ich we may feel certain
that it is such as is represented?

Moreover, all those that I have enumerated are nothing comparatively to
the remainder yet untold by me. Even whilst this treatise is in the press,
I have been informed of many relics not mentioned in it; and if a general
visitation of all existing relics were possible, a hundredfold more
discoveries would be made.

I remember when I was a little boy what took place in our parish. On the
festival day of St Stephen, the images of the tyrants who stoned him (for
they are thus called by the common people) were adorned as much as that of
the saint himself. Many women, seeing these tyrants thus decked out,
mistook them for the saint's companions, and offered the homage of candles
to each of them. Mistakes of this kind must frequently happen to the
worshippers of relics, for there is such confusion amongst them that it is
quite impossible to worship the bones of a martyr without danger of
rendering such honours by mistake to the bones of some brigand or thief,
or even to those of a horse, a dog, or a donkey.

And it is equally impossible to adore the ring, the comb, the girdle of
the Virgin Mary, without the risk of adoring instead objects which may
have belonged to some abandoned person.

Now, those who fall into this error must do so willingly, as no one can
from henceforth plead ignorance on the subject as their excuse.(161)

POSTSCRIPT.

The following extract from the _Ecclesiastical Gazette_ of Vienna has been
reproduced in an Extraordinary Supplement of the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, of
Augsburg, for the 11th May 1854. I subjoin a translation of it in a
postscript, as an additional evidence of the persecution to which the
Greek Church united with Rome has been subjected in Russia, and which I
mentioned on page 161 of this work:--

"Spies appointed for this especial purpose transmitted, in their
reports to the Government, lists of such individuals as were
suspected to be Catholics at heart; and if all the exaggerated
accounts which had been made of the Spanish Inquisition were true,
they would be thrown into the shade by the proceedings that were
adopted against the above-mentioned individuals. And indeed it is
an averred fact, that many of them fell a victim to starvation,
blows, and other cruel treatment. The Catholic inhabitants of
Worodzkow were forced with stripes, by the Governor and his
satellites, to