With regard to virtue and vice, the instances of the one of them
having been mistaken by the public for the other in particular people,
are so numerous, that history stumbles upon them, at almost every
step; nothing can illustrate this more evidently, than the greatest
impostors the world has produced, having passed for repositories of
the secrets of heaven. Numa Pompilius, introduced among the Romans,
whatever policy and religion he thought fit, by means of the fiction,
that all he proposed was dictated to him by the nymph Egeria. The
Spaniards fought blindly against the Romans, under the banners of
Sertorius, he having made them believe, that through a white doe, which
he artfully made use of, and had trained for his purpose, he received
by occult means, all sorts of information, which was communicated to
the doe by the goddess Diana. Mahomed persuaded a great part of Asia,
that Heaven had sent the Angel Gabriel to him as a Nuncio in the shape
of a dove, which he had taught to put its bill into his ear. Most
heretical opinions, although stained with manifest impurities, were
reputed in many places, to proceed from the venerable archives of the
divine mysteries.
XII. We have even seen such monsters, engendered in the bosom of the
Roman church. In the eleventh century, Tranquilenus, a man given openly
to all kinds of debauchery, was venerated as a saint by the people
of Antwerp, and to such a pitch did they carry their adoration, that
they preserved as a relic the water in which he had washed himself. In
the republic of Florence, where the people were never thought rude,
or uncultivated, Francis Jeronimo Savonarola, a man of prodigious
genius, and great sagacity, was many years respected as a saint, and a
person endued with the spirit of prophecy; he made the people believe,
that his political predictions were divine revelations, though they
were founded on secret advices which he received from France, and
notwithstanding many of those predictions were proved false, such as
the second coming of Charles the Eighth into Italy, the recovery of
John Pico de Mirandola from a fit of sickness, of which he died two
days afterwards, &c. And although he was publicly burnt on the parade
at Florence for an impostor, still, all was not sufficient to eradicate
his deceptions from the minds of many people; for not only the heretics
venerate him as a heavenly man, and consider him as a forerunner of
Luther, on account of his vehement declamations against the court of
Rome, but some Catholics were his panegyrists likewise, among whom
Marcus Antonius Flaminius excelled all the others, by the following
beautiful though false epigram.
_Dum fera flamma tuos, Hieronyme, pascitur artus,_
_Religio sacras dilaniata comas_
_Flevit, et O, dixit, crudeles, parcite, flammæ,_
_Parcite; sunt isto viscera nostra rogo._
XIII. But what has been the most monstrous in these sort of cases is,
that some churches have celebrated, and even worshiped as saints,
perverse men, who died separated from the Roman communion. The church
of Limogines, addressed for a long time in a direct prayer (which
prayer exists at this day in the antient breviary of that church)
Eusebius Cæsarius, who lived and died in the Arian heresy, they
having, as is most probable, mistaken him at first, for Eusebius
Bishop of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, who was the successor of Saint
Basil; whereas the man we have now been mentioning, was Bishop of
Cæsarea in Palestine; I am very well aware, some authors assert, that
at the council of Nice, he conformed to the Catholic faith, in which
he remained steady ever after, but there are so many testimonies to
contradict this, and among the rest his own writings, that what is
said in his defence seems void of all probability. The church of Turin
venerated a thief as a martyr, and erected an altar to him, which St.
Martin destroyed, after having convinced them of their error; this is
related by Sulpicius in his Life of St. Martin.