Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

24
FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.
lish saints, without seeing the perfect naturalness of this
growth. This evolution of miracle in all parts of Europe
came out of a vast preceding series of beliefs, extending not
merely through the early Church but far back into paganism.
Just as formerly patients were cured in the temples of
and so
^sculapius, so they were cured in the Middle Ages,
they are cured now at the shrines of saints. Just as the
ancient miracles were solemnly attested by votive tablets,
giving names, dates, and details, and these tablets hung
before the images of the gods, so the mediaeval miracles
were attested by similar tablets hung before the images of
the saints ; and so they are attested to-day by similar tablets
hung before the images of Our Lady of La Salette or of,
Lourdes. Just as faith in such miracles persisted, in spite of
the small percentage of cures at those ancient places of heal-
ing, so faith persists to-day, despite the fact that in at least
ninety per cent of the cases at Lourdes prayers prove un
availing. As a rule, the miracles of the sacred books were
taken as models, and each of those given by the sacre
chroniclers was repeated during the early ages of the Churchi
and through the mediaeval period with endless variations o
circumstance, but still with curious fidelity to the origina
type-
It should be especially kept in mind that, while the vasi
majority of these were doubtless due to the myth-makin
faculty and to that development of legends which always
goes on in ages ignorant of the relation between physical
causes and effects, some of the miracles of healing had undoubtedly
some basis in fact. We in modern times have seen
too many cures performed through influences exercised upon
the imagination, such as those of the Jansenists at the Ceme4
tery of St. M6dard, of the Ultramontanes at La Salette anc^
Lourdes, of the Russian Father Ivan at St. Petersburg, an
of various Protestant sects at Old Orchard and elsewhere,
as well as at sundry camp meetings, to doubt that some
cures, more or less permanent, were wrought by sainted
personages in the early Church and throughout the Middle
Ages.*
* For the story of travellers converted into domestic animals, see St. Augustine^
De Civ. Dei, liber xviii, chaps, xvii, xviii, in Migne, tom. xli, p. 574. For Gregoij