Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THE MEDIEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING.
the Church until a very recent period. Everywhere mi-
raculous cures became the rule rather than the exception
throughout Christendom.
III. THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK
MEDICAL SCIENCE.
So it was that, throughout antiquity, during the early
and in-
history of the Church, throughout the Middle Ages,
deed down to a comparatively recent period, testimony to
miraculous interpositions which would now be laughed at
by a schoolboy was accepted by the leaders of thought.
St. Augustine was certainly one of the strongest minds in
the early Church, and yet we find him mentioning, with
much seriousness, a story that sundry innkeepers of his time
put a drug into cheese which metamorphosed travellers into
domestic animals, and asserting that the peacock is so favoured
by the Almighty that its flesh will not decay, and that
he has tested it and knows this to be a fact. With such a
disposition regarding the wildest stories, it is not surprising
that the assertion of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, during the
second century, as to the cures wrought by the martyrs
Cosmo and Damian, was echoed from all parts of Europe
until every hamlet had its miracle-working saint or relic.
The literature of these miracles is simply endless. To
take our own ancestors alone, no one can read the Ecclesiastical
History of Bede, or Abbot Samson's Miracles of St. Ed-
mund, or the accounts given by Eadmer and Osbern of the
miracles of St. Dunstan, or the long lists of those wrought
by Thomas a Becket, or by any other in the army of Eng-
almost daily contact with the late archbishop, asked him which of these stories was
correct. This gentleman answered :
immediately
"
Neither I saw the ; archbishop
onstantly, and no such event occurred : he was never paralyzed and never blind."
The same gentleman then went on to say that, in his belief, Father Ivan had
shown remarkable powers in healing the sick, and the greatest charity in relieving
the distressed. It was made clearly evident that Father Ivan is a saintlike man,
devoted to the needy and distressed and exercising an enormous influence over
them an influence so great that crowds await him whenever he visits the capital.
In the atmosphere of Russian devotion myths and legends grow luxuriantly about
him, nor is belief in him confined to the peasant class. In the autumn of 1894 he
was summoned to the bedside of the Emperor Alexander III. Unfortunately for
the peace of Europe, his intercession at that time proved unavailing.
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