why all the people, except himself, had suddenly become somnolent;
and, determining to avail himself of the opportunity thus offered
(_oblata occasione utendum_), he rose and, having lighted a candle,
silently approached the chests. Then, having burnt through the
threads of the seals with the flame of the candle, he quickly
opened the chests, which had no locks;[23] and, taking out portions
of each of the bodies which were thus exposed, he closed the chests
and connected the burnt ends of the threads with the seals again,
so that they appeared not to have been touched; and, no one having
seen him, he returned to his place. (Cap. iii. 23.)
Hildoin went on to tell Eginhard that Hunus at first declared to him
that these purloined relics belonged to St. Tiburtius but afterwards
confessed, as a great secret, how he had come by them, and he wound up
his discourse thus:
They have a place of honour beside St. Medardus, where they are
worshipped with great veneration by all the people; but whether we
may keep them or not is for your judgment. (Cap. iii. 23.)
Poor Eginhard was thrown into a state of great perturbation of mind by
this revelation. An acquaintance of his had recently told him of a
rumour that was spread about that Hunus had contrived to abstract _all_
the remains of SS. Marcellinus and Petrus while Eginhard's agents were
in a drunken sleep; and that, while the real relics were in Abbot
Hildoin's hands at St. Medardus, the Shrine at Seligenstadt contained
nothing but a little dust. Though greatly annoyed by this "execrable
rumour, spread everywhere by the subtlety of the devil," Eginhard had
doubtless comforted himself by his supposed knowledge of its falsity,
and he only now discovered how considerable a foundation there was for
the scandal. There was nothing for it but to insist upon the return of
the stolen treasures. One would have thought that the holy man, who had
admitted himself to be knowingly a receiver of stolen goods, would have
made instant restitution and begged only for absolution. But Eginhard
intimates that he had very great difficulty in getting his brother abbot
to see that even restitution was necessary.
Hildoin's proceedings were not of such a nature as to lead any one to
place implicit confidence in anything he might say; still less had his
agent, priest Hunus, established much claim to confidence; and it is not
surprising that Eginhard should have lost no time in summoning his
notary and Lunison to his presence, in order that he might hear what
they had to say about the business. They, however, at once protested
that priest Hunus's story was a parcel of lies, and that after the
relics left Rome no one had any opportunity of meddling with them.
Moreover, Lunison, throwing himself at Eginhard's feet, confessed with
many tears what actually took place. It will be remembered that after
the body of St. Marcellinus was abstracted from its tomb, Ratleig
deposited it in the house of Deusdona, in charge of the latter's
brother, Lunison. But Hunus being very much disappointed that he could
not get hold of the body of St. Tiburtius, and afraid to go back to his
abbot empty-handed, bribed Lunison with four pieces of gold and five of
silver to give him access to the chest. This Lunison did, and Hunus
helped himself to as much as would fill a gallon-measure (_vas sextarii
mensuram_) of the sacred remains. Eginhard's indignation at the "rapine"
of this "nequissimus nebulo" is exquisitely droll. It would appear that
the adage about the receiver being as bad as the thief was not current
in the ninth century.
Let us now briefly sum up the history of the acquisition of the relics.
Eginhard makes a contract with Deusdona for the delivery of certain
relics which the latter says he possesses. Eginhard makes no inquiry how
he came by them; otherwise, the transaction is innocent enough.
Deusdona turns out to be a swindler, and has no relics. Thereupon
Eginhard's agent, after due fasting and prayer, breaks open the tombs
and helps himself.
Eginhard discovers by the self-betrayal of his brother abbot, Hildoin,
that portions of his relics have been stolen and conveyed to the latter.
With much ado he succeeds in getting them back.
Hildoin's agent, Hunus, in delivering these stolen goods to him, at
first declared they were the relics of St. Tiburtius, which Hildoin
desired him to obtain; but afterwards invented a story of their being
the product of a theft, which the providential drowsiness of his
companions enabled him to perpetrate, from the relics which Hildoin well
knew were the property of his friend.
Lunison, on the contrary, swears that all this story is false, and that
he himself was bribed by Hunus to allow him to steal what he pleased
from the property confided to his own and his brother's care by their
guest Ratleig. And the honest notary himself seems to have no hesitation
about lying and stealing to any extent, where the acquisition of relics
is the object in view.
For a parallel to these transactions one must read a police report of
the doings of a "long firm" or of a set of horse-coupers; yet Eginhard
seems to be aware of nothing, but that he has been rather badly used by
his friend Hildoin, and the "nequissimus nebulo" Hunus.
It is not easy for a modern Protestant, still less for any one who has
the least tincture of scientific culture, whether physical or
historical, to picture to himself the state of mind of a man of the
ninth century, however cultivated, enlightened, and sincere he may have
been. His deepest convictions, his most cherished hopes, were bound up
with the belief in the miraculous. Life was a constant battle between
saints and demons for the possession of the souls of men. The most
superstitious among our modern countrymen turn to supernatural agencies
only when natural causes seem insufficient; to Eginhard and his friends
the supernatural was the rule: and the sufficiency of natural causes was
allowed only when there was nothing to suggest others.
Moreover, it must be recollected that the possession of miracle-working
relics was greatly coveted, not only on high, but on very low grounds.
To a man like Eginhard, the mere satisfaction of the religious sentiment
was obviously a powerful attraction. But, more than this, the possession
of such a treasure was an immense practical advantage. If the saints
were duly flattered and worshipped, there was no telling what benefits
might result from their interposition on your behalf. For physical
evils, access to the shrine was like the grant of the use of a universal
pill and ointment manufactory; and pilgrimages thereto might suffice to
cleanse the performers from any amount of sin. A letter to Lupus,
subsequently Abbot of Ferrara, written while Eginhard was smarting under
the grief caused by the loss of his much-loved wife Imma, affords a
striking insight into the current view of the relation between the
glorified saints and their worshippers. The writer shows that he is
anything but satisfied with the way in which he has been treated by the
blessed martyrs whose remains he has taken such pains to "convey" to
Seligenstadt, and to honour there as they would never have been honoured
in their Roman obscurity.
It is an aggravation of my grief and a reopening of my wound, that
our vows have been of no avail, and that the faith which we placed
in the merits and intervention of the martyrs has been utterly
disappointed.
We may admit, then, without impeachment of Eginhard's sincerity, or of
his honour under all ordinary circumstances, that when piety,
self-interest, the glory of the Church in general, and that of the
church at Seligenstadt in particular, all pulled one way, even the
workaday principles of morality were disregarded; and, _a fortiori_,
anything like proper investigation of the reality of alleged miracles
was thrown to the winds.
And if this was the condition of mind of such a man as Eginhard, what is
it not legitimate to suppose may have been that of Deacon Deusdona,
Lunison, Hunus, and company, thieves and cheats by their own confession,
or of the probably hysterical nun, or of the professional beggars, for
whose incapacity to walk and straighten themselves there is no guarantee
but their own? Who is to make sure that the exorcist of the demon Wiggo
was not just such another priest as Hunus; and is it not at least
possible, when Eginhard's servants dreamed, night after night, in such a
curiously coincident fashion, that a careful inquirer might have found
they were very anxious to please their master?
Quite apart from deliberate and conscious fraud (which is a rarer thing
than is often supposed), people whose mythopoeic faculty is once
stirred, are capable of saying the thing that is not, and of acting as
they should not, to an extent which is hardly imaginable by persons who
are not so easily affected by the contagion of blind faith. There is no
falsity so gross that honest men and, still more, virtuous women,
anxious to promote a good cause, will not lend themselves to it without
any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing.
The cases of miraculously-effected cures of which Eginhard is ocular
witness appear to belong to classes of disease in which malingering is
possible or hysteria presumable. Without modern means of diagnosis, the
names given to them are quite worthless. One "miracle," however, in
which the patient, a woman, was cured by the mere sight of the church in
which the relics of the blessed martyrs lay, is an unmistakable case of
dislocation of the lower jaw; and it is obvious that, as not
unfrequently happens in such accidents in weakly subjects, the jaw
slipped suddenly back into place, perhaps in consequence of a jolt, as
the woman rode towards the church. (Cap. v. 53.)[24]
There is also a good deal said about a very questionable blind man--one
Albricus (Alberich?)--who having been cured, not of his blindness, but
of another disease under which he laboured, took up his quarters at
Seligenstadt, and came out as a prophet, inspired by the Archangel
Gabriel. Eginhard intimates that his prophecies were fulfilled; but as
he does not state exactly what they were, or how they were accomplished,
the statement must be accepted with much caution. It is obvious that he
was not the man to hesitate to "ease" a prophecy until it fitted, if the
credit of the shrine of his favourite saints could be increased by such
a procedure. There is no impeachment of his honour in the supposition.
The logic of the matter is quite simple, if somewhat sophistical. The
holiness of the Church of the martyrs guarantees the reality of the
appearance of the Archangel Gabriel there; and what the archangel says
must be true. Therefore if anything seem to be wrong, that must be the
mistake of the transmitter; and, in justice to the archangel, it must
be suppressed or set right. This sort of "reconciliation" is not unknown
in quite modern times, and among people who would be very much shocked
to be compared with a "benighted papist" of the ninth century.
The readers of this essay are, I imagine, very largely composed of
people who would be shocked to be regarded as anything but enlightened
Protestants. It is not unlikely that those of them who have accompanied
me thus far may be disposed to say, "Well, this is all very amusing as a
story, but what is the practical interest of it? We are not likely to
believe in the miracles worked by the spolia of SS. Marcellinus and
Petrus, or by those of any other saints in the Roman Calendar."
The practical interest is this: if you do not believe in these miracles
recounted by a witness whose character and competency are firmly
established, whose sincerity cannot be doubted, and who appeals to his
sovereign and other comtemporaries as witnesses of the truth of what he
says in a document of which a MS. copy exists, probably dating within a
century of the author's death, why do you profess to believe in stories
of a like character, which are found in documents of the dates and of
the authorship of which nothing is certainly determined, and no known
copies of which come within two or three centuries of the events they
record? If it be true that the four Gospels and the Acts were written by
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all that we know of these persons comes
to nothing in comparison with our knowledge of Eginhard; and not only is
there no proof that the traditional authors of these works wrote them,
but very strong reasons to the contrary may be alleged. If, therefore,
you refuse to believe that "Wiggo" was cast out of the possessed girl on
Eginhard's authority, with what justice can you profess to believe that
the legion of devils were cast out of the man among the tombs of the
Gadarenes? And if, on the other hand, you accept Eginhard's evidence,
why do you laugh at the supposed efficacy of relics and the
saint-worship of the modern Romanists? It cannot be pretended, in the
face of all evidence, that the Jews of the year 30 A.D. or thereabouts,
were less imbued with the belief in the supernatural than were the
Franks of the year 800 A.D. The same influences were at work in each
case, and it is only reasonable to suppose that the results were the
same. If the evidence of Eginhard is insufficient to lead reasonable men
to believe in the miracles he relates, _a fortiori_ the evidence
afforded by the Gospels and the Acts must be so.[25]
But it may be said that no serious critic denies the genuineness of the
four great Pauline Epistles--Galatians, First and Second Corinthians,
and Romans--and that in three out of these four Paul lays claim to the
power of working miracles.[26] Must we suppose, therefore, that the
Apostle to the Gentiles has stated that which is false? But to how much
does this so-called claim amount? It may mean much or little. Paul
nowhere tells us what he did in this direction; and in his sore need to
justify his assumption of apostleship against the sneers of his enemies,
it is hardly likely that, if he had any very striking cases to bring
forward, he would have neglected evidence so well calculated to put them
to shame. And, without the slightest impeachment of Paul's veracity, we
must further remember that his strongly-marked mental characteristics,
displayed in unmistakable fashion in these Epistles, are anything but
those which would justify us in regarding him as a critical witness
respecting matters of fact, or as a trustworthy interpreter of their
significance. When a man testifies to a miracle, he not only states a
fact, but he adds an interpretation of the fact. We may admit his
evidence as to the former, and yet think his opinion as to the latter
worthless. If Eginhard's calm and objective narrative of the historical
events of his time is no guarantee for the soundness of his judgment
where the supernatural is concerned, the heated rhetoric of the Apostle
of the Gentiles, his absolute confidence in the "inner light," and the
extraordinary conceptions of the nature and requirements of logical
proof which he betrays, in page after page of his Epistles, afford still
less security.
There is a comparatively modern man who shared to the full Paul's trust
in the "inner light," and who, though widely different from the fiery
evangelist of Tarsus in various obvious particulars, yet, if I am not
mistaken, shares his deepest characteristics. I speak of George Fox, who
separated himself from the current Protestantism of England, in the
seventeenth century, as Paul separated himself from the Judaism of the
first century, at the bidding of the "inner light"; who went through
persecutions as serious as those which Paul enumerates; who was beaten,
stoned, cast out for dead, imprisoned nine times, sometimes for long
periods, who was in perils on land and perils at sea. George Fox was an
even more widely-travelled missionary; while his success in founding
congregations, and his energy in visiting them, not merely in Great
Britain and Ireland and the West India Islands, but on the continent of
Europe and that of North America, were no less remarkable. A few years
after Fox began to preach, there were reckoned to be a thousand Friends
in prison in the various gaols of England; at his death, less than fifty
years after the foundation of the sect, there were 70,000 Quakers in the
United Kingdom. The cheerfulness with which these people--women as well
as men--underwent martyrdom in this country and in the New England
States is one of the most remarkable facts in the history of religion.
No one who reads the voluminous autobiography of "Honest George" can
doubt the man's utter truthfulness; and though, in his multitudinous
letters, he but rarely rises far above the incoherent commonplaces of a
street preacher, there can be no question of his power as a speaker, nor
any doubt as to the dignity and attractiveness of his personality, or of
his possession of a large amount of practical good sense and governing
faculty.
But that George Fox had full faith in his own powers as a
miracle-worker, the following passage of his autobiography (to which
others might be added) demonstrates:--
Now after I was set at liberty from Nottingham gaol (where I had
been kept a prisoner a pretty long time) I travelled as before, in
the work of the Lord. And coming to Mansfield Woodhouse, there was
a distracted woman, under a doctor's hand, with her hair let loose
all about her ears; and he was about to let her blood, she being
first bound, and many people being about her, holding her by
violence; but he could get no blood from her. And I desired them to
unbind her and let her alone; for they could not touch the spirit
in her by which she was tormented. So they did unbind her, and I
was moved to speak to her, and in the name of the Lord to bid her
be quiet and still. And she was so. And the Lord's power settled
her mind and she mended; and afterwards received the truth and
continued in it to her death. And the Lord's name was honoured; to
whom the glory of all His works belongs. Many great and wonderful
things were wrought by the heavenly power in those days. For the
Lord made bare His omnipotent arm and manifested His power to the
astonishment of many; by the healing virtue whereof many have been
delivered from great infirmities, and the devils were made subject
through His name: of which particular instances might be given
beyond what this unbelieving age is able to receive or bear.[27]
It needs no long study of Fox's writings, however, to arrive at the
conviction that the distinction between subjective and objective
verities had not the same place in his mind as it has in that of an
ordinary mortal. When an ordinary person would say "I thought so and
so," or "I made up my mind to do so and so," George Fox says, "It was
opened to me," or "at the command of God I did so and so." "Then at the
command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox being
just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all familiarity or
friendship with young or old." "About the beginning of the year 1647 I
was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire." Fox hears voices and he
sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic
power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled,
of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, he was a master.
"And one morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over
me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still. And it was said, _All
things come by Nature_. And the elements and stars came over me; so that
I was in a manner quite clouded with it.... And as I sate still under
it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me and a true voice arose
in me which said, _There is a living God who made all things_. And
immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose
over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the living God" (p.
13).
If George Fox could speak, as he proves in this and some other passages
he could write, his astounding influence on the contemporaries of Milton
and of Cromwell is no mystery. But this modern reproduction of the
ancient prophet, with his "Thus saith the Lord," "This is the work of
the Lord," steeped in supernaturalism and glorying in blind faith, is
the mental antipodes of the philosopher, founded in naturalism and a
fanatic for evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably suggest the
previous question: "How do you know that the Lord saith it?" "How do you
know that the Lord doeth it?" and who is compelled to demand that
rational ground for belief, without which, to the man of science, assent
is merely an immoral pretence.
And it is this rational ground of belief which the writers of the
Gospels, no less than Paul, and Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of
offering that they would regard the demand for it as a kind of
blasphemy.
AGNOSTICISM
[1889]
Within the last few months [1889] the public has received much and
varied information on the subject of Agnostics, their tenets, and even
their future. Agnosticism exercised the orators of the Church Congress
at Manchester.[28] It has been furnished with a set of "articles,"
fewer, but not less rigid, and certainly not less consistent than the
thirty-nine; its nature has been analysed, and its future severely
predicted by the most eloquent of that prophetical school whose Samuel
is Auguste Comte. It may still be a question, however, whether the
public is as much the wiser as might be expected, considering all the
trouble that has been taken to enlighten it. Not only are the three
accounts of the agnostic position sadly out of harmony with one another,
but I propose to show cause for my belief that all three must be
seriously questioned by any one who employs the term "agnostic" in the
sense in which it was originally used. The learned Principal of King's
College, who brought the topic of Agnosticism before the Church
Congress, took a short and easy way of settling the business:--
But if this be so, for a man to urge, as an escape from this
article of belief, that he has no means of a scientific knowledge
of the unseen world, or of the future, is irrelevant. His
difference from Christians lies not in the fact that he has no
knowledge of these things, but that he does not believe the
authority on which they are stated. He may prefer to call himself
an agnostic; but his real name is an older one--he is an infidel;
that is to say, an unbeliever. The word infidel, perhaps, carries
an unpleasant significance. Perhaps it is right that it should. It
is, and it ought to be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to
say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ.[29]
So much of Dr. Wace's address either explicitly or implicitly concerns
me, that I take upon myself to deal with it; but, in doing so, it must
be understood that I speak for myself alone. I am not aware that there
is any sect of Agnostics; and if there be, I am not its acknowledged
prophet or pope. I desire to leave to the Comtists the entire monopoly
of the manufacture of imitation ecclesiasticism.
Let us calmly and dispassionately consider Dr. Wace's appreciation of
agnosticism. The agnostic, according to his view, is a person who says
he has no means of attaining a scientific knowledge of the unseen world
or of the future; by which somewhat loose phraseology Dr. Wace
presumably means the theological unseen world and future. I cannot think
this description happy, either in form or substance; but for the present
it may pass. Dr. Wace continues that is not "his difference from
Christians." Are there then any Christians who say that they know
nothing about the unseen world and the future? I was ignorant of the
fact, but I am ready to accept it on the authority of a professional
theologian, and I proceed to Dr. Wace's next proposition.