Henry M. Baird · 59 of 379

CHAPTER I · Reverence for relics.

The French were behind no other nation in reverence for relics of saints and for pictures and images representing them. In the partial list, compiled by a contemporary, of the curiosities of this nature scattered through Christendom, the majority of the relics mentioned are selected from the immense treasures laid up in the thousands of cathedrals, parish churches, and abbeys within the domains of the "Very Christian King." In one place the hair of the blessed Virgin was carefully preserved; in another the sword of the archangel Michael, or the entire body of St. Dionysius. It was true that the Pope had by solemn bull, about a century before, declared, in the presence of the French ambassador, that the entire body of this last-named saint was in the possession of the inhabitants of Ratisbon; but, had any one been so rash as to affirm at Saint Denis, near Paris, that the veritable remains were not there, he would certainly have been stoned. At Notre-Dame de l'Ile, above Lyons, no little account was made of the twelve combs of the apostles!

The reflecting man who found, by a comparison of the treasures of different churches within his own personal observation, that some of the pretended relics were frivolous or impossible, and that the same members of some favorite saint were reproduced at points widely distant, might well speculate upon the probable benefits to Christendom from a complete inventory of the contents of the churches of two or three thousand bishoprics, of twenty or thirty thousand abbeys, and of more than forty thousand convents. He might find difficulty in believing that our Lord was crucified with fourteen nails; that "an entire hedge" should have been requisite to plait the crown of thorns; that a single spear should have begotten three others; or that from a solitary napkin there should have issued a whole brood of the same kind. He would be scandalized on learning that each apostle had more than four bodies, and the saints at least two or three apiece. And his faith in the genuineness of the objects of popular adoration would be still further shaken, if, on subjecting them to a closer examination, he discovered that, as was the case at Geneva, he had been worshipping a bone of a deer as the arm of Saint Anthony, or a piece of pumice for the brain of the apostle Peter.

But, whatever sceptical conclusions might be reached by the learned and discerning, the devotion of the common people showed no signs of flagging. In the parish church of St. Stephen at Noyon, it was not the Christian proto-martyr alone that was decorated with a cap and other gewgaws, when his yearly festival came around, but likewise the "tyrants," as they were styled by the people, who stoned him. And the poor women, seeing them thus adorned, took them to be companions of the saint, and each one had his candle. The devil with whom St. Michael contended fared equally well. The very stones that were the instruments of St. Stephen's death were adored at Arles and elsewhere. It was, however, to the Parisians that the palm in this species of superstition rightfully belonged. The knife wherewith an impious Jew had stabbed a consecrated wafer was held in higher esteem than the wafer itself! And so marked was the preference that it aroused the displeasure of one of the most bigoted doctors of the Sorbonne, De Quercu, who reproached the Parisians for being worse than the Jews themselves, "inasmuch as they adored the knife that had served to rend the precious body of Jesus Christ."