the long dissensions of the Jansenists and the Molenists
have made celebrated, and which worked the miraculous cure upon
Mademoiselle Perier, an account of which is so interesting that I give
it. The cure occurred on March 14, 1646.

"A young pensioner in the monastery, by name Margaret
Perier, who for three years and a half had suffered from
a lachrymal fistula, came up in her turn to kiss it; and
the nun, her mistress, more horrified than ever at the
swelling and deformity of her eye, had a sudden impulse
to touch the sore with the relic, believing that God was
sufficiently able and willing to heal her. She thought
no more of the matter, but the little girl having
retired to her room, perceived a quarter of an hour
after that her disease was cured; and when she told her
companions, it was indeed found that nothing more was to
be seen of it. There was no more tumor; and her eye,
which the swelling (continuous for three years) had
weakened and caused to water, had become as dry, as
healthy, as lively as the other. The spring of the
filthy matter, which every quarter of an hour ran down
from nose, eye, and mouth, and at the very moment before
the miracle had fallen upon her cheek (as she declared
in her deposition), was found to be quite dried up; the
bone, which had been rotted and putrified, was restored
to its former condition; all the stench, proceeding from
it, which had been so insupportable that by order of the
physicians and surgeons she was separated from her
companions, was changed into a breath as sweet as an
infant's; and she recovered at the same moment her sense
of smell....

"Mons. Felix, Chief Surgeon to the King, who had seen
her during the month of April, was curious enough to
return on the 8th of August, and having found the cure
as t