Warfare of Science/Theology
by Andrew Dickson White
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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In England a marked dislike was shown among various leading
ecclesiastics and theologians towards the Royal Society, and
later toward the Association for the Advancement of Science; and
this dislike, as will hereafter be seen, sometimes took shape in
serious opposition.

As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction
in chemistry and physics was for a long time discouraged by
Church authorities; and, when its suppression was no longer
possible, great pains were taken to subordinate it to instruction
supposed to be more fully in accordance with the older methods of
theological reasoning.

I have now presented in outline the more direct and open struggle
of the physical sciences with theology, mainly as an exterior
foe. We will next consider their warfare with the same foe in
its more subtle form, mainly as a vitiating and sterilizing
principle in science itself.

We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius,
Lactantius, and their compeers, opposed scientific investigation
as futile; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St. Thomas
Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, turned the main
current of medieval thought from science to theology; and,
finally, how a long line of Church authorities from Popes John
XXII and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious
orders, down to various theologians and ecclesiastics, Catholic
and Protestant, of a very recent period, endeavoured first to
crush and afterward to discourage scientific research as
dangerous.

Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, there
was developed something in many respects more destructive; and
this was the influence of mystic theology, penetrating,
permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every branch of science
for hundreds of years. Among the forms taken by this development
in the earlier Middle Ages we find a mixture of physical science
with a pseudo-science obtained from texts of Scripture. In
compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied with each
other. In this process the sacred books were used as a fetich;
every word, every letter, being considered to have a divine and
hidden meaning. By combining various scriptural letters in
various abstruse ways, new words of prodigious significance in
magic were obtained, and among them the great word embracing the
seventy-two mystical names of God--the mighty word
"Schemhamphoras."  Why should men seek knowledge by observation
and experiment in the book of Nature, when the book of
Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened such treasures to
the ingenious believer?

So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number which the
theological spirit had made Christian, usurping an enormous place
in medieval science. The sacred power of the number three was
seen in the Trinity; in the three main divisions of the
universe--the empyrean, the heavens, and the earth; in the three
angelic hierarchies; in the three choirs of seraphim, cherubim,
and thrones; in the three of dominions, virtues, and powers; in
the three of principalities, archangels, and angels; in the
three orders in the Church--bishops, priests, and deacons; in the
three classes--the baptized, the communicants, and the monks; in
the three degrees of attainment--light, purity, and knowledge; in
the three theological virtues--faith, hope, and charity--and in
much else. All this was brought into a theologico-scientific
relation, then and afterward, with the three dimensions of space;
with the three divisions of time--past, present, and future; with
the three realms of the visible world--sky, earth, and sea; with
the three constituents of man--body, soul, and spirit; with the
threefold enemies of man--the world, the flesh, and the devil;
with the three kingdoms in nature--mineral, vegetable, and
animal; with "the three colours"--red, yellow, and blue; with
"the three eyes of the honey-bee"--and with a multitude of other
analogues equally precious. The sacred power of the number seven
was seen in the seven golden candlesticks and the seven churches
in the Apocalypse; in the seven cardinal virtues and the seven
deadly sins; in the seven liberal arts and the seven devilish
arts, and, above all, in the seven sacraments. And as this
proved in astrology that there could be only seven planets, so it
proved in alchemy that there must be exactly seven metals. The
twelve apostles were connected with the twelve signs in the
zodiac, and with much in physical science. The seventy-two
disciples, the seventy-two interpreters of the Old Testament, the
seventy-two mystical names of God, were connected with the
alleged fact in anatomy that there were seventy-two joints in the
human frame.

Then, also, there were revived such theologic and metaphysical
substitutes for scientific thought as the declaration that the
perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets must move in
absolute circles--a statement which led astronomy astray even
when the great truths of the Copernican theory were well in
sight; also, the declaration that nature abhors a vacuum--a
statement which led physics astray until Torricelli made his
experiments; also, the declaration that we see the lightning
before we hear the thunder because "sight is nobler than
hearing."

In chemistry we have the same theologic tendency to magic, and,
as a result, a muddle of science and theology, which from one
point of view seems blasphemous and from another idiotic, but
which none the less sterilized physical investigation for ages.
That debased Platonism which had been such an important factor in
the evolution of Christian theology from the earliest days of the
Church continued its work. As everything in inorganic nature was
supposed to have spiritual significance, the doctrines of the
Trinity and Incarnation were turned into an argument in behalf of
the philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of redemption
and for transubstantiation suggested others of similar
construction to prove the transmutation of metals; the doctrine
of the resurrection of the human body was by similar mystic
jugglery connected with the processes of distillation and
sublimation. Even after the Middle Ages were past, strong men
seemed unable to break away from such reasoning as this--among
them such leaders as Basil Valentine in the fifteenth century,
Agricola in the sixteenth, and Van Helmont in the seventeenth.

The greatest theologians contributed to the welter of unreason
from which this pseudo-science was developed. One question
largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption it was necessary
for God to take the human form. Thomas Aquinas answered that it
was necessary, but William Occam and Duns Scotus answered that it
was not; that God might have taken the form of a stone, or of a
log, or of a beast. The possibilities opened to wild substitutes
for science by this sort of reasoning were infinite. Men have
often asked how it was that the Arabians accomplished so much in
scientific discovery as compared with Christian investigators;
but the answer is easy: the Arabians were comparatively free
from these theologic allurements which in Christian Europe
flickered in the air on all sides, luring men into paths which
led no-whither.

Strong investigators, like Arnold of Villanova, Raymond Lully,
Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and their compeers, were thus drawn
far out of the only paths which led to fruitful truths. In a
work generally ascribed to the first of these, the student is
told that in mixing his chemicals he must repeat the psalm
Exsurge Domine, and that on certain chemical vessels must be
placed the last words of Jesus on the cross. Vincent of Beauvais
insisted that, as the Bible declares that Noah, when five hundred
years old, had children born to him, he must have possessed
alchemical means of preserving life; and much later Dickinson
insisted that the patriarchs generally must have owed their long
lives to such means. It was loudly declared that the reality of
the philosopher's stone was proved by the words of St. John in
the Revelation. "To him that overcometh I will give a white
stone."  The reasonableness of seeking to develop gold out of the
baser metals was for many generations based upon the doctrine of
the resurrection of the physical body, which, though explicitly
denied by St. Paul, had become a part of the creed of the Church.
Martin Luther was especially drawn to believe in the alchemistic
doctrine of transmutation by this analogy. The Bible was
everywhere used, both among Protestants and Catholics, in support
of these mystic adulterations of science, and one writer, as late
as 1751, based his alchemistic arguments on more than a hundred
passages of Scripture. As an example of this sort of reasoning,
we have a proof that the elect will preserve the philosopher's
stone until the last judgment, drawn from a passage in St.
Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, "We have this treasure in
earthen vessels."

The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new
ingredients to this strange mixture of scientific and theologic
thought. The Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the
Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemistic
reveries of Basil Valentine were all cast into this seething
mass.

And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, we find
scriptural arguments no less perverse, and even comical, used on
the other side. As an example of this, just before the great
discoveries by Stahl, we find the valuable scientific efforts of
Becher opposed with the following syllogism: "King Solomon,
according to the Scriptures, possessed the united wisdom of
heaven and earth; but King Solomon knew nothing about alchemy
[or chemistry in the form it then took], and sent his vessels to
Ophir to seek gold, and levied taxes upon his subjects; ergo
alchemy [or chemistry] has no reality or truth."  And we find
that Becher is absolutely turned away from his labours, and
obliged to devote himself to proving that Solomon used more money
than he possibly could have obtained from Ophir or his subjects,
and therefore that he must have possessed a knowledge of chemical
methods and the philosopher's stone as the result of them.[277]

[277] For an extract from Agrippa's Occulta Philosophia, giving
examples of the way in which mystical names were obtained from
the Bible, see Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, pp. 143 et seq.
For the germs of many mystic beliefs regarding number and the
like, which were incorporated into mediaeval theology, see
Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation, pp. 254
and 572, and elsewhere. As to the connection of spiritual things
with inorganic nature in relation to chemistry, see Eicken, p.
634. On the injury to science wrought by Platonism acting
through mediaeval theology, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie,
vol. i, p. 90. As to the influence of mysticism upon strong men
in science, see Hoefer; also Kopp, Geschichte der Alchemie, vol.
i, p. 211. For a very curious Catholic treatise on sacred
numbers, see the Abbe Auber, Symbolisme Religieux, Paris, 1870;
also Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, pp. 44 et seq.; and for an
equally important Protestant work, see Samuell, Seven the Sacred
number, London 1887. It is interesting to note that the latter
writer, having been forced to give up the seven planets, consoles
himself with the statement that "the earth is the seventh planet,
counting from Neptune and calling the asteroids one" (see p.
426). For the electrum magicum, the seven metals composing it,
and its wonderful qualities, see extracts from Paracelsus's
writings in Hartmann's Life of Paracelsus, London, 1887, pp. 168
et seq. As to the more rapid transition of light than sound, the
following expresses the scholastic method well: "What is the
cause why we see sooner the lightning than we heare the thunder
clappe? That is because our sight is both nobler and sooner
perceptive of its object than our eare; as being the more active
part, and priore to our hearing: besides, the visible species are
more subtile and less corporeal than the audible species."--
Person's Varieties, Meteors, p. 82. For Basil Valentine's view,
see Hoefer, vol. i, pp. 453-465; Schmieder, Geschichte der
Alchemie, pp. 197-209; Allgemeine deutsche Biographies, article
Basilius. For the discussions referred to on possibilities of
God assuming forms of stone, or log, or beast, see Lippert,
Christenthum, Volksglaube, und Volksbrauch, pp. 372, 373, where
citations are given, etc. For the syllogism regarding Solomon,
see Figuier, L'Alchimie et les Alchimistes, pp. 106, 107. For
careful appreciation of Becher's position in the history of
chemistry, see Kopp, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie, etc.,
von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 201 et seq. For the
text proving the existence of the philosopher's stone from the
book of Revelation, see Figuier, p. 22.

Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding physical
science, every age has shown examples; yet out of them all I
will select but two, and these are given because they show how
this mixture of theological with scientific ideas took hold upon
the strongest supporters of better reasoning even after the power
of medieval theology seemed broken.

The first of these examples is Melanchthon. He was the scholar
of the Reformation, and justly won the title "Preceptor of
Germany." His mind was singularly open, his sympathies broad, and
his usual freedom from bigotry drew down upon him that wrath of
Protestant heresy-hunters which embittered the last years of his
life and tortured him upon his deathbed. During his career at
the University of Wittenberg he gave a course of lectures on
physics, and in these he dwelt upon scriptural texts as affording
scientific proofs, accepted the interference of the devil in
physical phenomena as in other things, and applied the medieval
method throughout his whole work.[278]

[278] For Melanchthon's ideas on physics, see his Initia
Doctrinae Physicae, Wittenberg, 1557, especially pp. 243 and 274;
also in vol. xiii of Bretschneider's edition of the collected
works, and especially pp. 339-343.

Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century later, of the
man who more than any other led the world out of the path opened
by Aquinas, and into that through which modern thought has
advanced to its greatest conquests. Strange as it may at first
seem, Francis Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the
delusions of the old path and the promises of the new, and whose
boldness did so much to turn the world from the old path into the
new, presents in his own writings one of the most striking
examples of the evil he did so much to destroy.

The Novum Organon, considering the time when it came from his
pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in
the history of human thought. It showed the modern world the way
out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the
experimental method and reverence for fact. In it occur many
passages which show that the great philosopher was fully alive to
the danger both to religion and to science arising from their
mixture. He declares that the "corruption of philosophy from
superstition and theology introduced the greatest amount of evil
both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts."  He
denounces those who "have endeavoured to found a natural
philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and other sacred
Scriptures, so `seeking the dead among the living.'"  He speaks
of the result as "an unwholesome mixture of things human and
divine; not merely fantastic philosophy, but heretical religion."

He refers to the opposition of the fathers to the doctrine of the
rotundity of the earth, and says that, "thanks to some of them,
you may find the approach to any kind of philosophy, however
improved, entirely closed up."  He charges that some of these
divines are "afraid lest perhaps a deeper inquiry into nature
should, penetrate beyond the allowed limits of sobriety"; and
finally speaks of theologians as sometimes craftily conjecturing
that, if science be little understood, "each single thing can be
referred more easily to the hand and rod of God," and says, "THIS
IS NOTHING MORE OR LESS THAN WISHING TO PLEASE GOD BY A LIE."

No man who has reflected much upon the annals of his race can,
without a feeling of awe, come into the presence of such
clearness of insight and boldness of utterance, and the first
thought of the reader is that, of all men, Francis Bacon is the
most free from the unfortunate bias he condemns; that he,
certainly, can not be deluded into the old path. But as we go on
through his main work we are surprised to find that the strong
arm of Aquinas has been stretched over the intervening ages, and
has laid hold upon this master-thinker of the seventeenth
century; for only a few chapters beyond those containing the
citations already made we find Bacon alluding to the recent
voyage of Columbus, and speaking of the prophecy of Daniel
regarding the latter days, that "many shall run to and fro, and
knowledge be increased," as clearly signifying "that...the
circumnavigation of the world and the increase of science should
happen in the same age."[279]

[279] See the Novum Organon, translated by the Rev. G. W.
Kitchin, Oxford, 1855, chaps. lxv and lxxxix.

In his great work on the Advancement of Learning the firm grasp
which the methods he condemned held upon him is shown yet more
clearly. In the first book of it he asserts that "that excellent
book of Job, if it be revolved with diligence, will be found
pregnant and swelling with natural philosophy," and he endeavours
to show that in it the "roundness of the earth," the "fixing of
the stars, ever standing at equal distances," the "depression of
the southern pole," the "matter of generation," and "matter of
minerals" are "with great elegancy noted."  But, curiously
enough, he uses to support some of these truths the very texts
which the fathers of the Church used to destroy them, and those
for which he finds Scripture warrant most clearly are such as
science has since disproved. So, too, he says that Solomon was
enabled in his Proverbs, "by donation of God, to compile a
natural history of all verdure."[280]

[280] See Bacon, Advancement of Learning, edited by W. Aldis
Wright, London, 1873, pp. 47, 48. Certainly no more striking
examples of the strength of the evil which he had all along been
denouncing could be exhibited that these in his own writings.
Nothing better illustrates the sway of the mediaeval theology, or
better explains his blindness to the discoveries of Copernicus
and to the experiments of Gilbert. For a very contemptuous
statement of Lord Bacon's claim to his position as a philosopher,
see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Leipsic, 1872, vol.i, p.
219. For a more just statement, see Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac
Newton, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 298.

Such was the struggle of the physical sciences in general. Let
us now look briefly at one special example out of many, which
reveals, as well as any, one of the main theories which prompted
theological interference with them.

It will doubtless seem amazing to many that for ages the weight
of theological thought in Christendom was thrown against the idea
of the suffocating properties of certain gases, and especially of
carbonic acid. Although in antiquity we see men forming a right
theory of gases in mines, we find that, early in the history of
the Church, St. Clement of Alexandria put forth the theory that
these gases are manifestations of diabolic action, and that,
throughout Christendom, suffocation in caverns, wells, and
cellars was attributed to the direct action of evil spirits.
Evidences of this view abound through the medieval period, and
during the Reformation period a great authority, Agricola, one of
the most earnest and truthful of investigators, still adhered to
the belief that these gases in mines were manifestations of
devils, and he specified two classes--one of malignant imps, who
blow out the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who
simply tease the workmen in various ways. He went so far as to
say that one of these spirits in the Saxon mine of Annaberg
destroyed twelve workmen at once by the power of his breath.

At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on
mineralogy complaining that the mines in France and Germany had
been in large part abandoned on account of the "evil spirits of
metals which had taken possession of them."

Even as late as the seventeenth century, Van Helmont, after he
had broken away from alchemy and opened one of the great paths to
chemistry--even after he had announced to the world the existence
of various gases and the mode of their generation--was not strong
enough to free himself from theologic bias; he still inclined to
believe that the gases he had discovered, were in some sense
living spirits, beneficent or diabolical.

But at various. periods glimpses of the truth had been gained.
The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; and as far
back as the first part of the thirteenth century Albert the Great
suggested a natural cause in the possibility of exhalations from
minerals causing a "corruption of the air"; but he, as we have
seen, was driven or dragged off into, theological studies, and
the world relapsed into the theological view.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century there had come a great
genius laden with important truths in chemistry, but for whom the
world was not ready--Basil Valentine. His discoveries
anticipated much that has brought fame and fortune to chemists
since, yet so fearful of danger was he that his work was
carefully concealed. Not until after his death was his treatise
on alchemy found, and even then it was for a long time not known
where and when he lived. The papal bull, Spondent pariter, and
the various prohibitions it bred, forcing other alchemists to
conceal their laboratories, led him to let himself be known
during his life at Erfurt simply as an apothecary, and to wait
until after his death to make a revelation of truth which during
his lifetime might have cost him dear. Among the legacies of
this greatest of the alchemists was the doctrine that the air
which asphyxiates workers in mines is similar to that which is
produced by fermentation of malt, and a recommendation that, in
order to drive away the evil and to prevent serious accidents,
fires be lighted and jets of steam used to ventilate the
mines--stress being especially laid upon the idea that the danger
in the mines is produced by "exhalations of metals."

Thanks to men like Valentine, this idea of the interference of
Satan and his minions with the mining industry was gradually
weakened, and the working of the deserted mines was resumed; yet
even at a comparatively recent period we find it still lingering,
and among leading divines in the very heart of Protestant
Germany. In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena,
the medical faculty of the university decided that the cause was
not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas. Thereupon
Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a solemn
protest, declaring that the decision of the medical faculty was
"only a proof of the lamentable license which has so taken
possession of us, and which, if we are not earnestly on our
guard, will finally turn away from us the blessing of God."[281]
But denunciations of this kind could not hold back the little
army of science; in spite of adverse influences, the evolution
of physics and chemistry went on. More and more there rose men
bold enough to break away from theological methods and strong
enough to resist ecclesiastical bribes and threats. As alchemy
in its first form, seeking for the philosopher's stone and the
transmutation of metals, had given way to alchemy in its second
form, seeking for the elixir of life and remedies more or less
magical for disease, so now the latter yielded to the search for
truth as truth. More and more the "solemnly constituted
impostors" were resisted in every field. A great line of
physicists and chemists began to appear.[282]

[281] For Loescher's protest, see Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des
geistigen Lebens, etc., vol. i, p. 319.

[282] For the general view of noxious gases as imps of Satan, see
Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. i, p. 350; vol. ii, p. 48.
For the work of Black, Priestley, Bergmann, and others, see main
authorities already cited, and especially the admirable paper of
Dr. R. G. Eccles on The Evolution of Chemistry, New York, D.
Appleton & Co., 1891. For the treatment of Priesley, see
Spence's Essays, London, 1892; also Rutt, Life and Correspondence
of Priestley, vol. ii, pp. 115 et seq.

II.

Just at the middle of the seventeenth century, and at the very
centre of opposition to physical science, Robert Boyle began the
new epoch in chemistry. Strongly influenced by the writings of
Bacon and the discoveries of Galileo, he devoted himself to
scientific research, establishing at Oxford a laboratory and
putting into it a chemist from Strasburg. For this he was at
once bitterly attacked. In spite of his high position, his
blameless life, his liberal gifts to charity and learning, the
Oxford pulpit was especially severe against him, declaring that
his researches were destroying religion and his experiments
undermining the university. Public orators denounced him, the
wits ridiculed him, and his associates in the peerage were
indignant that he should condescend to pursuits so unworthy. But
Boyle pressed on. His discoveries opened new paths in various
directions and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous
investigators. Thus began the long series of discoveries
culminating those of Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, and
Lavoisier, who ushered in the chemical science of the nineteenth
century.

Yet not even then without a sore struggle against unreason. And
it must here be noticed that this unreason was not all
theological. The unreasoning heterodox when intrusted with
irresponsible power can be as short-sighted and cruel as the
unreasoning orthodox. Lavoisier, one of the best of our race,
not only a great chemist but a true man, was sent to the scaffold
by the Parisian mob, led by bigoted "liberals" and atheists, with
the sneer that the republic had no need of savants. As to
Priestley, who had devoted his life to science and to every good
work among his fellow-men, the Birmingham mob, favoured by the
Anglican clergymen who harangued them as "fellow-churchmen,"
wrecked his house, destroyed his library, philosophical
instruments, and papers containing the results of long years of
scientific research, drove him into exile, and would have
murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon him. Nor
was it entirely his devotion to rational liberty, nor even his
disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought on this
catastrophe. That there was a deep distrust of his scientific
pursuits, was evident when the leaders of the mob took pains to
use his electrical apparatus to set fire to his papers.

Still, though theological modes of thought continued to sterilize
much effort in chemistry, the old influence was more and more
thrown off, and truth sought more and more for truth's sake.
"Black magic" with its Satanic machinery vanished, only
reappearing occasionally among marvel-mongers and belated
theologians. "White magic" became legerdemain.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical research,
though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt in various
ways the reaction which followed the French Revolution. It was
not merely under the Bourbons and Hapsburgs that resistance was
offered; even in England the old spirit lingered long. As late
as 1832, when the British Association for the Advancement of
Science first visited Oxford, no less amiable a man than John
Keble--at that time a power in the university--condemned
indignantly the conferring of honorary degrees upon the leading
men thus brought together. In a letter of that date to Dr. Pusey
he complained bitterly, to use his own words, that "the Oxford
doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in
receiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did."  It is
interesting to know that among the men thus contemptuously
characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton.

Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted
many years, and was especially shown on both sides of the
Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where theology
was dominant. Down to a period within the memory of men still in
active life, students in the sciences, not only at Oxford and
Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were considered a doubtful if
not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually and socially--to
be relegated to different instructors and buildings, and to
receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different
ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature. To
the State University of Michigan, among the greater American
institutions of learning which have never possessed or been
possessed by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of first
breaking down this wall of separation.

But from the middle years of the century chemical science
progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen,
Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the
century, led up to the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by which
chemistry has become predictive, as astronomy had become
predictive by the calculations of Newton, and biology by the
discoveries of Darwin.

While one succession of strong men were thus developing chemistry
out of one form of magic, another succession were developing
physics out of another form.

First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line of
thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical laws--a line
extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton to Ohm and Faraday
and Joule and Helmholtz. These, by revealing more and more
clearly the reign of law, steadily undermined the older
theological view of arbitrary influence in nature. Next should
be mentioned the line of profound observers, from Galileo and
Torricelli to Kelvin. These have as thoroughly undermined the
old theologic substitution of phrases for facts. When Galileo
dropped the differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he
began the end of Aristotelian authority in physics. When
Torricelli balanced a column of mercury against a column of water
and each of these against a column of air, he ended the theologic
phrase that "nature abhors a vacuum."  When Newton approximately
determined the velocity of sound, he ended the theologic argument
that we see the flash before we hear the roar because "sight is
nobler than hearing."  When Franklin showed that lightning is
caused by electricity, and Ohm and Faraday proved that
electricity obeys ascertained laws, they ended the theological
idea of a divinity seated above the clouds and casting
thunderbolts.

Resulting from the labour of both these branches of physical
science, we have the establishment of the great laws of the
indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and
chemical affinity. Thereby is ended, with various other sacred
traditions, the theological theory of a visible universe created
out of nothing, so firmly imbedded in the theological thought of
the Middle Ages and in the Westminster Catechism.[283]

[283] For a reappearance of the fundamental doctrines of black
magic among theologians, see Rev. Dr. Jewett, Professor of
Pastoral Theology in the Prot. Episc. Gen. Theolog. Seminary of
New York, Diabolology: The Person and the Kingdom of Satan, New
York, 1889. For their appearance among theosophists, see Eliphas
Levi, Histoire de la Magie, especially the final chapters. For
opposition to Boyle and chemistry studies at Oxford in the latter
half of the seventeenth century, see the address of Prof. Dixon,
F. R. S., before the British Association, 1894. For the recent
progress of chemistry, and opposition to its earlier development
at Oxford, see Lord Salisbury's address as President of the
British Association, in 1894. For the Protestant survival of the
mediaeval assertion that the universe was created out of nothing,
see the Westminster Catechism, question 15.

In our own time some attempt has been made to renew this war
against the physical sciences. Joseph de Maistre, uttering his
hatred of them, declaring that mankind has paid too dearly for
them, asserting that they must be subjected to theology, likening
them to fire--good when confined and dangerous when scattered
about--has been one of the main leaders among those who can not
relinquish the idea that our body of sacred literature should be
kept a controlling text-book of science. The only effect of such
teachings has been to weaken the legitimate hold of religion upon
men.

In Catholic countries exertion has of late years been mainly
confined to excluding science or diluting it in university
teachings. Early in the present century a great effort was made
by Ferdinand VII of Spain. He simply dismissed the scientific
professors from the University of Salamanca, and until a recent
period there has been general exclusion from Spanish universities
of professors holding to the Newtonian physics. So, too, the
contemporary Emperor of Austria attempted indirectly something of
the same sort; and at a still later period Popes Gregory XVI and
Pius IX discouraged, if they did not forbid, the meetings of
scientific associations in Italy. In France, war between
theology and science, which had long been smouldering, came in
the years 1867 and 1868 to an outbreak. Toward the end of the
last century, after the Church had held possession of advanced
instruction for more than a thousand years, and had, so far as it
was able, kept experimental science in servitude--after it had
humiliated Buffon in natural science, thrown its weight against
Newton in the physical sciences, and wrecked Turgot's noble plans
for a system of public instruction--the French nation decreed the
establishment of the most thorough and complete system of higher
instruction in science ever known. It was kept under lay control
and became one of the glories of France; but, emboldened by the
restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the Church began to
undermine this hated system, and in 1868 had made such progress
that all was ready for the final assault.

Foremost among the leaders of the besieging party was the Bishop
of Orleans, Dupanloup, a man of many winning characteristics and
of great oratorical power. In various ways, and especially in an
open letter, he had fought the "materialism" of science at Paris,
and especially were his attacks levelled at Profs. Vulpian and
See and the Minister of Public instruction, Duruy, a man of great
merit, whose only crime was devotion to the improvement of
education and to the promotion of the highest research in
science.[284]

[284] For the exertions of the restored Bourbons to crush the
universities of Spain, see Hubbard, Hist. Contemporaine de
l'Espagne, Paris, 1878, chaps. i and ii. For Dupanloup, Lettre a
un Cardinal, see the Revue de Therapeutique of 1868, p. 221.

The main attack was made rather upon biological science than upon
physics and chemistry, yet it was clear that all were involved
together.

The first onslaught was made in the French Senate, and the
storming party in that body was led by a venerable and
conscientious prelate, Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop of
Rouen. It was charged by him and his party that the tendencies
of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to religion
and morality. Heavy missiles were hurled--such phrases as
"sapping the foundations," "breaking down the bulwarks," and the
like; and, withal, a new missile was used with much effect--the
epithet "materialist."

The results can be easily guessed: crowds came to the
lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room of
Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation.

A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was sent by the
cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy. Having heard
one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that
seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party: he
brought a terrible statement--one that seemed enough to overwhelm
See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of public
instruction in France--the statement that See had denied the
existence of the human soul.

Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at once. Rising
in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent invective
against the Minister of State who could protect such a fortress
of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a climax, he
asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof. See's
lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his lecture of
the day before, that so long as he had the honour to hold his
professorship he would combat the false idea of the existence of
the soul. The weapon seemed resistless and the wound fatal, but
M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard.

His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary
proofs that Prof. See never made such a declaration. He held
the notes used by Prof. See in his lecture. Prof. See, it
appeared, belonged to a school in medical science which combated
certain ideas regarding medicine as an ART. The inflamed
imagination of the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the
lecture-notes proved, led him to mistake the word "art" for
"ame," and to exhibit Prof. See as treating a theological when he
was discussing a purely scientific question. Of the existence of
the soul the professor had said nothing.

The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated
in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet,
dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors by
Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their discomfiture. Thus a
well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in bringing
ridicule on religion, and in thrusting still deeper into the
minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all mistaken
ideas: the conviction that religion and science are
enemies.[285]

[285] For a general account of the Vulpian and See matter, see
Revue des Deux Mondes, 31 mai, 1868, "Chronique de la Quinzaine,"
pp. 763-765. As to the result on popular thought, may be noted
the following comment on the affair by the Revue, which is as
free as possible from anything like rabid anti-ecclesiastical
ideas: "Elle a ete vraiment curieuse, instructive, assez triste
et meme un peu amusante."  For Wurtz's statement, see Revue de
Therapeutique for 1868, p. 303.

But justice forbids raising an outcry against Roman Catholicism
for this. In 1864 a number of excellent men in England drew up a
declaration to be signed by students in the natural sciences,
expressing "sincere regret that researches into scientific truth
are perverted by some in our time into occasion for casting doubt
upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures."  Nine
tenths of the leading scientific men of England refused to sign
it; nor was this all: Sir John Herschel, Sir John Bowring, and
Sir W. R. Hamilton administered, through the press,
castigations which roused general indignation against the
proposers of the circular, and Prof. De Morgan, by a parody,
covered memorial and memorialists with ridicule. It was the old
mistake, and the old result followed in the minds of multitudes
of thoughtful young men.[286]

[286] De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 421-428; also Daubeny's Essays.

And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake was made.
In 1868 several excellent churchmen in Prussia thought it their
duty to meet for the denunciation of "science falsely so called."
Two results followed: upon the great majority of these really
self-sacrificing men--whose first utterances showed complete
ignorance of the theories they attacked--there came quiet and
widespread contempt; upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth and
proclaimed views of the universe which he thought scriptural, but
which most schoolboys knew to be childish, came a burst of
good-natured derision from every quarter of the German
nation.[287]

[287] See the Berlin newspapers for the summer of 1868,
especially Kladderdatsch.

But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind, after
the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more and more
futile. While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less
conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe and America
continued to insist that advanced education, not only in
literature but in science, should be kept under careful control
in their own sectarian universities and colleges, wretchedly
one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while
Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all
professors holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and Italy
all holding unsafe views regarding the Immaculate Conception, and
while Protestant clerical authorities in Great Britain and
America were keeping out of professorships men holding
unsatisfactory views regarding the Incarnation, or Infant
Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or Ordination by Elders, or
the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both Catholic and
Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly weeding out of
university faculties all who showed willingness to consider
fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly in progress
destined to take instruction, and especially instruction in the
physical and natural sciences, out of its old subordination to
theology and ecclesiasticism.[288]

[288] Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy
advocated by President McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man
must honor him for the large way in which he, at least, broke
away from the traditions of that centre of thought; prevented, so
far as he was able, persecution of scholars for holding to the
Darwinian view; and paved the way for the highest researches in
physical science in that university. For a most eloquent
statement of the opposition of modern physical science to
mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac
Newton, see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific
Discovery, London, 1878, p. 247.

The most striking beginnings of this movement had been seen when,
in the darkest period of the French Revolution, there was founded
at Paris the great Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and when, in
the early years of the nineteenth century, scientific and
technical education spread quietly upon the Continent. By the
middle of the century France and Germany were dotted with
well-equipped technical and scientific schools, each having
chemical and physical laboratories.

The English-speaking lands lagged behind. In England, Oxford and
Cambridge showed few if any signs of this movement, and in the
United States, down to 1850, evidences of it were few and feeble.
Very significant is it that, at that period, while Yale College
had in its faculty Silliman and Olmsted--the professor of
chemistry and the professor of physics most widely known in the
United States--it had no physical or chemical laboratory in the
modern sense, and confined its instruction in these subjects to
examinations upon a text-book and the presentation of a few
lectures. At the State University of Michigan, which had even
then taken a foremost place in the higher education west of the
Great Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and
virtually none in physics. This being the state of things in the
middle of the century in institutions remarkably free from
clerical control, it can be imagined what was the position of
scientific instruction in smaller colleges and universities where
theological considerations were entirely dominant.

But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, began
in Great Britain and America a movement in favour of scientific
education; men of wealth and public spirit began making
contributions to them, and thus came the growth of a new system
of instruction in which Chemistry and Physics took just rank.

By far the most marked feature in this movement was seen in
America, when, in 1857, Justin S. Morrill, a young member of
Congress from Vermont, presented the project of a law endowing
from the public lands a broad national system of colleges in
which scientific and technical studies should be placed on an
equality with studies in classical literature, one such college
to be established in every State of the Union. The bill, though
opposed mainly by representatives from the Southern States, where
doctrinaire politics and orthodox theology were in strong
alliance with negro slavery, was passed by both Houses of
Congress, but vetoed by President Buchanan, in whom the
doctrinaire and orthodox spirit was incarnate. But Morrill
persisted and again presented his bill, which was again carried
in spite of the opposition of the Southern members, and again
vetoed in 1859 by President Buchanan. Then came the civil war;
but Morrill and his associates did not despair of the republic.
In the midst of all the measures for putting vast armies into the
field and for saving the Union from foreign interference as well
as from domestic anarchy, they again passed the bill, and in
1862, in the darkest hour of the struggle for national existence,
it became a law by the signature of President Lincoln.

And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast
majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most
efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr.
Amos Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an instructor
in a little village of New York. His ideas were embodied in the
bill, and his efforts did much for its passage.

Thus was established, in every State of the American Union, at
least one institution in which scientific and technical studies
were given equal rank with classical, and promoted by
laboratories for research in physical and natural science. Of
these institutions there are now nearly fifty: all have proved
valuable, and some of them, by the addition of splendid gifts
from individuals and from the States in which they are situated,
have been developed into great universities.

Nor was this all. Many of the older universities and colleges
thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction. The
great physical and chemical laboratories founded by gifts from
public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, or
by enlightened State legislators, as in Michigan, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, have also become
centres from which radiate influences favouring the unfettered
search for truth as truth.

This system has been long enough in operation to enable us to
note in some degree its effects on religion, and these are
certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that religion
was necessarily bound up with the older instruction controlled by
theology. While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the colleges
under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the most
powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom
Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are
types, no such effects have been noted in these newer
institutions. While the theological way of looking at the
universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any
tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony
of those best acquainted with the American colleges and
universities during the last forty-five years that there has been
in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards
religion in its highest and best sense. The reason is not far to
seek. Under the old American system the whole body of students
at a university were confined to a single course, for which the
majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a
result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable.
Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially
courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and
aims, the great majority of students are interested, and
consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished.
Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learning
down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for the
religious culture of students was in the perfunctory presentation
of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring up of what
were called "revivals," which, after a period of unhealthy
stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students in a state of
religious and moral reaction and collapse. This method is now
discredited, and in the more important American universities it
has become impossible. Religious truth, to secure the attention
of the modern race of students in the better American
institutions, is presented, not by "sensation preachers," but by
thoughtful, sober-minded scholars. Less and less avail sectarian
arguments; more and more impressive becomes the presentation of
fundamental religious truths. The result is, that while young
men care less and less for the great mass of petty, cut-and-dried
sectarian formulas, they approach the deeper questions of
religion with increasing reverence.

While striking differences exist between the European
universities and those of the United States, this at least may be
said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority of
the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of
enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and that,
this being the case, the physical and natural sciences are
henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without fear of
being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesiasticism.

CHAPTER XIII.

FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.

I. THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE.

Nothing in the evolution of human thought appears more inevitable
than the idea of supernatural intervention in producing and
curing disease. The causes of disease are so intricate that they
are reached only after ages of scientific labour. In those
periods when man sees everywhere miracle and nowhere law,--when
he attributes all things which he can not understand to a will
like his own,--he naturally ascribes his diseases either to the
wrath of a good being or to the malice of an evil being.

This idea underlies the connection of the priestly class with the
healing art: a connection of which we have survivals among rude
tribes in all parts of the world, and which is seen in nearly
every ancient civilization--especially in the powers over disease
claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in Assyria by
the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of Aesculapius,
and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh.

In Egypt there is evidence, reaching back to a very early period,
that the sick were often regarded as afflicted or possessed by
demons; the same belief comes constantly before us in the great
religions of India and China; and, as regards Chaldea, the
Assyrian tablets recovered in recent years, while revealing the
source of so many myths and legends transmitted to the modern
world through the book of Genesis, show especially this idea of
the healing of diseases by the casting out of devils. A similar
theory was elaborated in Persia. Naturally, then, the Old
Testament, so precious in showing the evolution of religious and
moral truth among men, attributes such diseases as the leprosy of
Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the dysentery of Jehoram,
the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal illness of Asa, and many
other ills, to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan; while,
in the New Testament, such examples as the woman "bound by
Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting out of the devil
which was dumb, the healing of the person whom "the devil
ofttimes casteth into the fire"--of which case one of the
greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a truer
description of epilepsy--and various other episodes, show this
same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium through
which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician were
revealed to future generations.

In Greece, though this idea of an occult evil agency in producing
bodily ills appeared at an early period, there also came the
first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really scientific
theory of medicine. Five hundred years before Christ, in the
bloom period of thought--the period of Aeschylus, Phidias,
Pericles, Socrates, and Plato--appeared Hippocrates, one of the
greatest names in history. Quietly but thoroughly he broke away
from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid
the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation,
and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to
this hour among the most precious possessions of our race.

His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there
medical science was developed yet further, especially by such men
as Herophilus and Erasistratus. Under their lead studies in
human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had
weighed so long upon science, preventing that method of
anatomical investigation without which there can be no real
results, was cast aside apparently forever.[289]

[289] For extended statements regarding medicine in Egypt, Judea,
and Eastern nations generally, see Sprengel, Histoire de la
Medecine, and Haeser; and for more succinct accounts, Baas,
Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 15-29; also Isensee; also Fredault,
Histoire de la Medecine, chap. i. For the effort in Egyptian
medicine to deal with demons and witches, see Heinrich Brugsch,
Die Aegyptologie, Leipsic, 1891, p. 77; and for references to the
Papyrus Ebers, etc., pp. 155, 407, and following. For fear of
dissection and prejudices against it in Egypt, like those in
mediaeval Europe, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p.
216. For the derivation of priestly medicine in Egypt, see Baas,
pp. 16, 22. For the fame of Egyptian medicine at Rome, see
Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. ii, pp. 151, 184. For Assyria,
see especially George Smith in Delitzsch's German translation, p.
34, and F. Delitzsch's appendix, p. 27. On the cheapness and
commonness of miracles of healing in antiquity, see Sharpe,
quoting St. Jerome, vol. ii, pp. 276, 277. As to the influence
of Chaldean ideas of magic and disease, see Lecky, History of
European Morals, vol. i, p. 404 and note. But, on the other
hand, see reference in Homer to diseases caused by a "demon."
For the evolution of medicine before and after Hippocrates, see
Sprengel. For a good summing up of the work of Hippocrates, see
Baas, p. 201. For the necessary passage of medicine in its early
stages under priestly control, see Cabanis, The Revolution of
Medical Science, London, 1806, chap. ii. On Jewish ideas
regarding demons, and their relation to sickness, see Toy,
Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 168 et seq. For
avoidance of dissections of human subjects even by Galen and his
disciples, see Maurice Albert, Les Medecins Grecs a Rome, Paris,
1894, chap. xi. For Herophilus, Erasistratus, and the School of
Alexandria, see Sprengel, vol. i, pp. 433, 434 et seq.

But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of
events was set in motion which modified this development most
profoundly. The influence of Christianity on the healing art was
twofold: there was first a blessed impulse--the thought,
aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.
This spirit, then poured into the world, flowed down through the
ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the sick and wretched.
Through all those succeeding centuries, even through the rudest,
hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along this blessed stream.
Of these were the Eastern establishments for the cure of the sick
at the earliest Christian periods, the Infirmary of Monte Cassino
and the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons in the sixth century, the Hotel-Dieu
at Paris in the seventh, and the myriad refuges for the sick and
suffering which sprang up in every part of Europe during the
following centuries. Vitalized by this stream, all medieval
growths of mercy bloomed luxuriantly. To say nothing of those at
an earlier period, we have in the time of the Crusades great
charitable organizations like the Order of St. John of
Jerusalem, and thenceforward every means of bringing the spirit
of Jesus to help afflicted humanity. So, too, through all those
ages we have a succession of men and women devoting themselves to
works of mercy, culminating during modern times in saints like
Vincent de Paul, Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence
Nightingale, and Muhlenberg.

But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart of the
Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after century,
inspiring every development of mercy, there came from those who
organized the Church which bears his name, and from those who
afterward developed and directed it, another stream of
influence--a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions
of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest
historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew
and Christian sacred books.

The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in relation
to the cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there was a
new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical disease is
produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan, or by a
combination of both, which theology was especially called in to
explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of miraculous
methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the Divine anger,
or of thwarting Satanic malice.

Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the life of
Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians, legends of
miracles grew luxuriantly. It would be utterly unphilosophical
to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud. Whatever part
priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry discreditable
developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends, Century
after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as naturally as
elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie.

II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.
--  THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.

Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all great
benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and
devotees. Throughout human history the lives of such personages,
almost without exception, have been accompanied or followed by a
literature in which legends of miraculous powers form a very
important part--a part constantly increasing until a different
mode of looking at nature and of weighing testimony causes
miracles to disappear. While modern thought holds the testimony
to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as worthless, it is
very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings who endow
the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest hold
upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise
such influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or
body are helped or healed.

We have within the modern period very many examples which enable
us to study the evolution of legendary miracles. Out of these I
will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of
one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity,
one whose biography is before the world with its most minute
details--in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in
contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies: this
man is St. Francis Xavier. From these sources I draw the facts
now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant origin;
every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and Roman, and
published under the sanction of the Church.

Born a Spanish noble, Xavier at an early age cast aside all
ordinary aims, devoted himself to study, was rapidly advanced to
a professorship at Paris, and in this position was rapidly
winning a commanding influence, when he came under the sway of
another Spaniard even greater, though less brilliantly endowed,
than himself--Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.
The result was that the young professor sacrificed the brilliant
career on which he had entered at the French capital, went to the
far East as a simple missionary, and there devoted his remaining
years to redeeming the lowest and most wretched of our race.

Among the various tribes, first in lower India and afterward in
Japan, he wrought untiringly--toiling through village after
village, collecting the natives by the sound of a hand-bell,
trying to teach them the simplest Christian formulas; and thus
he brought myriads of them to a nominal Confession of the
Christian faith. After twelve years of such efforts, seeking new
conquests for religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert
island of San Chan.

During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of
letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and
these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly
all the features of his life. His own writings are very minute,
and enable us to follow him fully. No account of a miracle
wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any
contemporary document.[290] At the outside, but two or three
things occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by
himself and his contemporaries, for which the most earnest
devotee could claim anything like Divine interposition; and
these are such as may be read in the letters of very many fervent
missionaries, Protestant as well as Catholic. For example, in
the beginning of his career, during a journey in Europe with an
ambassador, one of the servants in fording a stream got into deep
water and was in danger of drowning. Xavier tells us that the
ambassador prayed very earnestly, and that the man finally
struggled out of the stream. But within sixty years after his
death, at his canonization, and by various biographers, this had
been magnified into a miracle, and appears in the various
histories dressed out in glowing colours. Xavier tells us that
the ambassador prayed for the safety of the young man; but his
biographers tell us that it was Xavier who prayed, and finally,
by the later writers, Xavier is represented as lifting horse and
rider out of the stream by a clearly supernatural act.

[290] This statement was denied with much explosive emphasis by a
writer in the Catholic World for September and October, 1891, but
he brought no FACT to support this denial. I may perhaps be
allowed to remind the reverend writer that since the days of
Pascal, whose eminence in the Church he will hardly dispute, the
bare assertion even of a Jesuit father against established facts
needs some support other than mere scurrility.

Still another claim to miracle is based upon his arriving at
Lisbon and finding his great colleague, Simon Rodriguez, ill of
fever. Xavier informs us in a very simple way that Rodriguez was
so overjoyed to see him that the fever did not return. This is
entirely similar to the cure which Martin Luther wrought upon
Melanchthon. Melanchthon had broken down and was supposed to be
dying, when his joy at the long-delayed visit of Luther brought
him to his feet again, after which he lived for many years.

Again, it is related that Xavier, finding a poor native woman
very ill, baptized her, saying over her the prayers of the
Church, and she recovered.

Two or three occurrences like these form the whole basis for the
miraculous account, so far as Xavier's own writings are
concerned.

Of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word there is in these
letters of his no mention. Though he writes of his doings with
especial detail, taking evident pains to note everything which he
thought a sign of Divine encouragement, he says nothing of his
performing miracles, and evidently knows nothing of them. This
is clearly not due to his unwillingness to make known any token
of Divine favour. As we have seen, he is very prompt to report
anything which may be considered an answer to prayer or an
evidence of the power of religious means to improve the bodily or
spiritual health of those to whom he was sent.

Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any
miracles wrought by him. His brother missionaries, who were in
constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no allusions to them
in their communications with each other or with their brethren in
Europe.

Of this fact we have many striking evidences. Various
collections of letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and
the East generally, during the years of Xavier's activity, were
published, and in not one of these letters written during
Xavier's lifetime appears any account of a miracle wrought by
him. As typical of these collections we may take perhaps the
most noted of all, that which was published about twenty years
after Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta.

The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his associates
not only from Goa, which was the focus of all missionary effort
and the centre of all knowledge regarding their work in the East,
but from all other important points in the great field. The
first of them were written during the saint's lifetime, but,
though filled with every sort of detail regarding missionary life
and work, they say nothing regarding any miracles by Xavier.

The same is true of various other similar collections published
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In not one of
them does any mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a letter
from India or the East contemporary with him.

This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any
"evil heart of unbelief."  On the contrary, these good missionary
fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they
thought evidence of the Divine favour: it is indeed touching to
see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things which could
be thus construed.

Their ample faith was fully shown. One of them, in Acosta's
collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been
recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast
out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that
various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by
baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb
had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the
proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles
are imputed by his associates during his life or during several
years after his death.

On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal
limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully
confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting, for
example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was
divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to
note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement
utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and
detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of
knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent
in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.

Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel
Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries
continued without any indication of miracles performed by the
saint. Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had
already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these
miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later
accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very
period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of
them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of
these miraculous manifestations.

But this negative evidence is by no means all. There is also
positive evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order
itself--that Xavier wrought no miracles.

For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything
of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest
contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest
correspondence with those who knew most about the saint, a member
of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of its
accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier
wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none.

This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its
visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of
the University of Salamanca. In 1571, nineteen years after
Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly
concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers
especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him
up as an ideal and his work as an example.

But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary
Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's
conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and
says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no
longer produce apostolic results "lies in the missionaries
themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles."
He then asks, "Why should our age be so completely destitute of
them?"  This question he answers at great length, and one of his
main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men
had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times
the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the
illiterate; and hence that "in the early times miracles were
necessary, but in our time they are not."

This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly to
Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and
that of the other great missionaries of his time. That the
Jesuit order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta
trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at
Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished
afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.[291]  Nothing
shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of
miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of
any land and time, and how independent it is of fact.

[291]The work of Joseph Acosta is in the Cornell University
Library, its title being as follows: De Natura Novi Orbis libri
duo et De Promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De
Procuranda Indorum Salute, libri sex, autore Jesepho Acosta,
presbytero Societis Jesu. I. H. S. Salmanticas, apud Guillelmum
Foquel, MDLXXXIX. For the passages cited directly contradicting
the working of miracles by Xavier and his associates, see lib.
ii, cap. ix, of which the title runs, Cur Miracula in Conversione
gentium non fiant nunc, ut olim, a Christi praedicatoribus,
especially pp. 242-245; also lib. ii, cap. viii, pp. 237 et seq.
For a passage which shows that Xavier was not then at all
credited with "the miraculous gift of tongues," see lib. i, cap.
vii, p. 173. Since writing the above, my attention has been
called to the alleged miraculous preservation of Xavier's body
claimed in sundry letters contemporary with its disinterment at
San Chan and reinterment at Goa. There is no reason why this
preservation in itself need be doubted, and no reason why it
should be counted miraculous. Such exceptional preservation of
bodies has been common enough in all ages, and, alas for the
claims of the Church, quite as common of pagans or Protestants as
of good Catholics. One of the most famous cases is that of the
fair Roman maiden, Julia, daughter of Claudius, over whose
exhumation at Rome, in 1485, such ado was made by the sceptical
scholars of the Renaissance. Contemporary observers tell us
enthusiastically that she was very beautiful, perfectly
preserved, "the bloom of youth still upom her cheeks," and
exhaling a "sweet odour"; but this enthusiasm was so little to
the taste of Pope Innocent VIII that he had her reburied secretly
by night. Only the other day, in June of the year 1895, there
was unearthed at Stade, in Hanover, the "perfectly preserved"
body of a soldier of the eighth century. So, too, I might
mention the bodies preserved at the church of St. Thomas at
Strasburg, beneath the Cathedral of Bremen, and elsewhere during
hundreds of years past; also the cases of "adiposeration" in
various American cemeteries, which never grow less wonderful by
repetition from mouth to mouth and in the public prints. But,
while such preservation is not incredible or even strange, there
is much reason why precisely in the case of a saint like St.
Francis Xavier the evidence for it should be received with
especial caution. What the touching fidelity of disciples may
lead them to believe and proclaim regarding an adored leader in a
time when faith is thought more meritorious than careful
statement, and miracle more probable than the natural course of
things, is seen, for example, in similar pious accounts regarding
the bodies of many other saints, especially that of St. Carlo
Borromeo, so justly venerated by the Church for his beautiful and
charitable life. And yet any one looking at the relics of
various saints, especially those of St. Carlo, preserved with
such tender care in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, will see that
they have shared the common fate, being either mummified or
reduced to skeletons; and this is true in all cases, as far as my
observation has extended. What even a great theologian can be
induced to believe and testify in a somewhat similar matter, is
seen in St. Augustine's declaration that the flesh of the
peacock, which in antiquity and in the early Church was
considered a bird somewhat supernaturally endowed, is
incorruptible. The saint declares that he tested it and found it
so (see the De Civitate dei, xxi, c. 4, under the passage
beginning Quis enim Deus). With this we may compare the
testimony of the pious author of Sir John Mandeville's Travels,
that iron floats upon the Dead Sea while feathers sink in it, and
that he would not have believed this had he not seen it. So,
too, testimony to the "sweet odour" diffused by the exhumed
remains of the saint seem to indicate feeling rather than
fact--those highly wrought feelings of disciples standing by--the
same feeling which led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on
his heap of ordure, and other hermits unwashed and living in
filth, to dwell upon the delicious "odour of sanctity' pervading
the air. In point, perhaps, is Louis Veuillot's idealization of
the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to which the present
writer and thousands of others can testify, that under Papal rule
Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in Christendom.
For the case of Julia, see the contemporary letter printed by
Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien, p. 120, note
167; also Infessura, Diarium Rom. Urbis, in Muratori, tom. iii,
pt. 2, col. 1192, 1193, and elsewhere; also Symonds, Renaissance
in Italy: Age of Despots, p. 22. For the case at Stade, see
press dispatch from Berlin in newspapers of June 24, 25, 1895.
The copy of Emanuel Acosta I have mainly used is that in the
Royal Library at Munich, De Japonicus rebus epistolarum libri
iii, item recogniti; et in Latinum ex Hispanico sermone conversi,
Dilingae, MDLXXI. I have since obtained and used the work now in
the library of Cornell University, being the letters and
commentary published by Emanuel Acosta and attached to Maffei's
book on the History of the Indies, published at Antwerp in 1685.
For the first beginnings of miracles wrought by Xavier, as given
in the letters of the missionaries, see that of Almeida, lib. ii,
p. 183. Of other collections, or selections from collections, of
letters which fail to give any indication of miracles wrought by
Xavier during his life, see Wytfliet and Magin, Histoire
Universelle des Indes Occidentales et Orientales, et de la
Conversion des Indiens, Douay, 1611. Though several letters of
Xavier and his fellow-missionaries are given, dated at the very
period of his alleged miracles, not a trace of miracles appears
in these. Also Epistolae Japonicae de multorum in variis Insulis
Gentilium ad Christi fidem Conversione, Lovanii, 1570. These
letters were written by Xavier and his companions from the East
Indies and Japan, and cover the years from 1549 to 1564. Though
these refer  frequently to Xavier, there is no mention of a
miracle wrought by him in any of them written during his
lifetime.

For, shortly after Xavier's heroic and beautiful death in 1552,
stories of miracles wrought by him began to appear. At first
they were few and feeble; and two years later Melchior Nunez,
Provincial of the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions, with all
the means at his command, and a correspondence extending
throughout Eastern Asia, had been able to hear of but three.
These were entirely from hearsay. First, John Deyro said he knew
that Xavier had the gift of prophecy; but, unfortunately, Xavier
himself had reprimanded and cast off Deyro for untruthfulness and
cheatery. Secondly, it was reported vaguely that at Cape Comorin
many persons affirmed that Xavier had raised a man from the dead.
Thirdly, Father Pablo de Santa Fe had heard that in Japan Xavier
had restored sight to a blind man. This seems a feeble
beginning, but little by little the stories grew, and in 1555 De
Quadros, Provincial of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, had heard of nine
miracles, and asserted that Xavier had healed the sick and cast
out devils. The next year, being four years after Xavier's
death, King John III of Portugal, a very devout man, directed his
viceroy Barreto to draw up and transmit to him an authentic
account of Xavier's miracles, urging him especially to do the
work "with zeal and speedily."  We can well imagine what
treasures of grace an obsequious viceroy, only too anxious to
please a devout king, could bring together by means of the
hearsay of ignorant, compliant natives through all the little
towns of Portuguese India.

But the letters of the missionaries who had been co-workers or
immediate successors of Xavier in his Eastern field were still
silent as regards any miracles by him, and they remained silent
for nearly ten years. In the collection of letters published by
Emanuel Acosta and others no hint at any miracles by him is
given, until at last, in 1562, fully ten years after Xavier's
death, the first faint beginnings of these legends appear in
them.

At that time the Jesuit Almeida, writing at great length to the
brethren, stated that he had found a pious woman who believed
that a book left behind by Xavier had healed sick folk when it
was laid upon them, and that he had met an old man who preserved
a whip left by the saint which, when properly applied to the
sick, had been found good both for their bodies and their souls.
From these and other small beginnings grew, always luxuriant and
sometimes beautiful, the vast mass of legends which we shall see
hereafter.

This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous and
less critical brethren in Europe until it had become enormous;
but it appears to have been thought of little value by those best
able to judge.

For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a solemn
oration on the condition and glory of the Church, before the
papal legates and other fathers assembled at the Council of
Trent, while he alluded to a multitude of things showing the
Divine favour, there was not the remotest allusion to the vast
multitude of miracles which, according to the legends, had been
so profusely lavished on the faithful during many years, and
which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of
prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church.

The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours
vouchsafed to the Church, or at least of any belief in them,
appears in that great Council of Trent among the fathers
themselves. Certainly there, if anywhere, one might on the Roman
theory expect Divine illumination in a matter of this kind. The
presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it was especially
claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual as well as
material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the
Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own
friend and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not
the slightest sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles. We
have the letters of Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these
fathers assembled at Trent, from 1557 onward for a considerable
time, and we have also a multitude of letters written from the
Council by bishops, cardinals, and even by the Pope himself,
discussing all sorts of Church affairs, and in not one of these
is there evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these
reports, which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles,
were worthy of mention.

Here, too, comes additional supplementary testimony of much
significance. With these orations and letters, Eugubinus gives a
Latin translation of a letter, "on religious affairs in the
Indies," written by a Jesuit father twenty years after Xavier's
death. Though the letter came from a field very distant from
that in which Xavier laboured, it was sure, among the general
tokens of Divine favour to the Church and to the order, on which
it dwelt, to have alluded to miracles wrought by Xavier had there
been the slightest ground for believing in them; but no such
allusion appears.[292]

[292] For the work referred to, see Julii Gabrielii Eugubini
orationum et epistolarum, etc., libri duo [et] Epitola de rebus
Indicis a quodam Societatis Jesu presbytero, etc., Venetiis,
1569. The Epistola begins at fol. 44.

So, too, when in 1588, thirty-six years after Xavier's death, the
Jesuit father Maffei, who had been especially conversant with
Xavier's career in the East, published his History of India,
though he gave a biography of Xavier which shows fervent
admiration for his subject, he dwelt very lightly on the alleged
miracles. But the evolution of miraculous legends still went on.
Six years later, in 1594, Father Tursellinus published his Life
of Xavier, and in this appears to have made the first large use
of the information collected by the Portuguese viceroy and the
more zealous brethren. This work shows a vast increase in the
number of miracles over those given by all sources together up to
that time. Xavier is represented as not only curing the sick,
but casting out devils, stilling the tempest, raising the dead,
and performing miracles of every sort.

In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome. Among the
speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the
claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal
Monte. In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from
those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them
minutely. He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the
sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his
fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed
the sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a
lost boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth
bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to
punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the
offenders in cinders from a volcano: this was afterward still
more highly developed, and the saint was represented in
engravings as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying
the town.

The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the cardinal's
list. Regarding this he states that, Xavier having during one of
his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was restored to him
after he had reached the shore by a crab.

The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's relics
after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps placed
before the image of the saint and filled with holy water burned
as if filled with oil.

This latter account appears to have deeply impressed the Pope,
for in the Bull of Canonization issued by virtue of his power of
teaching the universal Church infallibly in all matters
pertaining to faith and morals, His Holiness dwells especially
upon the miracle of the lamp filled with holy water and burning
before Xavier's image.

Xavier having been made a saint, many other Lives of him
appeared, and, as a rule, each surpassed its predecessor in the
multitude of miracles. In 1622 appeared that compiled and
published under the sanction of Father Vitelleschi, and in it not
only are new miracles increased, but some old ones are greatly
improved. One example will suffice to show the process. In his
edition of 1596, Tursellinus had told how, Xavier one day needing
money, and having asked Vellio, one of his friends, to let him
have some, Vellio gave him the key of a safe containing thirty
thousand gold pieces. Xavier took three hundred and returned the
key to Vellio; whereupon Vellio, finding only three hundred
pieces gone, reproached Xavier for not taking more, saying that
he had expected to give him half of all that the strong box
contained. Xavier, touched by this generosity, told Vellio that
the time of his death should be made known to him, that he might
have opportunity to repent of his sins and prepare for eternity.
But twenty-six years later the Life of Xavier published under
the sanction of Vitelleschi, giving the story, says that Vellio
on opening the safe found that ALL HIS MONEY remained as he had
left it, and that NONE AT ALL had disappeared; in fact, that
there had been a miraculous restitution. On his blaming Xavier
for not taking the money, Xavier declares to Vellio that not only
shall he be apprised of the moment of his death, but that the box
shall always be full of money. Still later biographers improved
the account further, declaring that Xavier promised Vellio that
the strong box should always contain money sufficient for all his
needs. In that warm and uncritical atmosphere this and other
legends grew rapidly, obedient to much the same laws which govern
the evolution of fairy tales.[293]

[293] The writer in the Catholic World, already mentioned, rather
rashly asserts that there is no such Life of Xavier as that I
have above quoted. The reverend Jesuit father has evidently
glanced over the bibliographies of Carayon and De Backer, and,
not finding it there under the name of Vitelleschi, has spared
himself further trouble. It is sufficient to say that the book
may be seen by him in the library of Cornell University. Its
full title is as follows: Compendio della Vita del s. p.
Francesco Xaviero dell Campagnia di Giesu, Canonizato con s.
Ignatio Fondatore dell' istessa Religione dalla Santita di N. S.
Gregorio XV. Composto, e dato in luce per ordine del Reverendiss.
P Mutio Vitelleschi Preposito Generale della Comp. di Giesu. In
Venetia, MDCXXII, Appresso Antonio Pinelli. Con Licenza de'
Superiori. My critic hazards a guess that the book may be a
later edition of Torsellino (Tursellinus), but here again he is
wrong. It is entirely a different book, giving in its preface a
list of sources comprising eleven authorities besides Torsellino.

In 1682, one hundred and thirty years after Xavier's death,
appeared his biography by Father Bouhours; and this became a
classic. In it the old miracles of all kinds were enormously
multiplied, and many new ones given. Miracles few and small in
Tursellinus became many and great in Bouhours. In Tursellinus,
Xavier during his life saves one person from drowning, in
Bouhours he saves during his life three; in Tursellinus, Xavier
during his life raises four persons from the dead, in Bouhours
fourteen; in Tursellinus there is one miraculous supply of
water, in Bouhours three; in Tursellinus there is no miraculous
draught of fishes, in Bouhours there is one; in Tursellinus,
Xavier is transfigured twice, in Bouhours five times: and so
through a long series of miracles which, in the earlier lives
appearing either not at all or in very moderate form, are greatly
increased and enlarged by Tursellinus, and finally enormously
amplified and multiplied by Father Bouhours.

And here it must be borne in mind that Bouhours, writing ninety
years after Tursellinus, could not have had access to any new
sources. Xavier had been dead one hundred and thirty years, and
of course all the natives upon whom he had wrought his miracles,
and their children and grandchildren, were gone. It can not then
be claimed that Bouhours had the advantage of any new witnesses,
nor could he have had anything new in the way of contemporary
writings; for, as we have seen, the missionaries of Xavier's
time wrote nothing regarding his miracles, and certainly the
ignorant natives of India and Japan did not commit any account of
his miracles to writing. Nevertheless, the miracles of healing
given in Bouhours were more numerous and brilliant than ever.
But there was far more than this. Although during the lifetime
of Xavier there is neither in his own writings nor in any
contemporary account any assertion of a resurrection from the
dead wrought by him, we find that shortly after his death stories
of such resurrections began to appear. A simple statement of the
growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of
miraculous accounts generally. At first it was affirmed that
some people at Cape Comorin said that he had raised one person;
then it was said that there were two persons; then in various
authors--Emanuel Acosta, in his commentaries written as an
afterthought nearly twenty years after Xavier's death, De
Quadros, and others--the story wavers between one and two cases;
finally, in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been
developed. In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were
mentioned; but by the time of Father Bouhours there were
fourteen--all raised from the dead by Xavier himself during his
lifetime--and the name, place, and circumstances are given with
much detail in each case.[294]

[294] The writer in the Catholic World, already referred to, has
based an attack here upon a misconception--I will not call it a
deliberate misrepresentation--of his own by stating that these
resurrections occurred after Xavier's death, and were due to his
intercession or the use of his relics. The statement of the
Jesuit father is utterly without foundation, as a simple
reference to Bouhours will show. I take the liberty of
commending to his attention The Life of St. Francis Xavier, by
Father Dominic Bouhours, translated by James Dryden, Dublin,
1838. For examples of raising the dead by the saint DURING HIS
LIFETIME, see pp. 69, 82, 93, 111, 218, 307, 316, 321--fourteen
cases in all.

It seems to have been felt as somewhat strange at first that
Xavier had never alluded to any of these wonderful miracles; but
ere long a subsidiary legend was developed, to the effect that
one of the brethren asked him one day if he had raised the dead,
whereat he blushed deeply and cried out against the idea, saying:
"And so I am said to have raised the dead! What a misleading man
I am! Some men brought a youth to me just as if he were dead,
who, when I commanded him to arise in the name of Christ,
straightway arose."

Noteworthy is the evolution of other miracles. Tursellinus,
writing in 1594, tells us that on the voyage from Goa to Malacca,
Xavier having left the ship and gone upon an island, was
afterward found by the persons sent in search of him so deeply
absorbed in prayer as to be unmindful of all things about him.
But in the next century Father Bouhours develops the story as
follows: "The servants found the man of God raised from the
ground into the air, his eyes fixed upon heaven, and rays of
light about his countenance."

Instructive, also, is a comparison between the successive
accounts of his noted miracle among the Badages at Travancore, in
1544 Xavier in his letters makes no reference to anything
extraordinary; and Emanuel Acosta, in 1571, declares simply that
"Xavier threw himself into the midst of the Christians, that
reverencing him they might spare the rest."  The inevitable
evolution of the miraculous goes on; and twenty years later
Tursellinus tells us that, at the onslaught of the Badages, "they
could not endure the majesty of his countenance and the splendour
and rays which issued from his eyes, and out of reverence for him
they spared the others."  The process of incubation still goes on
during ninety years more, and then comes Father Bouhours's
account. Having given Xavier's prayer on the battlefield,
Bouhours goes on to say that the saint, crucifix in hand, rushed
at the head of the people toward the plain where the enemy was
marching, and "said to them in a threatening voice, `I forbid you
in the name of the living God to advance farther, and on His part
command you to return in the way you came.' These few words cast
a terror into the minds of those soldiers who were at the head of
the army; they remained confounded and without motion. They who
marched afterward, seeing that the foremost did not advance,
asked the reason of it. The answer was returned from the front
ranks that they had before their eyes an unknown person habited
in black, of more than human stature, of terrible aspect, and
darting fire from his eyes....They were seized with amazement
at the sight, and all of them fled in precipitate confusion."

Curious, too, is the after-growth of the miracle of the crab
restoring the crucifix. In its first form Xavier lost the
crucifix in the sea, and the earlier biographers dwell on the
sorrow which he showed in consequence; but the later historians
declare that the saint threw the crucifix into the sea in order
to still a tempest, and that, after his safe getting to land, a
crab brought it to him on the shore. In this form we find it
among illustrations of books of devotion in the next century.

But perhaps the best illustration of this evolution of Xavier's
miracles is to be found in the growth of another legend; and it
is especially instructive because it grew luxuriantly despite the
fact that it was utterly contradicted in all parts of Xavier's
writings as well as in the letters of his associates and in the
work of the Jesuit father, Joseph Acosta.

Throughout his letters, from first to last, Xavier constantly
dwells upon his difficulties with the various languages of the
different tribes among whom he went. He tells us how he
surmounted these difficulties: sometimes by learning just enough
of a language to translate into it some of the main Church
formulas; sometimes by getting the help of others to patch
together some pious teachings to be learned by rote; sometimes
by employing interpreters; and sometimes by a mixture of various
dialects, and even by signs. On one occasion he tells us that a
very serious difficulty arose, and that his voyage to China was
delayed because, among other things, the interpreter he had
engaged had failed to meet him.

In various Lives which appeared between the time of his death
and his canonization this difficulty is much dwelt upon; but
during the canonization proceedings at Rome, in the speeches then
made, and finally in the papal bull, great stress was laid upon
the fact that Xavier possessed THE GIFT OF TONGUES. It was
declared that he spoke to the various tribes with ease in their
own languages. This legend of Xavier's miraculous gift of
tongues was especially mentioned in the papal bull, and was
solemnly given forth by the pontiff as an infallible statement to
be believed by the universal Church. Gregory XV having been
prevented by death from issuing the Bull of Canonization, it was
finally issued by Urban VIII; and there is much food for
reflection in the fact that the same Pope who punished Galileo,
and was determined that the Inquisition should not allow the
world to believe that the earth revolves about the sun, thus
solemnly ordered the world, under pain of damnation, to believe
in Xavier's miracles, including his "gift of tongues," and the
return of the crucifix by the pious crab. But the legend was
developed still further: Father Bouhours tells us, "The holy man
spoke very well the language of those barbarians without having
learned it, and had no need of an interpreter when he
instructed."  And, finally, in our own time, the Rev. Father
Coleridge, speaking of the saint among the natives, says, "He
could speak the language excellently, though he had never learned
it."

In the early biography, Tursellinus writes. "Nothing was a
greater impediment to him than his ignorance of the Japanese
tongues; for, ever and anon, when some uncouth expression
offended their fastidious and delicate ears, the awkward speech
of Francis was a cause of laughter."  But Father Bouhours, a
century later, writing of Xavier at the same period, says, "He
preached in the afternoon to the Japanese in their language, but
so naturally and with so much ease that he could not be taken for
a foreigner."

And finally, in 1872, Father Coleridge, of the Society of Jesus,
speaking of Xavier at this time, says, "He spoke freely,
flowingly, elegantly, as if he had lived in Japan all his life."

Nor was even this sufficient: to make the legend complete, it
was finally declared that, when Xavier addressed the natives of
various tribes, each heard the sermon in his own language in
which he was born.

All this, as we have seen, directly contradicts not only the
plain statements of Xavier himself, and various incidental
testimonies in the letters of his associates, but the explicit
declaration of Father Joseph Acosta. The latter historian dwells
especially on the labour which Xavier was obliged to bestow on
the study of the Japanese and other languages, and says, "Even if
he had been endowed with the apostolic gift of tongues, he could
not have spread more widely the glory of Christ."[295]

[295] For the evolution of the miracles of Xavier, see his
Letters, with Life, published by Leon Pages, Paris, 1855; also
Maffei, Historiarum Indicarum libri xvi, Venice, 1589; also the
lives by Tursellinus, various editions, beginning with that of
1594; Vitelleschi, 1622; Bouhours, 1683; Massei, second edition,
1682 (Rome), and others; Bartoli, Baltimore, 1868; Coleridge,
1872. In addition to these, I have compared, for a more extended
discussion of this subject hereafter, a very great number of
editions of these and other biographies of the saint, with
speeches at the canonization, the bull of Gregory XV, various
books of devotion, and a multitude of special writings, some of
them in manuscript, upon the glories of the saint, including a
large mass of material at the Royal Library in Munich and in the
British Museum. I have relied entirely upon Catholic authors,
and have not thought it worth while to consult any Protestant
author. The illustration of the miracle of the crucifix and the
crab in its final form is given in La Devotion de Dix Vendredis a
l'Honneur de St. Francois Xavier, Bruxelles, 1699, Fig. 24: the
pious crab is represented as presenting the crucifix by which a
journey of forty leagues he has brought from the depths of the
ocean to Xavier, who walks upon the shore. The book is in the
Cornell University Library. For the letter of King John to
Barreto, see Leon Pages's Lettres de Francois Xavier, Paris,
1855, vol. ii, p. 465. For the miracle among the Badages,
compare Tursellinus, lib. ii, c. x, p. 16, with Bouhours,
Dryden's translation, pp. 146, 147. For the miracle of the gift
of tongues, in its higher development, see Bouhours, p. 235, and
Coleridge, vo. i, pp. 151, 154, and vol. ii, p. 551

It is hardly necessary to attribute to the orators and
biographers generally a conscious attempt to deceive. The simple
fact is, that as a rule they thought, spoke, and wrote in
obedience to the natural laws which govern the luxuriant growth
of myth and legend in the warm atmosphere of love and devotion
which constantly arises about great religious leaders in times
when men have little or no knowledge of natural law, when there
is little care for scientific evidence, and when he who believes
most is thought most meritorious.[296]

[296] Instances can be given of the same evolution of miraculous
legend in our own time. To say nothing of the sacred fountain at
La Salette, which preserves its healing powers in spite of the
fact that the miracle that gave rise to them has twice been
pronounced fraudulent by the French courts, and to pass without
notice a multitude of others, not only in Catholic but in
Protestant countries, the present writer may allude to one which
in the year 1893 came under his own observation. On arriving in
St. Petersburg to begin an official residence there, his
attention was arrested by various portraits of a priest of the
Russo-Greek Church; they were displayed in shop windows and held
an honoured place in many private dwellings. These portraits
ranged from lifelike photographs, which showed a plain, shrewd,
kindly face, to those which were idealized until they bore a
strong resemblance to the conventional representations of Jesus
of Nazareth. On making inquiries, the writer found that these
portraits represented Father Ivan, of Cronstadt, a priest noted
for his good works, and very widely believed to be endowed with
the power of working miracles.

One day, in one of the most brilliant reception rooms of the
northern capital, the subject of Father Ivan's miracles having
been introduced, a gentleman in very high social position and
entirely trustworthy spoke as follows: "There is something very
surprising about these miracles. I am slow to believe in them,
but I know the following to be a fact: The late Metropolitan
Archbishop of St. Petersburg loved quiet, and was very adverse to
anything which could possibly cause scandal. Hearing of Father
Ivan's miracles, he summoned him to his presence and solemnly
commanded him to abstain from all of the things which had given
rise to his reported miracles, and with this injunction,
dismissed him. Hardly had the priest left the room when the
archbishop was struck with blindness and remained in this
condition until the priest returned and removed his blindness by
intercessory prayers."  When the present writer asked the person
giving this account if he directly knew these facts, he replied
that he was, of course, not present when the miracle was wrought,
but that he had the facts immediately from persons who knew all
the parties concerned and were cognizant directly of the
circumstances of the case.

Some time afterward, the present writer being at an afternoon
reception at one of the greater embassies, the same subject was
touched upon, when an eminent general spoke as follows: "I am not
inclined to believe in miracles, in fact am rather sceptical, but
the proofs of those wrought by Father Ivan are overwhelming."  He
then went on to say that the late Metropolitan Archbishop was a
man who loved quiet and disliked scandal; and that on this
account he had summoned Father Ivan to his palace and ordered him
to put an end to the conduct which had caused the reports
concerning his miraculous powers, and then, with a wave of the
arm, had dismissed him. The priest left the room, and from that
moment the archbishop's arm was paralyzed, and it remained so
until the penitent prelate summoned the priest again, by whose
prayers the arm was restored to its former usefulness. There was
present at the time another person besides the writer who had
heard the previous statement as to the blindness of the
archbishop, and on their both questioning the general if he were
sure that the archbishop's arm was paralyzed, as stated, he
declared that he could not doubt it, as he had it directly from
persons entirely trustworthy, who were cognizant of all the
facts.

Some time later, the present writer, having an interview with the
most eminent lay authority in the Greek Church, a functionary
whose duties  had brought him into almost daily contact with the
late archbishop, asked him which of these stories was correct.
This gentleman answered immediately: "Neither; I saw the
archbishop constantly, and no such event occurred; he was never
paralyzed and never blind."

The same gentleman 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.

These examples will serve to illustrate the process which in
thousands of cases has gone on from the earliest days of the
Church until a very recent period. Everywhere miraculous 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 history of
the Church, throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed 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. Edmund, 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 English 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 Aesculapius, so they were cured in the Middle Ages,
and so 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 medieval 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 healing, so faith persists
to-day, despite the fact that in at least ninety per cent of the
cases at Lourdes prayers prove unavailing. As a rule, the
miracles of the sacred books were taken as models, and each of
those given by the sacred chroniclers was repeated during the
early ages of the Church and through the medieval period with
endless variations of circumstance, but still with curious
fidelity to the original type.

It should be especially kept in mind that, while the vast
majority of these were doubtless due to the myth-making 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 Cemetery of St. Medard, of the
Ultramontanes at La Salette and Lourdes, of the Russian Father
Ivan at St. Petersburg, and 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.[297]

[297] 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 Gregory of Nazianen
and the similarity of these Christian cures in general character
to those wrought in the temples of Aesculapius, see Sprengel,
vol. ii, pp. 145, 146. For the miracles wrought at the shrine of
St. Edmund, see Samsonis Abbatis Opus de Miraculis Sancti
Aedmundi, in the Master of the Rolls' series, passim, but
especially chaps. xiv and xix for miracles of healing wrought on
those who drank out of the saint's cup. For the mighty works of
St. Dunstan, see the Mirac. Sancti Dunstani, auctore Eadmero and
auctore Osberno, in the Master of the Rolls' series. As to
Becket, see the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, in
the same series, and especially the lists of miracles--the mere
index of them in the first volume requires thirteen octavo pages.
For St. Martin of Tours, see the Guizot collection of French
Chronicles. For miracle and shrine cures chronicled by Bede, see
his Ecclesiastical History, passim, but especially from page 110
to page 267. For similarity between the ancient custom of
allowing invalids to sleep in the temples of Serapis and the
mediaeval custom of having them sleep in the church of St.
Anthony of Padua and other churches, see Meyer, Aberglaube des
Mittelalters, Basel, 1884, chap. iv. For the effect of "the
vivid belief in supernatural action which attaches itself to the
tombs of the saints," etc., as "a psychic agent of great value,"
see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, p. 131. For the Jansenist
miracles at Paris, see La Verite des Miracles operes par
l'Intercession de M. de Paris, par Montgeron, Utrecht, 1737, and
especially the cases of Mary Anne Couronneau, Philippe Sargent,
and Gautier de Pezenas. For some very thoughtful remarks as to
the worthlessness of the testimony to miracles presented during
the canonization proceedings at Rome, see Maury, Legendes
Pieuses, pp. 4-7.

There are undoubtedly serious lesions which yield to profound
emotion and vigorous exertion born of persuasion, confidence, or
excitement. The wonderful power of the mind over the body is
known to every observant student. Mr. Herbert Spencer dwells
upon the fact that intense feeling or passion may bring out great
muscular force. Dr. Berdoe reminds us that "a gouty man who has
long hobbled about on his crutch, finds his legs and power to run
with them if pursued by a wild bull"; and that "the feeblest
invalid, under the influence of delirium or other strong
excitement, will astonish her nurse by the sudden accession of
strength."[298]

[298] For the citation in the text, as well as for a brief but
remarkably valuable discussion of the power of the mind over the
body in disease, see Dr. Berdoe's Medical View of the Miracles at
Lourdes, in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1895.

But miraculous cures were not ascribed to persons merely.
Another growth, developed by the early Church mainly from germs
in our sacred books, took shape in miracles wrought by streams,
by pools of water, and especially by relics. Here, too, the old
types persisted, and just as we find holy and healing wells,
pools, and streams in all other ancient religions, so we find in
the evolution of our own such examples as Naaman the Syrian cured
of leprosy by bathing in the river Jordan, the blind man restored
to sight by washing in the pool of Siloam, and the healing of
those who touched the bones of Elisha, the shadow of St. Peter,
or the handkerchief of St. Paul.

St. Cyril, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and other great fathers
of the early Church, sanctioned the belief that similar efficacy
was to be found in the relics of the saints of their time; hence,
St. Ambrose declared that "the precepts of medicine are contrary
to celestial science, watching, and prayer," and we find this
statement reiterated from time to time throughout the Middle
Ages. From this idea was evolved that fetichism which we shall
see for ages standing in the way of medical science.

Theology, developed in accordance with this idea, threw about all
cures, even those which resulted from scientific effort, an
atmosphere of supernaturalism. The vividness with which the
accounts of miracles in the sacred books were realized in the
early Church continued the idea of miraculous intervention
throughout the Middle Ages. The testimony of the great fathers
of the Church to the continuance of miracles is overwhelming; but
everything shows that they so fully expected miracles on the
slightest occasion as to require nothing which in these days
would be regarded as adequate evidence.

In this atmosphere of theologic thought medical science was at
once checked. The School of Alexandria, under the influence
first of Jews and later of Christians, both permeated with
Oriental ideas, and taking into their theory of medicine demons
and miracles, soon enveloped everything in mysticism. In the
Byzantine Empire of the East the same cause produced the same
effect; the evolution of ascertained truth in medicine, begun by
Hippocrates and continued by Herophilus, seemed lost forever.
Medical science, trying to advance, was like a ship becalmed in
the Sargasso Sea: both the atmosphere about it and the medium
through which it must move resisted all progress. Instead of
reliance upon observation, experience, experiment, and thought,
attention was turned toward supernatural agencies.[299]

[299] For the mysticism which gradually enveloped the School of
Alexandria, see Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, De l'Ecole
d'Alexandrie, Paris, 1845, vol. vi, p. 161. For the effect of
the new doctrines on the Empire of the East, see Sprengel, vol.
ii, p. 240. As to the more common miracles of healing and the
acknowledgment of non-Christian miracles of healing by Christian
fathers, see Fort, p. 84.

IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE.
--"PASTORAL MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT.

Especially prejudicial to a true development of medical science
among the first Christians was their attribution of disease to
diabolic influence. As we have seen, this idea had come from
far, and, having prevailed in Chaldea, Egypt, and Persia, had
naturally entered into the sacred books of the Hebrews.
Moreover, St. Paul had distinctly declared that the gods of the
heathen were devils; and everywhere the early Christians saw in
disease the malignant work of these dethroned powers of evil.
The Gnostic and Manichaean struggles had ripened the theologic
idea that, although at times diseases are punishments by the
Almighty, the main agency in them is Satanic. The great fathers
and renowned leaders of the early Church accepted and
strengthened this idea. Origen said: "It is demons which produce
famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of the air, pestilences; they
hover concealed in clouds in the lower atmosphere, and are
attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen offer to
them as gods."  St. Augustine said: "All diseases of Christians
are to be ascribed to these demons; chiefly do they torment
fresh-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, newborn
infants."  Tertullian insisted that a malevolent angel is in
constant attendance upon every person. Gregory of Nazianzus
declared that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that
medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the
laying on of consecrated hands. St. Nilus and St. Gregory of
Tours, echoing St. Ambrose, gave examples to show the sinfulness
of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession
of saints. St. Bernard, in a letter to certain monks, warned
them that to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony
neither with their religion nor with the honour and purity of
their order. This view even found its way into the canon law,
which declared the precepts of medicine contrary to Divine
knowledge. As a rule, the leaders of the Church discouraged the
theory that diseases are due to natural causes, and most of them
deprecated a resort to surgeons and physicians rather than to
supernatural means.[300]

[300] For Chaldean, Egyptian, and Persian ideas as to the
diabolic origin of disease, see authorities already cited,
especially Maspero and Sayce. For Origen, see the Contra Celsum,
lib. viii, chap. xxxi. For Augustine, see De Divinatione
Daemonum, chap. iii (p.585 of Migne, vol. xl). For Turtullian
and Gregory of Nazianzus, see citations in Sprengel and in Fort,
p. 6. For St. Nilus, see his life, in the Bollandise Acta
Sanctorum. For Gregory of Tours, see his Historia Francorum,
lib. v, cap. 6, and his De Mirac. S. Martini, lib. ii, cap. 60.
I owe these citations to Mr. Lea (History of the Inquisition of
the Middle Ages, vol. iii, p. 410, note). For the letter of St.
Bernard to the monks of St. Anastasius, see his Epistola in
Migne, tom. 182, pp. 550, 551. For the canon law, see under De
Consecratione, dist. v, c. xxi, "Contraria sunt divinae
cognitioni praecepta medicinae: a jejunio revocant, lucubrare non
sinunt, ab omni intentione meditiationis abducunt."  For the
turning of the Greek mythology into a demonology as largely due
to St. Paul, see I Corinthians x, 20: "The things which the
Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God."

Out of these and similar considerations was developed the vast
system of "pastoral medicine," so powerful not only through the
Middle Ages, but even in modern times, both among Catholics and
Protestants. As to its results, we must bear in mind that, while
there is no need to attribute the mass of stories regarding
miraculous cures to conscious fraud, there was without doubt, at
a later period, no small admixture of belief biased by
self-interest, with much pious invention and suppression of
facts. Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and
churches in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their
healing powers. Every cathedral, every great abbey, and nearly
every parish church claimed possession of healing relics. While,
undoubtedly, a childlike faith was at the bottom of this belief,
there came out of it unquestionably a great development of the
mercantile spirit. The commercial value of sundry relics was
often very high. In the year 1056 a French ruler pledged
securities to the amount of ten thousand solidi for the
production of the relics of St. Just and St. Pastor, pending a
legal decision regarding the ownership between him and the
Archbishop of Narbonne. The Emperor of Germany on one occasion
demanded, as a sufficient pledge for the establishment of a city
market, the arm of St. George. The body of St. Sebastian
brought enormous wealth to the Abbey of Soissons; Rome,
Canterbury, Treves, Marburg, every great city, drew large
revenues from similar sources, and the Venetian Republic ventured
very considerable sums in the purchase of relics.

Naturally, then, corporations, whether lay or ecclesiastical,
which drew large revenue from relics looked with little favour on
a science which tended to discredit their investments.

Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe can the philosophy of this
development of fetichism be better studied to-day than at
Cologne. At the cathedral, preserved in a magnificent shrine
since about the twelfth century, are the skulls of the Three
Kings, or Wise Men of the East, who, guided by the star of
Bethlehem, brought gifts to the Saviour. These relics were an
enormous source of wealth to the cathedral chapter during many
centuries. But other ecclesiastical bodies in that city were
both pious and shrewd, and so we find that not far off, at the
church of St. Gereon, a cemetery has been dug up, and the bones
distributed over the walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his
Theban band of martyrs! Again, at the neighbouring church of St.
Ursula, we have the later spoils of another cemetery, covering
the interior walls of the church as the bones of St. Ursula and
her eleven thousand virgin martyrs: the fact that many of them,
as anatomists now declare, are the bones of MEN does not appear
in the Middle Ages to have diminished their power of competing
with the relics at the other shrines in healing efficiency.

No error in the choice of these healing means seems to have
diminished their efficacy. When Prof. Buckland, the eminent
osteologist and geologist, discovered that the relics of St.
Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded
off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the
slightest diminution in their miraculous power.

Other developments of fetich cure were no less discouraging to
the evolution of medical science. Very important among these was
the Agnus Dei, or piece of wax from the Paschal candles, stamped
with the figure of a lamb and consecrated by the Pope. In 1471
Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of this
fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, tempest,
lightning, and hail, as well as in assisting women in childbirth;
and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture of
it. Even as late as 1517 Pope Leo X issued, for a consideration,
tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription: "This
cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in his
humanity. He who kisses it is preserved for seven days from
falling-sickness, apoplexy, and sudden death."

Naturally, the belief thus sanctioned by successive heads of the
Church, infallible in all teaching regarding faith and morals,
created a demand for amulets and charms of all kinds; and under
this influence we find a reversion to old pagan fetiches.
Nothing, on the whole, stood more constantly in the way of any
proper development of medical science than these fetich cures,
whose efficacy was based on theological reasoning and sanctioned
by ecclesiastical policy. It would be expecting too much from
human nature to imagine that pontiffs who derived large revenues
from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or priests who derived both
wealth and honours from cures wrought at shrines under their
care, or lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics,
should favour the development of any science which undermined
their interests.[301]

[301] See Fort's Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, pp. 211-
213; also the Handbooks of Murray and Baedeker for North Germany,
and various histories of medicine passim; also Collin de Plancy
and scores of others. For the discovery that the relics of St.
Rosaria at Palermo are simply the bones of a goat, see Gordon,
Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96. For an account of the Agnes Dei,
see Rydberg, pp. 62, 63; and for "Conception Billets," pp. 64 and
65. For Leo X's tickets, see Hausser (professor at Heidelberg),
Period of Reformation, English translation, p. 17.

V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES.

Yet a more serious stumbling-block, hindering the beginnings of
modern medicine and surgery, was a theory regarding the
unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. This
theory, like so many others which the Church cherished as
peculiarly its own, had really been inherited from the old pagan
civilizations. So strong was it in Egypt that the embalmer was
regarded as accursed; traces of it appear in Greco-Roman life,
and hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly
strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic
ideas--the recognition of the human body as the temple of the
Holy Spirit. Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus
as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in
similar terms.

But this nobler conception was alloyed with a medieval
superstition even more effective, when the formula known as the
Apostles' Creed had, in its teachings regarding the resurrection
of the body, supplanted the doctrine laid down by St. Paul.
Thence came a dread of mutilating the body in such a way that
some injury might result to its final resurrection at the Last
Day, and additional reasons for hindering dissections in the
study of anatomy.

To these arguments against dissection was now added another--one
which may well fill us with amazement. It is the remark of the
foremost of recent English philosophical historians, that of all
organizations in human history the Church of Rome has caused the
greatest spilling of innocent blood. No one conversant with
history, even though he admit all possible extenuating
circumstances, and honour the older Church for the great services
which can undoubtedly be claimed for her, can deny this
statement. Strange is it, then, to note that one of the main
objections developed in the Middle Ages against anatomical
studies was the maxim that "the Church abhors the shedding of
blood."

On this ground, in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery
to monks. Many other councils did the same, and at the end of
the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all; for
then it was that Pope Boniface VIII, without any of that
foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in
an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice
which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the
separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains
it was desired to carry back to their own country.

The idea lying at the bottom of this interdiction was in all
probability that which had inspired Tertullian to make his bitter
utterance against Herophilus; but, be that as it may, it soon
came to be considered as extending to all dissection, and thereby
surgery and medicine were crippled for more than two centuries;
it was the worst blow they ever received, for it impressed upon
the mind of the Church the belief that all dissection is
sacrilege, and led to ecclesiastical mandates withdrawing from
the healing art the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the
Middle Ages and giving up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic
charlatans.

So deeply was this idea rooted in the mind of the universal
Church that for over a thousand years surgery was considered
dishonourable: the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure
an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a
better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany
ordered that dishonour should no longer attach to the surgical
profession.[302]

[302] As to religious scruples against dissection, and abhorrence
of the Paraschites, or embalmer, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn
of Civilization, p. 216. For denunciation of surgery by the
Church authorities, see Sprengel, vol. ii, pp. 432-435; also
Fort, pp. 452 et seq.; and for the reasoning which led the Church
to forbid surgery to priests, see especially Fredault, Histoire
de la Medecine, p. 200. As to the decretal of Boniface VIII, the
usual statement is that he forbade all dissections. While it was
undoubtedly construed universally to prohibit dissections for
anatomical purposes, its declared intent was as stated in the
text; that it was constantly construed against anatomical
investigations can not for a moment be denied. This construction
is taken for granted in the great Histoire Litteraire de la
France, founded by the Benedictines, certainly a very high
authority as to the main current of opinion in the Church. For
the decretal of Boniface VIII, see the Corpus Juris Canonici. I
have also used the edition of Paris, 1618, where it may be found
on pp. 866, 867. See also, in spite of the special pleading of
Giraldi, the Benedictine Hist. Lit. de la France, tome xvi, p.
98.

VI. NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.

In spite of all these opposing forces, the evolution of medical
science continued, though but slowly. In the second century of
the Christian era Galen had made himself a great authority at
Rome, and from Rome had swayed the medical science of the world:
his genius triumphed over the defects of his method; but, though
he gave a powerful impulse to medicine, his dogmatism stood in
its way long afterward.

The places where medicine, such as it thus became, could be
applied, were at first mainly the infirmaries of various
monasteries, especially the larger ones of the Benedictine order:
these were frequently developed into hospitals. Many monks
devoted themselves to such medical studies as were permitted, and
sundry churchmen and laymen did much to secure and preserve
copies of ancient medical treatises. So, too, in the cathedral
schools established by Charlemagne and others, provision was
generally made for medical teaching; but all this instruction,
whether in convents or schools, was wretchedly poor. It
consisted not in developing by individual thought and experiment
the gifts of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, but almost
entirely in the parrot-like repetition of their writings.

But, while the inherited ideas of Church leaders were thus
unfavourable to any proper development of medical science, there
were two bodies of men outside the Church who, though largely
fettered by superstition, were far less so than the monks and
students of ecclesiastical schools: these were the Jews and
Mohammedans. The first of these especially had inherited many
useful sanitary and hygienic ideas, which had probably been first
evolved by the Egyptians, and from them transmitted to the modern
world mainly through the sacred books attributed to Moses.

The Jewish scholars became especially devoted to medical science.
To them is largely due the building up of the School of Salerno,
which we find flourishing in the tenth century. Judged by our
present standards its work was poor indeed, but compared with
other medical instruction of the time it was vastly superior: it
developed hygienic principles especially, and brought medicine
upon a higher plane.

Still more important is the rise of the School of Montpellier;
this was due almost entirely to Jewish physicians, and it
developed medical studies to a yet higher point, doing much to
create a medical profession worthy of the name throughout
southern Europe.

As to the Arabians, we find them from the tenth to the fourteenth
century, especially in Spain, giving much thought to medicine,
and to chemistry as subsidiary to it. About the beginning of the
ninth century, when the greater Christian writers were supporting
fetich by theology, Almamon, the Moslem, declared, "They are the
elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are
devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties."  The
influence of Avicenna, the translator of the works of Aristotle,
extended throughout all Europe during the eleventh century. The
Arabians were indeed much fettered by tradition in medical
science, but their translations of Hippocrates and Galen
preserved to the world the best thus far developed in medicine,
and still better were their contributions to pharmacy: these
remain of value to the present hour.[303]

[303] For the great services rendered to the development of
medicine by the Jews, see Monteil, Medecine en France, p. 58;
also the historians of medicine generally. For the quotation
from Almamon, see Gibbon, vol. x, p. 42. For the services of
both Jews and Arabians, see Bedarride, Histoire des Juifs, p.
115; also Sismondi, Histoire des Francais, tome i, p. 191. For
the Arabians, especially, see Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Histoire
d'Espagne, Paris, 1844, vol. iii, pp. 191 et seq. For the
tendency of the Mosaic books to insist on hygienic rather than
therapeutical treatment, and its consequences among Jewish
physicians, see Sprengel, but especially Fredault, p.14.

Various Christian laymen also rose above the prevailing theologic
atmosphere far enough to see the importance of promoting
scientific development. First among these we may name the
Emperor Charlemagne; he and his great minister, Alcuin, not only
promoted medical studies in the schools they founded, but also
made provision for the establishment of botanic gardens in which
those herbs were especially cultivated which were supposed to
have healing virtues. So, too, in the thirteenth century, the
Emperor Frederick II, though under the ban of the Pope, brought
together in his various journeys, and especially in his crusading
expeditions, many Greek and Arabic manuscripts, and took special
pains to have those which concerned medicine preserved and
studied; he also promoted better ideas of medicine and embodied
them in laws.

Men of science also rose, in the stricter sense of the word, even
in the centuries under the most complete sway of theological
thought and ecclesiastical power; a science, indeed, alloyed
with theology, but still infolding precious germs. Of these were
men like Arnold of Villanova, Bertrand de Gordon, Albert of
Bollstadt, Basil Valentine, Raymond Lully, and, above all, Roger
Bacon; all of whom cultivated sciences subsidiary to medicine,
and in spite of charges of sorcery, with possibilities of
imprisonment and death, kept the torch of knowledge burning, and
passed it on to future generations.[304]

[304] For the progress of sciences subsidiary to medicine even in
the darkest ages, see Fort, pp. 374, 375; also Isensee,
Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 225 et seq.; also Monteil, p. 89;
Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, bk. 3; also Kopp,
Geschichte der Chemie. For Frederick II and his
Medicinal-Gesetz, see Baas, p. 221, but especially Von Raumer,
Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, Leipsic, 1872, vol. iii, p. 259.

From the Church itself, even when the theological atmosphere was
most dense, rose here and there men who persisted in something
like scientific effort. As early as the ninth century,
Bertharius, a monk of Monte Cassino, prepared two manuscript
volumes of prescriptions selected from ancient writers; other
monks studied them somewhat, and, during succeeding ages,
scholars like Hugo, Abbot of St. Denis,--Notker, monk of St.
Gall,--Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg,--Milo, Archbishop of
Beneventum,--and John of St. Amand, Canon of Tournay, did
something for medicine as they understood it. Unfortunately,
they generally understood its theory as a mixture of deductions
from Scripture with dogmas from Galen, and its practice as a
mixture of incantations with fetiches. Even Pope Honorius III
did something for the establishment of medical schools; but he
did so much more to place ecclesiastical and theological fetters
upon teachers and taught, that the value of his gifts may well be
doubted. All germs of a higher evolution of medicine were for
ages well kept under by the theological spirit. As far back as
the sixth century so great a man as Pope Gregory I showed himself
hostile to the development of this science. In the beginning of
the twelfth century the Council of Rheims interdicted the study
of law and physic to monks, and a multitude of other councils
enforced this decree. About the middle of the same century St.
Bernard still complained that monks had too much to do with
medicine; and a few years later we have decretals like those of
Pope Alexander III forbidding monks to study or practise it. For
many generations there appear evidences of a desire among the
more broad-minded churchmen to allow the cultivation of medical
science among ecclesiastics: Popes like Clement III and
Sylvester II seem to have favoured this, and we even hear of an
Archbishop of Canterbury skilled in medicine; but in the
beginning of the thirteenth century the Fourth Council of the
Lateran forbade surgical operations to be practised by priests,
deacons, and subdeacons; and some years later Honorius III
reiterated this decree and extended it. In 1243 the Dominican
order forbade medical treatises to be brought into their
monasteries, and finally all participation of ecclesiastics in
the science and art of medicine was effectually prevented.[305]

[305] For statements as to these decrees of the highest Church
and monastic authorities against medicine and surgery, see
Sprengel, Baas, Geschichte der Medicin, p. 204, and elsewhere;
also Buckle, Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 567. For a long list
of Church dignitaries who practised a semi-theological medicine
in the Middle Ages, see Baas, pp. 204, 205. For Bertharius,
Hildegard, and others mentioned, see also Sprengel and other
historians of medicine. For clandestine study and practice of
medicine by sundry ecclesiastics in spite of the prohibition by
the Church, see Von Raumer, Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 438. For
some remarks on this subject by an eminent and learned
ecclesiastic, see Ricker, O. S. B., professor in the University
of Vienna, Pastoral-Psychiatrie, 1894, pp. 12,13.

VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE.

While various churchmen, building better than they knew, thus did
something to lay foundations for medical study, the Church
authorities, as a rule, did even more to thwart it among the very
men who, had they been allowed liberty, would have cultivated it
to the highest advantage.

Then, too, we find cropping out every where the feeling that,
since supernatural means are so abundant, there is something
irreligious in seeking cure by natural means: ever and anon we
have appeals to Scripture, and especially to the case of King
Asa, who trusted to physicians rather than to the priests of
Jahveh, and so died. Hence it was that St. Bernard declared
that monks who took medicine were guilty of conduct unbecoming to
religion. Even the School of Salerno was held in aversion by
multitudes of strict churchmen, since it prescribed rules for
diet, thereby indicating a belief that diseases arise from
natural causes and not from the malice of the devil: moreover,
in the medical schools Hippocrates was studied, and he had
especially declared that demoniacal possession is "nowise more
divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease."  Hence it
was, doubtless, that the Lateran Council, about the beginning of
the thirteenth century, forbade physicians, under pain of
exclusion from the Church, to undertake medical treatment without
calling in ecclesiastical advice.

This view was long cherished in the Church, and nearly two
hundred and fifty years later Pope Pius V revived it by renewing
the command of Pope Innocent and enforcing it with penalties.
Not only did Pope Pius order that all physicians before
administering treatment should call in "a physician of the soul,"
on the ground, as he declares, that "bodily infirmity frequently
arises from sin," but he ordered that, if at the end of three
days the patient had not made confession to a priest, the medical
man should cease his treatment, under pain of being deprived of
his right to practise, and of expulsion from the faculty if he
were a professor, and that every physician and professor of
medicine should make oath that he was strictly fulfilling these
conditions.

Out of this feeling had grown up another practice, which made the
development of medicine still more difficult--the classing of
scientific men generally with sorcerers and magic-mongers: from
this largely rose the charge of atheism against physicians, which
ripened into a proverb, "Where there are three physicians there
are two atheists."[306]

[306] "Ubi sunt tres medici ibi sunt duo athei."  For the bull of
Pius V, see the Bullarium Romanum, ed. Gaude, Naples, 1882, tom.
vii, pp. 430, 431.

Magic was so common a charge that many physicians seemed to
believe it themselves. In the tenth century Gerbert, afterward
known as Pope Sylvester II, was at once suspected of sorcery when
he showed a disposition to adopt scientific methods; in the
eleventh century this charge nearly cost the life of Constantine
Africanus when he broke from the beaten path of medicine; in the
thirteenth, it gave Roger Bacon, one of the greatest benefactors
of mankind, many years of imprisonment, and nearly brought him to
the stake: these cases are typical of very many.

Still another charge against physicians who showed a talent for
investigation was that of Mohammedanism and Averroism; and
Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark
at Christ."[307]

[307] For Averroes, see Renan, Averroes et l'Averroisme, Paris,
1861, pp. 327-335. For a perfectly just statement of the only
circumstances which can justify a charge of atheism, see Rev. Dr.
Deems, in Popular Science Monthly, February, 1876.

The effect of this widespread ecclesiastical opposition was, that
for many centuries the study of medicine was relegated mainly to
the lowest order of practitioners. There was, indeed, one
orthodox line of medical evolution during the later Middle Ages:
St. Thomas Aquinas insisted that the forces of the body are
independent of its physical organization, and that therefore
these forces are to be studied by the scholastic philosophy and
the theological method, instead of by researches into the
structure of the body; as a result of this, mingled with
survivals of various pagan superstitions, we have in anatomy and
physiology such doctrines as the increase and decrease of the
brain with the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human
vitality with the tides of the ocean, the use of the lungs to fan
the heart, the function of the liver as the seat of love, and
that of the spleen as the centre of wit.

Closely connected with these methods of thought was the doctrine
of signatures. It was reasoned that the Almighty must have set
his sign upon the various means of curing disease which he has
provided: hence it was held that bloodroot, on account of its
red juice, is good for the blood; liverwort, having a leaf like
the liver, cures diseases of the liver; eyebright, being marked
with a spot like an eye, cures diseases of the eyes; celandine,
having a yellow juice, cures jaundice; bugloss, resembling a
snake's head, cures snakebite; red flannel, looking like blood,
cures blood-taints, and therefore rheumatism; bear's grease,
being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is
recommended to persons fearing baldness.[308]

[308] For a summary of the superstitions which arose under the
theological doctrine of signatures, see Dr. Eccles's admirable
little tract on the Evolution of Medical Science, p. 140; see
also Scoffern, Science and Folk Lore, p. 76.

Still another method evolved by this theological pseudoscience
was that of disgusting the demon with the body which he
tormented--hence the patient was made to swallow or apply to
himself various unspeakable ordures, with such medicines as the
livers of toads, the blood of frogs and rats, fibres of the
hangman's rope, and ointment made from the body of gibbeted
criminals. Many of these were survivals of heathen
superstitions, but theologic reasoning wrought into them an
orthodox significance. As an example of this mixture of heathen
with Christian magic, we may cite the following from a medieval
medical book as a salve against "nocturnal goblin visitors":
"Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat,
henbane, harewort, viper's bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek,
garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel. Put these
worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them
nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much
holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running
water. If any ill tempting occur to a man, or an elf or goblin
night visitors come, smear his body with this salve, and put it
on his eyes, and cense him with incense, and sign him frequently
with the sign of the cross. His condition will soon be
better."[309]

[309] For a list of unmentionable ordures used in Germany near
the end of the seventeenth century, see Lammert, Volksmedizin und
medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern, Wurzburg, 1869, p. 34, note.
For the English prescription given, see Cockayne, Leechdoms,
Wort-cunning, and Star-craft of Early England, in the Master of
the Rolls' series, London, 1865, vol. ii, pp. 345 and following.
Still another of these prescriptions given by Cockayne covers
three or four octavo pages. For very full details of this sort
of sacred pseudo-science in Germany, with accounts of survivals
of it at the present time, see Wuttke, Prof. der Theologie in
Halle, Der Deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, Berlin, 1869,
passim. For France, see Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation
francaise, pp. 371 et seq.

As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with survivals
of pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of medical
science down to the modern epoch. The nominal hostility of the
Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from
surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence
surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised
profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of
charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name
"barber-surgeon" was a survival of this. In such surgery, the
application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of
the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled
poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured toothache.[310]

[310] On the low estate of surgery during the Middle Ages, see
the histories of medicine already cited, and especially
Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, Hamburg, 1890, pp.
216 et seq.

The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the
Church continued during century after century, and here probably
lay the main causes of hostility between the Church on the one
hand and the better sort of physicians on the other; namely, in
the fact that the Church supposed herself in possession of
something far better than scientific methods in medicine. Under
the sway of this belief a natural and laudable veneration for the
relics of Christian martyrs was developed more and more into pure
fetichism.

Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped
was used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been
dipped cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been
dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of
St. Gall cured tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St.
Christopher, throat diseases; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid,
deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St. Apollonia, toothache;
St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the
maladies which bear their names. Even as late as 1784 we find
certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a
mad dog shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St. Hubert,
and not waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical
cure.[311] In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted
by causing the invalid to drink water in which St. Bernard had
washed his hands. Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a
saint, when steeped in water, were supposed to be especially
efficacious in various diseases. The pulpit everywhere dwelt
with unction on the reality of fetich cures, and among the choice
stories collected by Archbishop Jacques de Vitry for the use of
preachers was one which, judging from its frequent recurrence in
monkish literature, must have sunk deep into the popular mind:
"Two lazy beggars, one blind, the other lame, try to avoid the
relics of St. Martin, borne about in procession, so that they may
not be healed and lose their claim to alms. The blind man takes
the lame man on his shoulders to guide him, but they are caught
in the crowd and healed against their will."[312]

[311] See Baas, p. 614; aslo Biedermann.

[312] For the efficacy of flowers, see the Bollandist Lives of
the Saints, cited in Fort, p. 279; also pp. 457, 458. For the
story of those unwillingly cured, see the Exempla of Jacques de
Vitry, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University,
London, 1890, pp. 52, 182.

Very important also throughout the Middle Ages were the medical
virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had early
Oriental sanction. It is clearly found in Egypt. Pliny devotes
a considerable part of one of his chapters to it; Galen approved
it; Vespasian, when he visited Alexandria, is said to have cured
a blind man by applying saliva to his eves; but the great
example impressed most forcibly upon the medieval mind was the
use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus himself: thence
it came not only into Church ceremonial, but largely into medical
practice.[313]

[313] As to the use of saliva in medicine, see Story, Castle of
St. Angelo, and Other Essays, London, 1877, pp. 208 and
elsewhere. For Pliny, Galen, and others, see the same, p. 211;
see also the book of Tobit, chap. xi, 2-13. For the case of
Vespasian, see Suetonius, Life of Vespasian; also Tacitus,
Historiae, lib. iv, c. 81. For its use by St. Francis Xavier,
see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, London,
1872.

As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every country had
its long list of saints, each with a special power over some one
organ or disease. The clergy, having great influence over the
medical schools, conscientiously mixed this fetich medicine with
the beginnings of science. In the tenth century, even at the
School of Salerno, we find that the sick were cured not only by
medicine, but by the relics of St. Matthew and others.

Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making
various pious cures fashionable for a time and then allowing them
to become unfashionable. Just as we see the relics of St. Cosmo
and St. Damian in great vogue during the early Middle Ages, but
out of fashion and without efficacy afterward, so we find in the
thirteenth century that the bones of St. Louis, having come into
fashion, wrought multitudes of cures, while in the fourteenth,
having become unfashionable, they ceased to act, and gave place
for a time to the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier and St.
Catherine of Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures until
they too became out of date and yielded to other saints. Just so
in modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost
prestige in some measure, and those of Lourdes have come into
fashion.[314]

[314] For one of these lists of saints curing diseaes, see
Pettigrew, On Superstitions connected with Medicine; for another,
see Jacob, Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96-100; also Rydberg, p.
69; also Maury, Rambaud, and others. For a comparison of
fashions in miracles with fashions in modern healing agents, see
Littre, Medecine et Medecins, pp. 118, 136 and elsewhere; also
Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143.

Even such serious matters as fractures, calculi, and difficult
parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its
greatest triumphs, were then dealt with by relics; and to this
hour the ex votos hanging at such shrines as those of St.
Genevieve at Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at
Chartres, of the Virgin at Einsiedeln and Lourdes, of the
fountain at La Salette, are survivals of this same conception of
disease and its cure.

So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, and spots of
earth. In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had one such sacred
centre; in England and Scotland there have been many; and as
late as 1805 the eminent Dr. Milner, of the Roman Catholic
Church, gave a careful and earnest account of a miraculous cure
wrought at a sacred well in Flintshire. In all parts of Europe
the pious resort to wells and springs continued long after the
close of the Middle Ages, and has not entirely ceased to-day.
It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional deception in
the origin and maintenance of all fetich cures. Although two
different judicial investigations of the modern miracles at La
Salette have shown their origin tainted with fraud, and though
the recent restoration of the Cathedral of Trondhjem has revealed
the fact that the healing powers of the sacred spring which once
brought such great revenues to that shrine were assisted by
angelic voices spoken through a tube in the walls, not unlike the
pious machinery discovered in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii,
there is little doubt that the great majority of fountain and
even shrine cures, such as they have been, have resulted from a
natural law, and that belief in them was based on honest argument
from Scripture. For the theological argument which thus stood in
the way of science was simply this: if the Almighty saw fit to
raise the dead man who touched the bones of Elisha, why should he
not restore to life the patient who touches at Cologne the bones
of the Wise Men of the East who followed the star of the
Nativity?  If Naaman was cured by dipping himself in the waters
of the Jordan, and so many others by going down into the Pool of
Siloam, why should not men still be cured by bathing in pools
which men equally holy with Elisha have consecrated?  If one
sick man was restored by touching the garments of St. Paul, why
should not another sick man be restored by touching the seamless
coat of Christ at Treves, or the winding-sheet of Christ at
Besancon?  And out of all these inquiries came inevitably that
question whose logical answer was especially injurious to the
development of medical science: Why should men seek to build up
scientific medicine and surgery, when relics, pilgrimages, and
sacred observances, according to an overwhelming mass of
concurrent testimony, have cured and are curing hosts of sick
folk in all parts of Europe? [315]

[315] For sacred fountains in modern times, see Pettigrew, as
above, p. 42; also Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp.
82 and following; also Montalembert, Les Moines d'Occident, tome
iii, p. 323, note. For those in Ireland, with many curious
details, see S. C. Hall, Ireland, its Scenery and Character,
London, 1841, vol. i, p. 282, and passim. For the case in
Flintshire, see Authentic Documents relative to the Miraculous
Cure of Winifred White, of the Town of Wolverhampton, at
Holywell, Flintshire, on the 28th of June, 1805, by John Milner,
D. D., Vicar Apostolic, etc., London, 1805. For sacred wells in
France, see Chevart, Histoire de Chartres, vol. i, pp. 84-89, and
French local histories generally. For superstitions attaching to
springs in Germany, see Wuttke, Volksaberglaube, Sections 12 and
356. For one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern
fiction, showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous
powers at a fashionable spring in France, see Gustave Droz,
Autour d'une Source. The reference to the old pious machinery at
Trondhjem is based upon personal observation by the present
writer in August, 1893.

Still another development of the theological spirit, mixed with
professional exclusiveness and mob prejudice, wrought untold
injury. Even to those who had become so far emancipated from
allegiance to fetich cures as to consult physicians, it was
forbidden to consult those who, as a rule, were the best. From a
very early period of European history the Jews had taken the lead
in medicine; their share in founding the great schools of
Salerno and Montpellier we have already noted, and in all parts
of Europe we find them acknowledged leaders in the healing art.
The Church authorities, enforcing the spirit of the time, were
especially severe against these benefactors: that men who openly
rejected the means of salvation, and whose souls were undeniably
lost, should heal the elect seemed an insult to Providence;
preaching friars denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers
in state and church, while frequently secretly consulting them,
openly proscribed them.

Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having been
partially cured of disease of the eyes by St. Martin, sought
further aid from a Jewish physician, with the result that neither
the saint nor the Jew could help him afterward. Popes Eugene IV,
Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to
employ them. The Trullanean Council in the eighth century, the
Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth, the Councils of
Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and
the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in
the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful
to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as
John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against
them and all who consulted them. As late as the middle of the
seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, in
Wurtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physician "on
account of his admirable experience and skill," the clergy of the
city joined in a protest, declaring that "it were better to die
with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil."
Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals, kings, and even
popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated race.[316]

[316] For the general subject of the influence of theological
idea upon medicine, see Fort, History of Medical Economy during
the Middle Ages, New York, 1883, chaps. xiii and xviii; also
Colin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des Reliques, passim; also Rambaud,
Histoire de la Civilisation francaise, Paris, 1885, vol. i, chap.
xviii; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 345, and elsewhere; also Baas
and others. For proofs that the School of Salerno was not
founded by the monks, Benedictine or other, but by laymen, who
left out a faculty of theology from their organization, see
Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i, p. 646; also
Baas. For a very strong statement that married professors,
women, and Jews were admitted to professional chairs, see Baas,
pp. 208 et seq.; also summary by Dr. Payne, article in the Encyc.
Brit. Sprengel's old theory that the school was founded by
Benedictines seems now entirely given up; see Haeser and Bass on
the subject; also Daremberg, La Medecine, p. 133. For the
citation from Gregory of Tours, see his Hist. Francorum, lib. vi.
For the eminence of Jewish physicians and proscription of them,
see Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris, 1824, pp. 76-94; also
Bedarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, et en Espagne, chaps.
v, viii, x, and xiii; also Renouard, Histoire de la Medecine,
Paris, 1846, tome i, p. 439; also especially Lammert,
Volksmedizin, etc., in Bayern, p. 6, note. For Church decrees
against them, see the Acta Conciliorum, ed. Hardouin, vol. x, pp.
1634, 1700, 1870, 1873, etc. For denunciations of them by Geiler
and others, see Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, pp.
194, 195. For a list of kings and popes who persisted in having
Jewish physicians and for other curious information of the sort,
see Prof. Levi of Vercelli, Cristiani ed Ebrei nel Medio Evo, pp.
200-207; and for a very valuable summary, see Lecky, History of
Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, pp. 265-271.

VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH.

The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of
medicine. Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed his
own diseases to "devils' spells," declaring that "Satan produces
all the maladies which afflict mankind, for he is the prince of
death," and that "he poisons the air"; but that "no malady comes
from God."  From that day down to the faith cures of Boston, Old
Orchard, and among the sect of "Peculiar People" in our own time,
we see the results among Protestants of seeking the cause of
disease in Satanic influence and its cure in fetichism.

Yet Luther, with his sturdy common sense, broke away from one
belief which has interfered with the evolution of medicine from
the dawn of Christianity until now. When that troublesome
declaimer, Carlstadt, declared that "whoso falls sick shall use
no physic, but commit his case to God, praying that His will be
done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when you are hungry?" and the
answer being in the affirmative, he continued, "Even so you may
use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink is, or
whatever else we use for the preservation of life."  Hence it
was, doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more
ready than others to admit anatomical investigation by proper
dissections.[317]

[317] For Luther's belief and his answer to Carlstadt, see his
Table Talk, especially in Hazlitt's edition, pp. 250-257; also
his letters passim. For recent "faith cures," see Dr. Buckley's
articles on Faith Healing and Kindred Phenomena, in The Century,
1886. For the greater readiness of Protestant cities to
facilitate dissections, see Toth, Andreas Vesalius, p. 33.

Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in the
Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a
French germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of
the royal touch in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and
scrofula, the latter being consequently known as the king's evil.
This mode of cure began, so far as history throws light upon it,
with Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and came down
from reign to reign, passing from the Catholic saint to
Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with
ever-increasing miraculous efficacy.

Testimony to the reality of these cures is overwhelming. As a
simple matter of fact, there are no miracles of healing in the
history of the human race more thoroughly attested than those
wrought by the touch of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and
especially of that chosen vessel, Charles II. Though Elizabeth
could not bring herself fully to believe in the reality of these
cures, Dr. Tooker, the Queen's chaplain, afterward Dean of
Lichfield, testifies fully of his own knowledge to the cures
wrought by her, as also does William Clowes, the Queen's surgeon.
Fuller, in his Church History, gives an account of a Roman
Catholic who was thus cured by the Queen's touch and converted to
Protestantism. Similar testimony exists as to cures wrought by
James I. Charles I also enjoyed the same power, in spite of the
public declaration against its reality by Parliament. In one
case the King saw a patient in the crowd, too far off to be
touched, and simply said, "God bless thee and grant thee thy
desire"; whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours
disappeared from the patient's body and appeared in the bottle of
medicine which he held in his hand; at least so says Dr. John
Nicholas, Warden of Winchester College, who declares this of his
own knowledge to be every word of it true.

But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous gift is
found in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly cynical
debauchee who ever sat on the English throne before the advent of
George IV. He touched nearly one hundred thousand persons, and
the outlay for gold medals issued to the afflicted on these
occasions rose in some years as high as ten thousand pounds.
John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his Majesty and to St.
Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works on surgery
and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the touch
of this monarch; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an entire
book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, "I myself
have been frequent witness to many hundreds of cures performed by
his Majesty's touch alone without any assistance of chirurgery,
and these many of them had tyred out the endeavours of able
chirurgeons before they came thither."  Yet it is especially
instructive to note that, while in no other reign were so many
people touched for scrofula, and in none were so many cures
vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of that
disease: the bills of mortality show this clearly, and the
reason doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural for
scientific means of cure. This is but one out of many examples
showing the havoc which a scientific test always makes among
miracles if men allow it to be applied.

To James II the same power continued; and if it be said, in the
words of Lord Bacon, that "imagination is next of kin to
miracle--a working faith," something else seems required to
account for the testimony of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the
royal touch upon babes in their mothers' arms. Myth-making and
marvel-mongering were evidently at work here as in so many other
places, and so great was the fame of these cures that we find, in
the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to enable him to make
the voyage to England in order that he may be healed by the royal
touch.

The change in the royal succession does not seem to have
interfered with the miracle; for, though William III evidently
regarded the whole thing as a superstition, and on one occasion
is said to have touched a patient, saying to him, "God give you
better health and more sense," Whiston assures us that this
person was healed, notwithstanding William's incredulity.

As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his Art of Surgery,
relates that several cases of scrofula which had been
unsuccessfully treated by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard,
sergeant-surgeon to her Majesty, yielded afterward to the
efficacy of the Queen's touch. Naturally does Collier, in his
Ecclesiastical History, say regarding these cases that to
dispute them "is to come to the extreme of scepticism, to deny
our senses and be incredulous even to ridiculousness."  Testimony
to the reality of these cures is indeed overwhelming, and a
multitude of most sober scholars, divines, and doctors of
medicine declared the evidence absolutely convincing. That the
Church of England accepted the doctrine of the royal touch is
witnessed by the special service provided in the Prayer-Book of
that period for occasions when the King exercised this gift. The
ceremony was conducted with great solemnity and pomp: during the
reading of the service and the laying on of the King's hands, the
attendant bishop or priest recited the words, "They shall lay
their hands on the sick, and they shall recover"; afterward came
special prayers, the Epistle and Gospel, with the blessing, and
finally his Majesty washed his royal hands in golden vessels
which high noblemen held for him.

In France, too, the royal touch continued, with similar testimony
to its efficacy. On a certain Easter Sunday, that pious king,
Louis XIV, touched about sixteen hundred persons at Versailles.

This curative power was, then, acknowledged far and wide, by
Catholics and Protestants alike, upon the Continent, in Great
Britain, and in America; and it descended not only in spite of
the transition of the English kings from Catholicism to
Protestantism, but in spite of the transition from the legitimate
sovereignty of the Stuarts to the illegitimate succession of the
House of Orange. And yet, within a few years after the whole
world held this belief, it was dead; it had shrivelled away in
the growing scientific light at the dawn of the eighteenth
century.[318]

[318] For the royal touch, see Becket, Free and Impartial Inquiry
into the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the King's Evil,
1772, cited in Pettigrew, p. 128, and elsewhere; also Scoffern,
Science and Folk Lore, London, 1870, pp. 413 and following; also
Adams, The Healing Art, London, 1887, vol. i, pp. 53-60; and
especially Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, chapter on
The Conversion of Rome; also his History of England in the
Eighteenth Century, vol. i, chap. i. For curious details
regarding the mode of conducting the ceremony, see Evelyn's
Diary; also Lecky, as above. For the royal touch in France, and
for a claim to its possession in feudal times by certain noble
families, see Rambaud, Hist. de la Civ. francaise, p. 375.

IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY.

We may now take up the evolution of medical science out of the
medieval view and its modern survivals. All through the Middle
Ages, as we have seen, some few laymen and ecclesiastics here and
there, braving the edicts of the Church and popular superstition,
persisted in medical study and practice: this was especially
seen at the greater universities, which had become somewhat
emancipated from ecclesiastical control. In the thirteenth
century the University of Paris gave a strong impulse to the
teaching of medicine, and in that and the following century we
begin to find the first intelligible reports of medical cases
since the coming in of Christianity.

In the thirteenth century also the arch-enemy of the papacy, the
Emperor Frederick II, showed his free-thinking tendencies by
granting, from time to time, permissions to dissect the human
subject. In the centuries following, sundry other monarchs
timidly followed his example: thus John of Aragon, in 1391, gave
to the University of Lerida the privilege of dissecting one dead
criminal every three years.[319]

[319] For the promotion of medical science and practice,
especially in the thirteenth century, by the universities, see
Baas, pp. 222-224.

During the fifteenth century and the earlier years of the
sixteenth the revival of learning, the invention of printing, and
the great voyages of discovery gave a new impulse to thought, and
in this medical science shared: the old theological way of
thinking was greatly questioned, and gave place in many quarters
to a different way of looking at the universe.

In the sixteenth century Paracelsus appears--a great genius,
doing much to develop medicine beyond the reach of sacred and
scholastic tradition, though still fettered by many
superstitions. More and more, in spite of theological dogmas,
came a renewal of anatomical studies by dissection of the human
subject. The practice of the old Alexandrian School was thus
resumed. Mundinus, Professor of Medicine at Bologna early in the
fourteenth century, dared use the human subject occasionally in
his lectures; but finally came a far greater champion of
scientific truth, Andreas Vesalius, founder of the modern science
of anatomy. The battle waged by this man is one of the glories
of our race.

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search
for real knowledge he risked the most terrible dangers, and
especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of
the Church for ages. As we have seen, even such men in the early
Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in
abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII was
universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as
threatening excommunication against those practising it. Through
this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite
ecclesiastical censure, great opposition in his own profession,
and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that
could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure
material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and
charnel-houses, braving the fires of the Inquisition and the
virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the
science of human anatomy on its solid modern foundations--on
careful examination and observation of the human body: this was
his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered
even greater.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for
Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed
and gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon,
excellent men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity
to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they
insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas; so, in the
time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity
to Galen. The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same
which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies: the
cry for what is called "sound learning."  Whether standing for
Aristotle against Bacon, or for Aquinas against Erasmus, or for
Galen against Vesalius, the cry is always for "sound learning":
the idea always has been that the older studies are "SAFE."

At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great
work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new;
its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science;
its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.

To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he
foresaw must come, Vesalius dedicated the work to the Emperor
Charles V, and in his preface he argues for his method, and
against the parrot repetitions of the mediaeval text-books; he
also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens
made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the
ancient master. The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle
at once. After the manner of their time their first missiles
were epithets; and, the vast arsenal of these having been
exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons--weapons theologic.

In this case there were especial reasons why the theological
authorities felt called upon to intervene. First, there was the
old idea prevailing in the Church that the dissection of the
human body is forbidden to Christians: this was used with great
force against Vesalius, but he at first gained a temporary
victory; for, a conference of divines having been asked to
decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a
decision in the negative.

The reason was simple: the great Emperor Charles V had made
Vesalius his physician and could not spare him; but, on the
accession of Philip II to the throne of Spain and the
Netherlands, the whole scene changed. Vesalius now complained
that in Spain he could not obtain even a human skull for his
anatomical investigations: the medical and theological
reactionists had their way, and to all appearance they have, as a
rule, had it in Spain ever since. As late as the last years of
the eighteenth century an observant English traveller found that
there were no dissections before medical classes in the Spanish
universities, and that the doctrine of the circulation of the
blood was still denied, more than a century and a half after
Sarpi and Harvey had proved it.

Another theological idea barred the path of Vesalius. Throughout
the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in man a bone
imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible--the necessary nucleus
of the resurrection body. Belief in a resurrection of the
physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians,
had been incorporated into the formula evolved during the early
Christian centuries and known as the Apostles' Creed, and was
held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all."
This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great veneration,
and many anatomists sought to discover it; but Vesalius,
revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself
with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of
such a bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not
wish to fight the Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.

The strength of this theological point may be judged from the
fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the
executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all
the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received
which fatally undermined this superstition. Yet, in 1689 we find
it still lingering in France, stimulating opposition in the
Church to dissection. Even as late as the eighteenth century,
Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly
undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are
renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn
upon him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to
the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake
of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his
collected works.[320]

[320] For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here
and there during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius,
Berlin, 1892, pp. 3, 13 et seq. For religious antipathies as a
factor in the persecution of Vesalius, see the biographies by
Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725; Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also
Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest and most thorough of all, Roth,
as above. Even Goethals, despite the timidity natural to a city
librarian in a town like Brussels, in which clerical power is
strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that there was a
certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment of
Vesalius. See his Notice Biographique sur Andre Vesale. For the
resurrection bones, see Roth, as above, pp. 154, 155, and notes.
For Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist. de l'Anatomie et de la
Chirurgie, Paris, 1770, tome i, p. 407. For neglect of
dissection and opposition to Harvey's discovery in Spain, see
Townsend's Travels, edition of 1792, cited in Buckle, History of
Civilization in England, vol. ii, pp. 74, 75. Also Henry Morley,
in his Clement Marot, and Other Essays. For Bernouilli and his
trouble with the theologians, see Wolf, Biographien zur
Culturgeschichte der Schweiz, vol. ii, p. 95. How different
Mundinus's practice of dissection was from that of Vesalius may
be seen by Cuvier's careful statement that the entire number of
dissections by the former was three; the usual statement is that
there were but two. See Cuvier, Hist. des Sci. Nat., tome ii, p.
7; also Sprengel, Fredault, Hallam, and Littre. Also Whewell,
Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii, p. 328; also, for a
very full statement regarding the agency of Mundinus in the
progress of Anatomy, see Portal, vol. i, pp. 209-216.

Still other encroachments upon the theological view were made by
the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius. During
the Middle Ages there had been developed various theological
doctrines regarding the human body; these were based upon
arguments showing what the body OUGHT TO BE, and naturally,
when anatomical science showed what it IS, these doctrines fell.
An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen in a
widespread belief of the twelfth century, that, during the year
in which the cross of Christ was captured by Saladin, children,
instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had
twenty or twenty-two. So, too, in Vesalius's time another
doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held that
Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of
Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man
than on the other. This creation of Eve was a favourite subject
with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon his
beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals,
and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in
the first years after the invention of printing; but Vesalius
and the anatomists who followed him put an end among thoughtful
men to this belief in the missing rib, and in doing this dealt a
blow at much else in the sacred theory. Naturally, all these
considerations brought the forces of ecclesiasticism against the
innovators in anatomy.[321]

[321] As to the supposed change in the number of teeth, see the
Gesta Philippi Augusti Francorum Regis, . . . descripta a
magistro Rigardo, 1219, edited by Father Francois Duchesne, in
Histories Francorum Scriptores, tom. v, Paris, 1649, p. 24. For
representations of Adam created by the Almighty out of a pile of
dust, and of Eve created from a rib of Adam, see the earlier
illustrations in the Nuremberg Chronicle. As to the relation of
anatomy to theology as regards to Adam's rib, see Roth, pp. 154,
155.

A new weapon was now forged: Vesalius was charged with
dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as
the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect
influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he
became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently
undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the
prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world.

And yet not lost. In this century a great painter has again
given him to us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again
stands on earth, and we look once more into his cell. Its
windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of
bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns
his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labours; the corpse
of the plague-stricken beneath his hand ceases to be repulsive;
his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas, which
strengthen us for the good fight in this age.[322]

[322] The original painting of Vesalius at work in his cell, by
Hamann, is now at Cornell University.

His death was hastened, if not caused, by men who conscientiously
supposed that he was injuring religion: his poor, blind foes
aided in destroying one of religion's greatest apostles. What
was his influence on religion?  He substituted, for the
repetition of worn-out theories, a conscientious and reverent
search into the works of the great Power giving life to the
universe; he substituted, for representations of the human
structure pitiful and unreal, representations revealing truths
most helpful to the whole human race.

The death of this champion seems to have virtually ended the
contest. Licenses to dissect soon began to be given by sundry
popes to universities, and were renewed at intervals of from
three to four years, until the Reformation set in motion trains
of thought which did much to release science from this
yoke.[323]

[323] For a curious example of weapons drawn from Galen and used
against Vesalius, see Lewes, Life of Goethe, p. 343, note. For
proofs that I have not overestimated Vesalius, see Portal, ubi
supra. Portal speaks of him as "le genie le plus droit qu'eut
l'Europe"; and again, "Vesale me parait un des plus grands hommes
qui ait existe."  For the charge that anatomists dissected living
men--against men of science before Vesalius's time--see Littre's
chapter on Anatomy. For the increased liberty given anatomy by
the Reformation, see Roth's Vesalius, p. 33.

X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION,
AND THE USE OF ANAESTHETICS.

I hasten now to one of the most singular struggles of medical
science during modern times. Early in the last century Boyer
presented inoculation as a preventive of smallpox in France, and
thoughtful physicians in England, inspired by Lady Montagu and
Maitland, followed his example. Ultra-conservatives in medicine
took fright at once on both sides of the Channel, and theology
was soon finding profound reasons against the new practice. The
French theologians of the Sorbonne solemnly condemned it; the
English theologians were most loudly represented by the Rev.
Edward Massey, who in 1772 preached and published a sermon
entitled The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation. In
this he declared that Job's distemper was probably confluent
smallpox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil;
that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin;
and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical
operation."  Not less vigorous was the sermon of the Rev. Mr.
Delafaye, entitled Inoculation an Indefensible Practice. This
struggle went on for thirty years. It is a pleasure to note some
churchmen--and among them Madox, Bishop of Worcester--giving
battle on the side of right reason; but as late as 1753 we have
a noted rector at Canterbury denouncing inoculation from his
pulpit in the primatial city, and many of his brethren following
his example.

The same opposition was vigorous in Protestant Scotland. A large
body of ministers joined in denouncing the new practice as
"flying in the face of Providence," and "endeavouring to baffle a
Divine judgment."

On our own side of the ocean, also, this question had to be
fought out. About the year 1721 Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, a
physician in Boston, made an experiment in inoculation, one of
his first subjects being his own son. He at once encountered
bitter hostility, so that the selectmen of the city forbade him
to repeat the experiment. Foremost among his opponents was Dr.
Douglas, a Scotch physician, supported by the medical profession
and the newspapers. The violence of the opposing party knew no
bounds; they insisted that inoculation was "poisoning," and they
urged the authorities to try Dr. Boylston for murder. Having
thus settled his case for this world, they proceeded to settle it
for the next, insisting that "for a man to infect a family in the
morning with smallpox and to pray to God in the evening against
the disease is blasphemy"; that the smallpox is "a judgment of
God on the sins of the people," and that "to avert it is but to
provoke him more"; that inoculation is "an encroachment on the
prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite."
Among the mass of scriptural texts most remote from any possible
bearing on the subject one was employed which was equally cogent
against any use of healing means in any disease--the words of
Hosea: "He hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and
he will bind us up."

So bitter was this opposition that Dr. Boylston's life was in
danger; it was considered unsafe for him to be out of his house
in the evening; a lighted grenade was even thrown into the house
of Cotton Mather, who had favoured the new practice, and had
sheltered another clergyman who had submitted himself to it.

To the honour of the Puritan clergy of New England, it should be
said that many of them were Boylston's strongest supporters.
Increase and Cotton Mather had been among the first to move in
favour of inoculation, the latter having called Boylston's
attention to it; and at the very crisis of affairs six of the
leading clergymen of Boston threw their influence on Boylston's
side and shared the obloquy brought upon him. Although the
gainsayers were not slow to fling into the faces of the Mathers
their action regarding witchcraft, urging that their credulity in
that matter argued credulity in this, they persevered, and among
the many services rendered by the clergymen of New England to
their country this ought certainly to be remembered; for these
men had to withstand, shoulder to shoulder with Boylston and
Benjamin Franklin, the same weapons which were hurled at the
supporters of inoculation in Europe--charges of "unfaithfulness
to the revealed law of God."

The facts were soon very strong against the gainsayers: within a
year or two after the first experiment nearly three hundred
persons had been inoculated by Boylston in Boston and
neighbouring towns, and out of these only six had died; whereas,
during the same period, out of nearly six thousand persons who
had taken smallpox naturally, and had received only the usual
medical treatment, nearly one thousand had died. Yet even here
the gainsayers did not despair, and, when obliged to confess the
success of inoculation, they simply fell back upon a new
argument, and answered: "It was good that Satan should be
dispossessed of his habitation which he had taken up in men in
our Lord's day, but it was not lawful that the children of the
Pharisees should cast him out by the help of Beelzebub. We must
always have an eye to the matter of what we do as well as the
result, if we intend to keep a good conscience toward God."  But
the facts were too strong; the new practice made its way in the
New World as in the Old, though bitter opposition continued, and
in no small degree on vague scriptural grounds, for more than
twenty years longer.[324]

[324] For the general subject, see Sprengel, Histoire de la
Medecine, vol. vi, pp. 39-80. For the opposition of the Paris
faculty of Theology to inoculation, see the Journal de Barbier,
vol. vi, p. 294; also the Correspondance de Grimm et Diderot,
vol. iii, pp. 259 et seq. For bitter denunciations of inoculation
by the English clergy, and for the noble stand against them by
Madox, see Baron, Life of Jenner, vol. i, pp. 231, 232, and vol.
ii, pp. 39, 40. For the strenuous opposition of the same clergy,
see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 464, note;
also, for its comical side, see Nichol's Literary Illustrations,
vol. v, p. 800. For the same matter in Scotland, see Lecky's
History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 83. For New
England, see Green, History of Medicine in Massachusetts, Boston,
1881, pp. 58 et seq; also chapter x of the Memorial History of
Boston, by the same author and O. W. Holmes. For a letter of Dr.
Franklin's, see Massachusetts Historical Collections, second
series, vol. vii, p. 17. Several most curious publications
issued during the heat of the inoculation controversy have been
kindly placed in my hands by the librarians of Harvard College
and of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among them A Reply
to Increase Mather, by John Williams, Boston, printed by J.
Franklin, 1721, from which the above scriptural arguments are
cited. For the terrible virulence of the smallpox in New England
up to the introduction of the inoculation, see McMaster, History
of the People of the United States, first edition, vol. i, p. 30.

The steady evolution of scientific medicine brings us next to
Jenner's discovery of vaccination. Here, too, sundry vague
survivals of theological ideas caused many of the clergy to side
with retrograde physicians. Perhaps the most virulent of
Jenner's enemies was one of his professional brethren, Dr.
Moseley, who placed on the title-page of his book, Lues Bovilla,
the motto, referring to Jenner and his followers, "Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do": this book of Dr.
Moseley was especially indorsed by the Bishop of Dromore. In
1798 an Anti-vaccination Society was formed by physicians and
clergymen, who called on the people of Boston to suppress
vaccination, as "bidding defiance to Heaven itself, even to the
will of God," and declared that "the law of God prohibits the
practice."  As late as 1803 the Rev. Dr. Ramsden thundered
against vaccination in a sermon before the University of
Cambridge, mingling texts of Scripture with calumnies against
Jenner; but Plumptre and the Rev. Rowland Hill in England,
Waterhouse in America, Thouret in France, Sacco in Italy, and a
host of other good men and true, pressed forward, and at last
science, humanity, and right reason gained the victory. Most
striking results quickly followed. The diminution in the number
of deaths from the terrible scourge was amazing. In Berlin,
during the eight years following 1783, over four thousand
children died of the smallpox; while during the eight years
following 1814, after vaccination had been largely adopted, out
of a larger number of deaths there were but five hundred and
thirty-five from this disease. In Wurtemberg, during the
twenty-four years following 1772, one in thirteen of all the
children died of smallpox, while during the eleven years after
1822 there died of it only one in sixteen hundred. In
Copenhagen, during twelve years before the introduction of
vaccination, fifty-five hundred persons died of smallpox, and
during the sixteen years after its introduction only one hundred
and fifty-eight persons died of it throughout all Denmark. In
Vienna, where the average yearly mortality from this disease had
been over eight hundred, it was steadily and rapidly reduced,
until in 1803 it had fallen to less than thirty; and in London,
formerly so afflicted by this scourge, out of all her inhabitants
there died of it in 1890 but one. As to the world at large, the
result is summed up by one of the most honoured English
physicians of our time, in the declaration that "Jenner has
saved, is now saving, and will continue to save in all coming
ages, more lives in one generation than were destroyed in all the
wars of Napoleon."

It will have been noticed by those who have read this history
thus far that the record of the Church generally was far more
honourable in this struggle than in many which preceded it: the
reason is not difficult to find; the decline of theology enured
to the advantage of religion, and religion gave powerful aid to
science.

Yet there have remained some survivals both in Protestantism and
in Catholicism which may be regarded with curiosity. A small
body of perversely ingenious minds in the medical profession in
England have found a few ardent allies among the less
intellectual clergy. The Rev. Mr. Rothery and the Rev. Mr.
Allen, of the Primitive Methodists, have for sundry vague
theological reasons especially distinguished themselves by
opposition to compulsory vaccination; but it is only just to say
that the great body of the English clergy have for a long time
taken the better view.

Far more painful has been the recent history of the other great
branch of the Christian Church--a history developed where it
might have been least expected: the recent annals of the world
hardly present a more striking antithesis between Religion and
Theology.

On the religious side few things in the history of the Roman
Church have been more beautiful than the conduct of its clergy in
Canada during the great outbreak of ship-fever among immigrants
at Montreal about the middle of the present century. Day and
night the Catholic priesthood of that city ministered fearlessly
to those victims of sanitary ignorance; fear of suffering and
death could not drive these ministers from their work; they laid
down their lives cheerfully while carrying comfort to the poorest
and most ignorant of our kind: such was the record of their
religion. But in 1885 a record was made by their theology. In
that year the smallpox broke out with great virulence in
Montreal. The Protestant population escaped almost entirely by
vaccination; but multitudes of their Catholic fellow-citizens,
under some vague survival of the old orthodox ideas, refused
vaccination; and suffered fearfully. When at last the plague
became so serious that travel and trade fell off greatly and
quarantine began to be established in neighbouring cities, an
effort was made to enforce compulsory vaccination. The result
was, that large numbers of the Catholic working population
resisted and even threatened bloodshed. The clergy at first
tolerated and even encouraged this conduct: the Abbe
Filiatrault, priest of St. James's Church, declared in a sermon
that, "if we are afflicted with smallpox, it is because we had a
carnival last winter, feasting the flesh, which has offended the
Lord; it is to punish our pride that God has sent us smallpox."
The clerical press went further: the Etendard exhorted the
faithful to take up arms rather than submit to vaccination, and
at least one of the secular papers was forced to pander to the
same sentiment. The Board of Health struggled against this
superstition, and addressed a circular to the Catholic clergy,
imploring them to recommend vaccination; but, though two or three
complied with this request, the great majority were either silent
or openly hostile. The Oblate Fathers, whose church was situated
in the very heart of the infected district, continued to denounce
vaccination; the faithful were exhorted to rely on devotional
exercises of various sorts; under the sanction of the hierarchy
a great procession was ordered with a solemn appeal to the
Virgin, and the use of the rosary was carefully specified.

Meantime, the disease, which had nearly died out among the
Protestants, raged with ever-increasing virulence among the
Catholics; and, the truth becoming more and more clear, even to
the most devout, proper measures were at last enforced and the
plague was stayed, though not until there had been a fearful
waste of life among these simple-hearted believers, and germs of
scepticism planted in the hearts of their children which will
bear fruit for generations to come.[325]

[325] For the opposition of concientious men to vaccination in
England, see Baron, Life of Jenner, as above; also vol. ii, p.
43; also Dun's Life of Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 248, 249; also
Works of Sir J. Y. Simpson, vol. ii. For a multitude of
statistics ahowing the diminution of smallpox after the
introduction of vaccination, see Russell, p. 380. For the
striking record in London for 1890, see an article in the
Edinburgh review for January, 1891. The general statement
referred to was made in a speech some years since by Sir Spencer
Wells. For recent scattered cases of feeble opposition to
vaccination by Protestant ministers, see William White, The Great
Delusion, London, 1885, passim. For opposition of the Roman
Catholic clergy and peasantry in Canada to vaccination during the
smallpox plague of 1885, see the English, Canadian, and American
newspapers, but especially the very temperate and accurate
correspondence in the New York Evening Post during September and
October of that year.

Another class of cases in which the theologic spirit has allied
itself with the retrograde party in medical science is found in
the history of certain remedial agents; and first may be named
cocaine. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century the
value of coca had been discovered in South America; the natives
of Peru prized it highly, and two eminent Jesuits, Joseph Acosta
and Antonio Julian, were converted to this view. But the
conservative spirit in the Church was too strong; in 1567 the
Second Council of Lima, consisting of bishops from all parts of
South America, condemned it, and two years later came a royal
decree declaring that "the notions entertained by the natives
regarding it are an illusion of the devil."

As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the older
Church came another committed by many Protestants. In the early
years of the seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in South
America learned from the natives the value of the so-called
Peruvian bark in the treatment of ague; and in 1638, the
Countess of Cinchon, Regent of Peru, having derived great benefit
from the new remedy, it was introduced into Europe. Although its
alkaloid, quinine, is perhaps the nearest approach to a medical
specific, and has diminished the death rate in certain regions to
an amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly opposed by many
conservative members of the medical profession, and in this
opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, out of
hostility to the Roman Church. In the heat of sectarian feeling
the new remedy was stigmatized as "an invention of the devil";
and so strong was this opposition that it was not introduced into
England until 1653, and even then its use was long held back,
owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling.

What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side could do
to help the world at this very time is seen in the fact that,
while this struggle was going on, Hoffmann was attempting to give
a scientific theory of the action of the devil in causing Job's
boils. This effort at a quasi-scientific explanation which
should satisfy the theological spirit, comical as it at first
seems, is really worthy of serious notice, because it must be
considered as the beginning of that inevitable effort at
compromise which we see in the history of every science when it
begins to appear triumphant.[326]

[326] For the opposition of the South American Church authorities
to the introduction of coca, etc., see Martindale, Coca, Cocaine,
and its Salts, London, 1886, p. 7. As to theological and
sectarian resistance to quinine, see Russell, pp. 194, 253; also
Eccles; also Meryon, History of Medicine, London, 1861, vol. i,
p. 74, note. For the great decrease in deaths by fever after the
use of Peruvian bark began, see statistical tables given in
Russell, p. 252; and for Hoffmann's attempt at compromise, ibid.,
p. 294.

But I pass to a typical conflict in our days, and in a Protestant
country. In 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, who
afterward rose to the highest eminence in his profession, having
advocated the use of anaesthetics in obstetrical cases, was
immediately met by a storm of opposition. This hostility flowed
from an ancient and time-honoured belief in Scotland. As far
back as the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a lady of rank, being
charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for the relief of
pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was burned alive
on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh; and this old theological view
persisted even to the middle of the nineteenth century. From
pulpit after pulpit Simpson's use of chloroform was denounced as
impious and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited abundantly,
the ordinary declaration being that to use chloroform was "to
avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman."  Simpson wrote
pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he brought
into use; but he seemed about to be overcome, when he seized a
new weapon, probably the most absurd by which a great cause was
ever won: "My opponents forget," he said, "the twenty-first
verse of the second chapter of Genesis; it is the record of the
first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves
that the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from
Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall
upon Adam."  This was a stunning blow, but it did not entirely
kill the opposition; they had strength left to maintain that the
"deep sleep of Adam took place before the introduction of pain
into the world--in a state of innocence."  But now a new champion
intervened--Thomas Chalmers: with a few pungent arguments from
his pulpit he scattered the enemy forever, and the greatest
battle of science against suffering was won. This victory was
won not less for religion. Wisely did those who raised the
monument at Boston to one of the discoverers of anaesthetics
inscribe upon its pedestal the words from our sacred text, "This
also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in
counsel, and excellent in working."[327]

[327] For the case of Eufame Macalyane, se Dalyell, Darker
Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 130, 133. For the contest of
Simpson with Scotch ecclesiatical authorities, see Duns, Life of
Sir J. Y. Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 215-222, and 256-260.

XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE.

While this development of history was going on, the central idea
on which the whole theologic view rested--the idea of diseases as
resulting from the wrath of God or malice of Satan--was steadily
weakened; and, out of the many things which show this, one may
be selected as indicating the drift of thought among theologians
themselves.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century the most eminent divines
of the American branch of the Anglican Church framed their Book
of Common Prayer. Abounding as it does in evidences of their
wisdom and piety, few things are more noteworthy than a change
made in the exhortation to the faithful to present themselves at
the communion. While, in the old form laid down in the English
Prayer Book, the minister was required to warn his flock not "to
kindle God's wrath" or "provoke him to plague us with divers
diseases and sundry kinds of death," from the American form all
this and more of similar import in various services was left out.

Since that day progress in medical science has been rapid indeed,
and at no period more so than during the last half of the
nineteenth century.

The theological view of disease has steadily faded, and the
theological hold upon medical education has been almost entirely
relaxed. In three great fields, especially, discoveries have
been made which have done much to disperse the atmosphere of
miracle. First, there has come knowledge regarding the relation
between imagination and medicine, which, though still defective,
is of great importance. This relation has been noted during the
whole history of the science. When the soldiers of the Prince of
Orange, at the siege of Breda in 1625, were dying of scurvy by
scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials
filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave
out that it was a very rare and precious medicine--a medicine of
such virtue that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a
gallon of water, and that it had been obtained from the East with
great difficulty and danger."  This statement, made with much
solemnity, deeply impressed the soldiers; they took the medicine
eagerly, and great numbers recovered rapidly. Again, two
centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed to apply the
bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients at
Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for
disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application
of the thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by
this application alone, without any use of the gases whatever.
Innumerable cases of this sort have thrown a flood of light upon
such cures as those wrought by Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic
tractors," and by a multitude of other agencies temporarily in
vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous cures which in past
ages have been so frequent and of which a few survive.

The second department is that of hypnotism. Within the last
half-century many scattered indications have been collected and
supplemented by thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and
especially by Braid in England and Charcot in France. Here, too,
great inroads have been made upon the province hitherto sacred to
miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral preacher, Steigenberger, of
Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his fears "lest
accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public,"
denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the
singular argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly
incapable of explaining all the wonders of history, it is idle to
consider it at all. But investigations in hypnotism still go on,
and may do much in the twentieth century to carry the world yet
further from the realm of the miraculous.

In a third field science has won a striking series of victories.
Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of Leeuwenhoek in the
seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller in the eighteenth,
and developed or applied with wonderful skill by Ehrenberg, Cohn,
Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and their compeers in
the nineteenth, has explained the origin and proposed the
prevention or cure of various diseases widely prevailing, which
until recently have been generally held to be "inscrutable
providences."  Finally, the closer study of psychology,especially
in its relations to folklore, has revealed processes involved in
the development of myths and legends: the phenomena of
"expectant attention," the tendency to marvel-mongering, and the
feeling of "joy in believing."

In summing up the history of this long struggle between science
and theology, two main facts are to be noted: First, that in
proportion as the world approached the "ages of faith" it receded
from ascertained truth, and in proportion as the world has
receded from the "ages of faith" it has approached ascertained
truth; secondly, that, in proportion as the grasp of theology
Upon education tightened, medicine declined, and in proportion as
that grasp has relaxed, medicine has been developed.

The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical discoveries,
yet they have already taken from theology what was formerly its
strongest province--sweeping away from this vast field of human
effort that belief in miracles which for more than twenty
centuries has been the main stumblingblock in the path of
medicine; and in doing this they have cleared higher paths not
only for science, but for religion.[328]

[328] For the rescue of medical education from the control of
theology, especially in France, see Rambaud, La Civilisation
Contemporaine en France, pp. 682, 683. For miraculous cures
wrought by imagination, see Tuke, Influence of Mind on Body, vol.
ii. For opposition to the scientific study of hypnotism, see
Hypnotismus und Wunder: ein Vortrag, mit Weiterungen, von Max
Steigenberger, Domprediger, Augsburg, 1888, reviewed in Science,
Feb. 15, 1889, p. 127. For a recent statement regarding the
development of studies in hypnotism, see Liegeois, De la
Suggestion et du Somnambulisme dans leurs rapports avec la
Jurisprudence, Paris, 1889, chap. ii. As to joy in believing and
exaggerating marvels, see in the London Graphic for January 2,
1892, an account of Hindu jugglers by "Professor" Hofmann,
himself an expert conjurer. He shows that the Hindu performances
have been grossly and persistently exaggerated in the accounts of
travellers; that they are easily seen through, and greatly
inferior to the jugglers' tricks seen every day in European
capitals. The eminent Prof. De Gubernatis, who also had
witnessed the Hindu performances, assured the present writer that
the current accounts of them were monstrously exaggerated. As to
the miraculous in general, the famous Essay of Hume holds a most
important place in the older literature of the subject; but, for
perhaps the most remarkable of all discussions of it, see Conyers
Middleton, D. D., A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which
are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, London,
1749. For probably the most judicially fair discussion, see
Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, chap. iii; also his
Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, chaps. i and ii; and for perhaps
the boldest and most suggestive of recent statements, see Max
Muller, Physical Religion, being the Gifford Lectures before the
University of Glasgow for 1890, London, 1891, lecture xiv. See
also, for very cogent statements and arguments, Matthew Arnold's
Literature and Dogma, especially chap. v, and, for a recent
utterance of great clearness and force, Prof. Osler's Address
before the Johns Hopkins University, given in Science for March
27, 1891.

CHAPTER XIV.

FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE.

I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION.

A very striking feature in recorded history has been the
recurrence of great pestilences. Various indications in ancient
times show their frequency, while the famous description of the
plague of Athens given by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by
Lucretius, exemplify their severity. In the Middle Ages they
raged from time to time throughout Europe: such plagues as the
Black Death and the sweating sickness swept off vast multitudes,
the best authorities estimating that of the former, at the middle
of the fourteenth century, more than half the population of
England died, and that twenty-five millions of people perished in
various parts of Europe. In 1552 sixty-seven thousand patients
died of the plague at Paris alone, and in 1580 more than twenty
thousand. The great plague in England and other parts of Europe
in the seventeenth century was also fearful, and that which swept
the south of Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century,
as well as the invasions by the cholera at various times during
the nineteenth, while less terrible than those of former years,
have left a deep impress upon the imaginations of men.

From the earliest records we find such pestilences attributed to
the wrath or malice of unseen powers. This had been the
prevailing view even in the most cultured ages before the
establishment of Christianity: in Greece and Rome especially,
plagues of various sorts were attributed to the wrath of the
gods; in Judea, the scriptural records of various plagues sent
upon the earth by the Divine fiat as a punishment for sin show
the continuance of this mode of thought. Among many examples and
intimations of this in our sacred literature, we have the
epidemic which carried off fourteen thousand seven hundred of the
children of Israel, and which was only stayed by the prayers and
offerings of Aaron, the high priest; the destruction of seventy
thousand men in the pestilence by which King David was punished
for the numbering of Israel, and which was only stopped when the
wrath of Jahveh was averted by burnt-offerings; the plague
threatened by the prophet Zechariah, and that delineated in the
Apocalypse. From these sources this current of ideas was poured
into the early Christian Church, and hence it has been that
during nearly twenty centuries since the rise of Christianity,
and down to a period within living memory, at the appearance of
any pestilence the Church authorities, instead of devising
sanitary measures, have very generally preached the necessity of
immediate atonement for offences against the Almighty.

This view of the early Church was enriched greatly by a new
development of theological thought regarding the powers of Satan
and evil angels, the declaration of St. Paul that the gods of
antiquity were devils being cited as its sufficient
warrant.[329]

[329] For plague during the Peloponnesian war, see Thucydides,
vol. ii, pp.47-55, and vol. iii, p. 87. For a general statement
regarding this and other plagues in ancient times, see Lucretius,
vol. vi, pp. 1090 et seq.; and for a translation, see vol. i, p.
179, in Munro's edition of 1886. For early views of sanitary
science in Greece and Rome, see Forster's Inquiry, in The
Pamphleteer, vol. xxiv, p. 404. For the Greek view of the
interference of the gods in disease, especially in pestilence,
see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 251, 485, and vol. vi,
p. 213; see also Herodotus, lib. iii, c. xxxviii, and elsewhere.
For the Hebrew view of the same interference by the Almighty, see
especially Numbers xi, 4-34; also xvi, 49; I Samuel xxiv; also
Psalm cvi, 29; also the well-known texts in Zechariah and
Revelation. For St. Paul's declaration that the gods of the
heathen are devils, see I Cor. x, 20. As to the earlier origin
of the plague in Egypt, see Haeser, 'Lehrbuch der Geschichte der
Medicin und der epidemischen Krankheiten, Jena, 1875-'82, vol.
iii, pp. 15 et seq.

Moreover, comets, falling stars, and earthquakes were thought,
upon scriptural authority, to be "signs and wonders"-- evidences
of the Divine wrath, heralds of fearful visitations; and this
belief, acting powerfully upon the minds of millions, did much to
create a panic-terror sure to increase epidemic disease wherever
it broke forth.

The main cause of this immense sacrifice of life is now known to
have been the want of hygienic precaution, both in the Eastern
centres, where various plagues were developed, and in the
European towns through which they spread. And here certain
theological reasonings came in to resist the evolution of a
proper sanitary theory. Out of the Orient had been poured into
the thinking of western Europe the theological idea that the
abasement of man adds to the glory of God; that indignity to the
body may secure salvation to the soul; hence, that cleanliness
betokens pride and filthiness humility. Living in filth was
regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the
Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome
and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the
fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter
physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony
because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking
evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither
his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her
body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in
which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of
Egypt was eminent for filthiness; St. Simnon Stylites was in this
respect unspeakable--the least that can be said is, that he lived
in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. The Lives of
the Saints dwell with complacency on the statement that, when
sundry Eastern monks showed a disposition to wash themselves, the
Almighty manifested his displeasure by drying up a neighbouring
stream until the bath which it had supplied was destroyed.

The religious world was far indeed from the inspired utterance
attributed to John Wesley, that "cleanliness is near akin to
godliness."  For century after century the idea prevailed that
filthiness was akin to holiness; and, while we may well believe
that the devotion of the clergy to the sick was one cause why,
during the greater plagues, they lost so large a proportion of
their numbers, we can not escape the conclusion that their want
of cleanliness had much to do with it. In France, during the
fourteenth century, Guy de Chauliac, the great physician of his
time, noted particularly that certain Carmelite monks suffered
especially from pestilence, and that they were especially filthy.
During the Black Death no less than nine hundred Carthusian monks
fell victims in one group of buildings.

Naturally, such an example set by the venerated leaders of
thought exercised great influence throughout society, and all the
more because it justified the carelessness and sloth to which
ordinary humanity is prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as
well as in the country at large, down to a recent period, the
most ordinary sanitary precautions were neglected, and
pestilences continued to be attributed to the wrath of God or the
malice of Satan. As to the wrath of God, a new and powerful
impulse was given to this belief in the Church toward the end of
the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great. In 590, when he was
elected Pope, the city of Rome was suffering from a dreadful
pestilence: the people were dying by thousands; out of one
procession imploring the mercy of Heaven no less than eighty
persons died within an hour: what the heathen in an earlier
epoch had attributed to Apollo was now attributed to Jehovah, and
chroniclers tell us that fiery darts were seen flung from heaven
into the devoted city. But finally, in the midst of all this
horror, Gregory, at the head of a penitential procession, saw
hovering over the mausoleum of Hadrian the figure of the
archangel Michael, who was just sheathing a flaming sword, while
three angels were heard chanting the Regina Coeli. The legend
continues that the Pope immediately broke forth into hallelujahs
for this sign that the plague was stayed, and, as it shortly
afterward became less severe, a chapel was built at the summit of
the mausoleum and dedicated to St. Michael; still later, above
the whole was erected the colossal statue of the archangel
sheathing his sword, which still stands to perpetuate the legend.
Thus the greatest of Rome's ancient funeral monuments was made to
bear testimony to this medieval belief; the mausoleum of Hadrian
became the castle of St. Angelo. A legend like this, claiming
to date from the greatest of the early popes, and vouched for by
such an imposing monument, had undoubtedly a marked effect upon
the dominant theology throughout Europe, which was constantly
developing a great body of thought regarding the agencies by
which the Divine wrath might be averted.

First among these agencies, naturally, were evidences of
devotion, especially gifts of land, money, or privileges to
churches, monasteries, and shrines--the seats of fetiches which
it was supposed had wrought cures or might work them. The whole
evolution of modern history, not only ecclesiastical but civil,
has been largely affected by the wealth transferred to the clergy
at such periods. It was noted that in the fourteenth century,
after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely
increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every
European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a
great ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests of
the ministers of God."[330]

[330] For triumphant mention of St. Hilarion's filth, see the
Roman Breviary for October 21st; and for details, see S.
Hieronymus, Vita S. Hilarionis Eremitae, in Migne, Patrologia,
vol. xxiii. For Athanasius's reference to St. Anthony's filth,
see works of St. Athanasius in the Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, second series, vol. iv, p. 209. For the filthiness of
the other saints named, see citations from the Lives of the
Saints, in Lecky's History of European Morals, vol. ii, pp. 117,
118. For Guy de Chauliac's observation on the filthiness of
Carmelite monks and their great losses by pestilence, see Meryon,
History of Medicine, vol. i, p. 257. For the mortality among the
Carthusian monks in time of plague, see Mrs. Lecky's very
interesting Visit to the Grand Chartreuse, in The Nineteenth
Century for March, 1891. For the plague at Rome in 590, the
legend regarding the fiery darts, mentioned by Pope Gregory
himself, and that of the castle of St. Angelo, see Gregorovius,
Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, vol. ii, pp. 26-35; also
Story, Castle of St. Angelo, etc., chap. ii. For the remark that
"pestilences are the harvest of the ministers of God," see
reference to Charlevoix, in Southey, History of Brazil, vol. ii,
p. 254, cited in Buckle, vol. i, p. 130, note.

Other modes of propitiating the higher powers were penitential
processions, the parading of images of the Virgin or of saints
through plague-stricken towns, and fetiches innumerable. Very
noted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the
processions of the flagellants, trooping through various parts of
Europe, scourging their naked bodies, shrieking the penitential
psalms, and often running from wild excesses of devotion to the
maddest orgies.

Sometimes, too, plagues were attributed to the wrath of lesser
heavenly powers. Just as, in former times, the fury of
"far-darting Apollo" was felt when his name was not respectfully
treated by mortals, so, in 1680, the Church authorities at Rome
discovered that the plague then raging resulted from the anger of
St. Sebastian because no monument had been erected to him. Such
a monument was therefore placed in the Church of St. Peter ad
Vincula, and the plague ceased.

So much for the endeavour to avert the wrath of the heavenly
powers. On the other hand, theological reasoning no less subtle
was used in thwarting the malice of Satan. This idea, too, came
from far. In the sacred books of India and Persia, as well as in
our own, we find the same theory of disease, leading to similar
means of cure. Perhaps the most astounding among Christian
survivals of this theory and its resultant practices was seen
during the plague at Rome in 1522. In that year, at that centre
of divine illumination, certain people, having reasoned upon the
matter, came to the conclusion that this great scourge was the
result of Satanic malice; and, in view of St. Paul's declaration
that the ancient gods were devils, and of the theory that the
ancient gods of Rome were the devils who had the most reason to
punish that city for their dethronement, and that the great
amphitheatre was the chosen haunt of these demon gods, an ox
decorated with garlands, after the ancient heathen manner, was
taken in procession to the Colosseum and solemnly sacrificed.
Even this proved vain, and the Church authorities then ordered
expiatory processions and ceremonies to propitiate the Almighty,
the Virgin, and the saints, who had been offended by this
temporary effort to bribe their enemies.

But this sort of theological reasoning developed an idea far more
disastrous, and this was that Satan, in causing pestilences, used
as his emissaries especially Jews and witches. The proof of this
belief in the case of the Jews was seen in the fact that they
escaped with a less percentage of disease than did the Christians
in the great plague periods. This was doubtless due in some
measure to their remarkable sanitary system, which had probably
originated thousands of years before in Egypt, and had been
handed down through Jewish lawgivers and statesmen. Certainly
they observed more careful sanitary rules and more constant
abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among Christians;
but the public at large could not understand so simple a cause,
and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity resulted from
protection by Satan, and that this protection was repaid and the
pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Christians. As
a result of this mode of thought, attempts were made in all parts
of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Satan, and to
stop the plague by torturing and murdering the Jews. Throughout
Europe during great pestilences we hear of extensive burnings of
this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the time of the Black Death,
it is computed that twelve thousand Jews thus perished; in the
small town of Erfurt the number is said to have been three
thousand; in Strasburg, the Rue Brulee remains as a monument to
the two thousand Jews burned there for poisoning the wells and
causing the plague of 1348; at the royal castle of Chinon, near
Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood, and
in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews were burned.
Everywhere in continental Europe this mad persecution went on;
but it is a pleasure to say that one great churchman, Pope
Clement VI, stood against this popular unreason, and, so far as
he could bring his influence to bear on the maddened populace,
exercised it in favour of mercy to these supposed enemies of the
Almighty.[331]

[331] For an early conception in India of the Divinity acting
through medicine, see The Bhagavadgita, translated by Telang, p.
82, in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East. For the necessity
of religious means of securing knowledge of medicine, see the
Anugita, translated by Telang, in Max Muller's Sacred Books of
the East, p. 388. For ancient Persian ideas of sickness as sent
by the spirit of evil and to be cured by spells, but not
excluding medicine and surgery, and for sickness generally as
caused by the evil principle in demons, see the Zend-Avesta,
Darmesteter's translation, introduction, passim, but especially
p. xciii. For diseases wrought by witchcraft, see the same, pp.
230, 293. On the preferences of spells in healing over medicine
and surgery, see Zend-Avesta, vol. i, pp. 85, 86. For healing by
magic in ancient Greece, see, e. g., the cure of Ulysses in the
Odyssey, "They stopped the black blood by a spell" (Odyssey,
xxix, 457). For medicine in Egypt as partly priestly and partly
in the hands of physicians, see Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii,
p. 136, note. For ideas of curing of disease by expulsion of
demons still surviving among various tribes and nations of Asia,
see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: a Study of Comparative
Religion, London, 1890, pp. 184-192. For the Flagellants and
their processions at the time of the Black Death, see Lea,
History of the Inquisition, New York, 1888, vol. ii, pp. 381 et
seq. For the persecution of the Jews in time of pestilence, see
ibid., p. 379 and following, with authorities in the notes. For
the expulsion of the Jews from Padua, see the Acta Sanctorum,
September, tom. viii, p. 893.

Yet, as late as 1527, the people of Pavia, being threatened with
plague, appealed to St. Bernardino of Feltro, who during his
life had been a fierce enemy of the Jews, and they passed a
decree promising that if the saint would avert the pestilence
they would expel the Jews from the city. The saint apparently
accepted the bargain, and in due time the Jews were expelled.

As to witches, the reasons for believing them the cause of
pestilence also came from far. This belief, too, had been poured
mainly from Oriental sources into our sacred books and thence
into the early Church, and was strengthened by a whole line of
Church authorities, fathers, doctors, and saints; but, above
all, by the great bull, Summis Desiderantes, issued by Pope
Innocent VIII, in 1484. This utterance from the seat of St.
Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that witches
are a great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which
afflict humanity; and the Scripture on which the action
recommended against witches in this papal bull, as well as in so
many sermons and treatises for centuries afterward, was based,
was the famous text, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
This idea persisted long, and the evolution of it is among the
most fearful things in human history.[332]

[332] On the plagues generally, see Hecker, Epidemics of the
Middle Ages, passim; but especially Haeser, as above, III. Band,
pp. 1-202; also Sprengel, Baas, Isensee, et al. For brief
statement showing the enormous loss of life in these plagues, see
Littre, Medecine et Medecins, Paris, 1875, pp. 3 et seq. For a
summary of the effects of the Black Plague throughout England,
see Green's Short History of the English People, chap. v. For
the mortality in the Paris hospitals, see Desmazes, Supplices,
Prisons et Graces en France, Paris 1866. For striking
descriptions of plague-stricken cities, see the well-known
passages in Thucydides, Boccaccio, De Foe, and, above all,
Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. For examples of averting the plagues
by processions, see Leopold  Delisle, Etudes sur la Condition de
la Classe Agricole, etc., en Normandie au Moyen Age, p. 630; also
Fort, chap. xxiii. For the anger of St. Sebastian as a cause of
the plague at Rome, and its cessation when a monument had been
erected to him, see Paulus Diaconus, cited in Gregorovius, vol.
ii. p. 165. For the sacrifice of an ox in the Colosseum to the
ancient gods as a means of averting the plague of 1522, at Rome,
see Gregorovius, vol. viii, p. 390. As to massacres of the Jews
in order to avert the wrath of God in pestilence, see L'Ecole et
la Science, Paris, 1887, p. 178; also Hecker, and especially
Hoeniger, Gang und Verbreitung des Schwarzen Todes in
Deutschalnd, Berlin, 1889. For a long list of towns in which
burnings of Jews took place for this imaginary cause, see pp.
7-11. As to absolute want of sanitary precautions, see Hecker,
p. 292. As to condemnation by strong religionists of medical
means in the plague, see Fort, p. 130. For a detailed account of
the action of Popes Eugene IV, Innocent VIII, and other popes,
against witchcraft, ascribing to it storms and diseases, and for
the bull Summis Desiderantes, see the chapters on Meteorology and
Magic in this series. The text of the bull is given in the
Malleus Maleficarum, in Binsfield, and in Roskoff, Geschichte des
Teufels, Leipzig, 1869, vol. i, pp. 222-225, and a good summary
and analysis of it in Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprocesse. For
a concise and admirable statement of the contents and effects of
the bull, see Lea, History of the Inquisition, vol. iii, pp. 40
et seq.; and for the best statement known to me of the general
subject, Prof. George L. Burr's paper on The Literature of
Witchcraft, read before the American Historical Association at
Washington, 1890.

In Germany its development was especially terrible. From the
middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth,
Catholic and Protestant theologians and ecclesiastics vied with
each other in detecting witches guilty of producing sickness or
bad weather; women were sent to torture and death by thousands,
and with them, from time to time, men and children. On the
Catholic side sufficient warrant for this work was found in the
bull of Pope Innocent VIII, and the bishops' palaces of south
Germany became shambles,--the lordly prelates of Salzburg,
Wurzburg, and Bamberg taking the lead in this butchery.

In north Germany Protestantism was just as conscientiously cruel.
It based its theory and practice toward witches directly upon the
Bible, and above all on the great text which has cost the lives
of so many myriads of innocent men, women, and children, "Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live."  Naturally the Protestant
authorities strove to show that Protestantism was no less
orthodox in this respect than Catholicism; and such theological
jurists as Carpzov, Damhouder, and Calov did their work
thoroughly. An eminent authority on this subject estimates the
number of victims thus sacrificed during that century in Germany
alone at over a hundred thousand.

Among the methods of this witch activity especially credited in
central and southern Europe was the anointing of city walls and
pavements with a diabolical unguent causing pestilence. In 1530
Michael Caddo was executed with fearful tortures for thus
besmearing the pavements of Geneva. But far more dreadful was
the torturing to death of a large body of people at Milan, in the
following century, for producing the plague by anointing the
walls; and a little later similar punishments for the same crime
were administered in Toulouse and other cities. The case in
Milan may be briefly summarized as showing the ideas on sanitary
science of all classes, from highest to lowest, in the
seventeenth century. That city was then under the control of
Spain; and, its authorities having received notice from the
Spanish Government that certain persons suspected of witchcraft
had recently left Madrid, and had perhaps gone to Milan to anoint
the walls, this communication was dwelt upon in the pulpits as
another evidence of that Satanic malice which the Church alone
had the means of resisting, and the people were thus excited and
put upon the alert. One morning, in the year 1630, an old woman,
looking out of her window, saw a man walking along the street and
wiping his fingers upon the walls; she immediately called the
attention of another old woman, and they agreed that this man
must be one of the diabolical anointers. It was perfectly
evident to a person under ordinary conditions that this
unfortunate man was simply trying to remove from his fingers the
ink gathered while writing from the ink-horn which he carried in
his girdle; but this explanation was too simple to satisfy those
who first observed him or those who afterward tried him: a mob
was raised and he was thrown into prison. Being tortured, he at
first did not know what to confess; but, on inquiring from the
jailer and others, he learned what the charge was, and, on being
again subjected to torture utterly beyond endurance, he confessed
everything which was suggested to him; and, on being tortured
again and again to give the names of his accomplices, he accused,
at hazard, the first people in the city whom he thought of.
These, being arrested and tortured beyond endurance, confessed
and implicated a still greater number, until members of the
foremost families were included in the charge. Again and again
all these unfortunates were tortured beyond endurance. Under
paganism, the rule regarding torture had been that it should not
be carried beyond human endurance; and we therefore find Cicero
ridiculing it as a means of detecting crime, because a stalwart
criminal of strong nerves might resist it and go free, while a
physically delicate man, though innocent, would be forced to
confess. Hence it was that under paganism a limit was imposed to
the torture which could be administered; but, when Christianity
had become predominant throughout Europe, torture was developed
with a cruelty never before known. There had been evolved a
doctrine of "excepted cases"--these "excepted cases" being
especially heresy and witchcraft; for by a very simple and
logical process of theological reasoning it was held that Satan
would give supernatural strength to his special devotees--that
is, to heretics and witches--and therefore that, in dealing with
them, there should be no limit to the torture. The result was in
this particular case, as in tens of thousands besides, that the
accused confessed everything which could be suggested to them,
and often in the delirium of their agony confessed far more than
all that the zeal of the prosecutors could suggest. Finally, a
great number of worthy people were sentenced to the most cruel
death which could be invented. The records of their trials and
deaths are frightful. The treatise which in recent years has
first brought to light in connected form an authentic account of
the proceedings in this affair, and which gives at the end
engravings of the accused subjected to horrible tortures on their
way to the stake and at the place of execution itself, is one of
the most fearful monuments of theological reasoning and human
folly.

To cap the climax, after a poor apothecary had been tortured into
a confession that he had made the magic ointment, and when he had
been put to death with the most exquisite refinements of torture,
his family were obliged to take another name, and were driven out
from the city; his house was torn down, and on its site was
erected "The Column of Infamy," which remained on this spot
until, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a party of young
radicals, probably influenced by the reading of Beccaria, sallied
forth one night and leveled this pious monument to the ground.

Herein was seen the culmination and decline of the bull Summis
Desiderantes. It had been issued by him whom a majority of the
Christian world believes to be infallible in his teachings to the
Church as regards faith and morals; yet here was a deliberate
utterance in a matter of faith and morals which even children now
know to be utterly untrue. Though Beccaria's book on Crimes and
Punishments, with its declarations against torture, was placed
by the Church authorities upon the Index, and though the
faithful throughout the Christian world were forbidden to read
it, even this could not prevent the victory of truth over this
infallible utterance of Innocent VIII.[333]

[333] As to the fearful effects of the papal bull Summis
Desiderantes in south Germany, as to the Protestant severities in
north Germany, as to the immense number of women and children put
to death for witchcraft in Germany generally for spreading storms
and pestilence, and as to the monstrous doctrine of "excepted
cases," see the standard authorities on witchcraft, especially
Wachter, Beitrage zur Geschichte des Strafrechts, Soldan, Horst,
Hauber, and Langin; also Burr, as above. In another series of
chapters on The Warfare of Humanity with Theology, I hope to go
more fully into the subject. For the magic spreading of the
plague at Milan, see Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi and La Colonna
Infame; and for the origin of the charges, with all the details
of the trail, see the Precesso Originale degli Untori, Milan,
1839, passim, but especially the large folding plate at the end,
exhibiting the tortures. For the after-history of the Column of
Infamy, and for the placing of Beccaria's book on the Index, see
Cantu, Vita di Beccaria. For the magic spreading of the plague
in general, see Littre, pp. 492 and following.

As the seventeenth century went on, ingenuity in all parts of
Europe seemed devoted to new developments of fetichism. A very
curious monument of this evolution in Italy exists in the Royal
Gallery of Paintings at Naples, where may be seen several
pictures representing the measures taken to save the city from
the plague during the seventeenth century, but especially from
the plague of 1656. One enormous canvas gives a curious example
of the theological doctrine of intercession between man and his
Maker, spun out to its logical length. In the background is the
plague-stricken city: in the foreground the people are praying
to the city authorities to avert the plague; the city authorities
are praying to the Carthusian monks; the monks are praying to St.
Martin, St. Bruno, and St. Januarius; these three saints in
their turn are praying to the Virgin; the Virgin prays to Christ;
and Christ prays to the Almighty. Still another picture
represents the people, led by the priests, executing with
horrible tortures the Jews, heretics, and witches who were
supposed to cause the pestilence of 1656, while in the heavens
the Virgin and St. Januarius are interceding with Christ to
sheathe his sword and stop the plague.

In such an atmosphere of thought it is no wonder that the death
statistics were appalling. We hear of districts in which not
more than one in ten escaped, and some were entirely depopulated.

Such appeals to fetich against pestilence have continued in
Naples down to our own time, the great saving power being the
liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. In 1856 the present
writer saw this miracle performed in the gorgeous chapel of the
saint forming part of the Cathedral of Naples. The chapel was
filled with devout worshippers of every class, from the officials
in court dress, representing the Bourbon king, down to the lowest
lazzaroni. The reliquary of silver-gilt, shaped like a large
human head, and supposed to contain the skull of the saint, was
first placed upon the altar; next, two vials containing a dark
substance said to be his blood, having been taken from the wall,
were also placed upon the altar near the head. As the priests
said masses, they turned the vials from time to time, and the
liquefaction being somewhat delayed, the great crowd of people
burst out into more and more impassioned expostulation and
petitions to the saint. Just in front of the altar were the
lazzaroni who claimed to be descendants of the saint's family,
and these were especially importunate: at such times they beg,
they scold, they even threaten; they have been known to abuse
the saint roundly, and to tell him that, if he did not care to
show his favour to the city by liquefying his blood, St. Cosmo
and St. Damian were just as good saints as he, and would no doubt
be very glad to have the city devote itself to them. At last, on
the occasion above referred to, the priest, turning the vials
suddenly, announced that the saint had performed the miracle, and
instantly priests, people, choir, and organ burst forth into a
great Te Deum; bells rang, and cannon roared; a procession was
formed, and the shrine containing the saint's relics was carried
through the streets, the people prostrating themselves on both
sides of the way and throwing showers of rose leaves upon the
shrine and upon the path before it. The contents of these
precious vials are an interesting relic indeed, for they
represent to us vividly that period when men who were willing to
go to the stake for their religious opinions thought it not wrong
to save the souls of their fellowmen by pious mendacity and
consecrated fraud. To the scientific eye this miracle is very
simple: the vials contain, no doubt, one of those mixtures
fusing at low temperature, which, while kept in its place within
the cold stone walls of the church, remains solid, but upon being
brought out into the hot, crowded chapel, and fondled by the warm
hands of the priests, gradually softens and becomes liquid. It
was curious to note, at the time above mentioned, that even the
high functionaries representing the king looked at the miracle
with awe: they evidently found "joy in believing," and one of
them assured the present writer that the only thing which COULD
cause it was the direct exercise of miraculous power.

It may be reassuring to persons contemplating a visit to that
beautiful capital in these days, that, while this miracle still
goes on, it is no longer the only thing relied upon to preserve
the public health. An unbelieving generation, especially taught
by the recent horrors of the cholera, has thought it wise to
supplement the power of St. Januarius by the "Risanamento,"
begun mainly in 1885 and still going on. The drainage of the
city has thus been greatly improved, the old wells closed, and
pure water introduced from the mountains. Moreover, at the last
outburst of cholera a few years since, a noble deed was done
which by its moral effect exercised a widespread healing power.
Upon hearing of this terrific outbreak of pestilence, King
Humbert, though under the ban of the Church, broke from all the
entreaties of his friends and family, went directly into the
plague-stricken city, and there, in the streets, public places,
and hospitals, encouraged the living, comforted the sick and
dying, and took means to prevent a further spread of the
pestilence. To the credit of the Church it should also be said
that the Cardinal Archbishop San Felice joined him in this.

Miracle for miracle, the effect of this visit of the king seems
to have surpassed anything that St. Januarius could do, for it
gave confidence and courage which very soon showed their effects
in diminishing the number of deaths. It would certainly appear
that in this matter the king was more directly under Divine
inspiration and guidance than was the Pope; for the fact that
King Humbert went to Naples at the risk of his life, while Leo
XIII remained in safety at the Vatican, impressed the Italian
people in favour of the new regime and against the old as
nothing else could have done.

In other parts of Italy the same progress is seen under the new
Italian government. Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, and especially Rome,
which under the sway of the popes was scandalously filthy, are
now among the cleanest cities in Europe. What the relics of St.
Januarius, St. Anthony, and a multitude of local fetiches
throughout Italy were for ages utterly unable to do, has been
accomplished by the development of the simplest sanitary
principles.

Spain shows much the same characteristics of a country where
theological considerations have been all-controlling for
centuries. Down to the interference of Napoleon with that
kingdom, all sanitary efforts were looked upon as absurd if not
impious. The most sober accounts of travellers in the Spanish
Peninsula until a recent period are sometimes irresistibly comic
in their pictures of peoples insisting on maintaining
arrangements more filthy than any which would be permitted in an
American backwoods camp, while taking enormous pains to stop
pestilence by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses
bestowed upon the local Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful
scepticism has begun to work for good. The outbreaks of cholera
in recent years have done some little to bring in better sanitary
measures.[334]

[334] As to the recourse to fetichism in Italy in time of plague,
and the pictures showing the intercession of Januarius and other
saints, I have relied on my own notes made at various visits to
Naples. For the general subject, see Peter, Etudes Napolitaines,
especially chapters v  and vi. For detailed accounts of the
liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood by eye-witnesses, one an
eminent Catholic of the seventeenth century, and the other a
distinguished Protestant of our own time, see Murray's Handbook
for South Italy and Naples, description of the Cathedral of San
Gennaro. For an interesting series of articles on the subject,
see The Catholic World for September, October, and November,
1871. For the incredible filthiness of the great cities of
Spain, and the resistance of the people, down to a recent period,
to the most ordinary regulations prompted by decency, see
Bascome, History of the Epidemic Pestilences, especially pp. 119,
120. See also the Autobiography of D'Ewes, London, 1845, vol.
ii, p. 446; also, for various citations, the second volume of
Buckle, History of Civilization in England.

II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.

We have seen how powerful in various nations especially obedient
to theology were the forces working in opposition to the
evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition,
less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in
countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological
control. In England, during the medieval period, persecutions of
Jews were occasionally resorted to, and here and there we hear of
persecutions of witches; but, as torture was rarely used in
England, there were, from those charged with producing plague,
few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries
gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life
in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting
organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of
the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly
developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the
physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus
incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is of
far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the
wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a
chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately
seized with a fever."  He ascribed the fearful plague of the
sweating sickness to this cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius
advised sanitary precautions against the plague, and in
after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged them; but the
prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done. Even the
floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich
Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one
of the chroniclers tells us.

In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was
mainly sought in special church services. The foremost English
churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of the
early fathers of the Church; the theological theory of disease,
so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case
when the various visitations reached their climax in the great
plague of London in 1665, which swept off more than a hundred
thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting it by
sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of the
time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from
medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally
attributed to the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the
Sabbath."  Texts from Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the
Apocalypse were dwelt upon in the pulpits to show that plagues
are sent by the Almighty to punish sin; and perhaps the most
ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes described by De Foe
is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the streets with
a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner of
Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its
destruction in forty days.

That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary sin.
Both before and after this culmination of the disease cases of
plague were constantly occurring in London throughout the
seventeenth century; but about the beginning of the eighteenth
century it began to disappear. The great fire had done a good
work by sweeping off many causes and centres of infection, and
there had come wider streets, better pavements, and improved
water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague,
other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged
in the city, became much less frequent.

But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London, others
developed by sanitary ignorance raged fearfully both there and
elsewhere, and of these perhaps the most fearful was the jail
fever. The prisons of that period were vile beyond belief. Men
were confined in dungeons rarely if ever disinfected after the
death of previous occupants, and on corridors connecting directly
with the foulest sewers: there was no proper disinfection,
ventilation, or drainage; hence in most of the large prisons for
criminals or debtors the jail fever was supreme, and from these
centres it frequently spread through the adjacent towns. This
was especially the case during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In the Black Assize at Oxford, in 1577, the chief
baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred men died within forty
hours. Lord Bacon declared the jail fever "the most pernicious
infection next to the plague."  In 1730, at the Dorsetshire
Assize, the chief baron and many lawyers were killed by it. The
High Sheriff of Somerset also took the disease and died. A
single Scotch regiment, being infected from some prisoners, lost
no less than two hundred. In 1750 the disease was so virulent at
Newgate, in the heart of London, that two judges, the lord mayor,
sundry aldermen, and many others, died of it.

It is worth noting that, while efforts at sanitary dealing with
this state of things were few, the theological spirit developed a
new and special form of prayer for the sufferers and placed it in
the Irish Prayer Book.

These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance through
the first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750 began
the work of John Howard, who visited the prisons of England, made
known their condition to the world, and never rested until they
were greatly improved. Then he applied the same benevolent
activity to prisons in other countries, in the far East, and in
southern Europe, and finally laid down his life, a victim to
disease contracted on one of his missions of mercy; but the
hygienic reforms he began were developed more and more until this
fearful blot upon modern civilization was removed.[335]

[335] For Erasmus, see the letter cited in Bascome, History of
Epidemic Pestilences, London, 1851. For the account of the
condition of Queen Elizabeth's presence chamber, see the same, p.
206; see also the same for attempts at sanitation by Caius, Mead,
Pringle, and others; also see Baas and various medical
authorities. For the plague in London, see Green's History of
the English People, chap. ix, sec. 2; and for a more detailed
account, see Lingard, History of England, enlarged edition of
1849, vol. ix, pp. 107 et seq. For full scientific discussion of
this and other plagues from a medical point of view, see
Creighton, History of Epidemics in Great Britain, vol. ii, chap.
i. For the London plague as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking,
see A Divine Tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry
memorable examples of God's judgements upon Sabbath Breakers and
other like libertines, etc., by the worthy divine, Mr. Henry
Burton, 1641. The book gives fifty-six accounts of Sabbath-
breakers sorely punished, generally struck dead, in England, with
places, names, and dates. For a general account of the condition
of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the
diminution of the plague by the rebuilding of some parts of the
city after the great fire, see Lecky, History of England in the
Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 592, 593. For the jail fever,
see Lecky, vol. i, pp. 500-503.

The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of America;
but here, while plagues were steadily attributed to Divine wrath
or Satanic malice, there was one case in which it was claimed
that such a visitation was due to the Divine mercy. The
pestilence among the INDIANS, before the arrival of the Plymouth
Colony, was attributed in a notable work of that period to the
Divine purpose of clearing New England for the heralds of the
gospel; on the other hand, the plagues which destroyed the WHITE
population were attributed by the same authority to devils and
witches. In Cotton Mather's Wonder of the Invisible World,
published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples of this.
The great Puritan divine tells us:

"Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil troubles
us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10. THEY WERE
DESTROYED OF THE DESTROYER. That is, they had the Plague among
them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that scatters Plagues
about the World: Pestilential and Contagious Diseases, 'tis the
Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with them. 'Tis no uneasy
thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such
Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall
immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction,
which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes within us; Ev'n
as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol,
Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the Divel has raised
those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous. Quivers full of
Terrible Arrows, how easily can he shoot the deleterious Miasms
into those Juices or Bowels of Men's Bodies, which will soon
Enflame them with a Mortal Fire! Hence come such Plagues, as that
Beesome of Destruction which within our memory swept away such a
throng of people from one English City in one Visitation: and
hence those Infectious Feavers, which are but so many Disguised
Plagues among us, Causing Epidemical Desolations."

Mather gives several instances of witches causing diseases, and
speaks of "some long Bow'd down under such a Spirit of Infirmity"
being "Marvelously Recovered upon the Death of the Witches," of
which he gives an instance. He also cites a case where a patient
"was brought unto death's door and so remained until the witch
was taken and carried away by the constable, when he began at
once to recover and was soon well."[336]

[336] For the passages from Cotton Mather, see his book as cited,
pp. 17, 18, also 134, 145. Johnson declares that "by this meanes
Christ . . . not only made roome for His people to plant, but
also tamed the hard and cruell hearts of these barbarous Indians,
insomuch that a halfe a handful of His people landing not long
after in Plymouth Plantation, found little resistance."   See The
History of New England, by Edward Johnson, London, 1654.
Reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Collection,
second series, vol. i, p. 67.

In France we see, during generation after generation, a similar
history evolved; pestilence after pestilence came, and was met
by various fetiches. Noteworthy is the plague at Marseilles near
the beginning of the last century. The chronicles of its sway
are ghastly. They speak of great heaps of the unburied dead in
the public places, "forming pestilential volcanoes"; of
plague-stricken men and women in delirium wandering naked through
the streets; of churches and shrines thronged with great crowds
shrieking for mercy; of other crowds flinging themselves into
the wildest debauchery; of robber bands assassinating the dying
and plundering the dead; of three thousand neglected children
collected in one hospital and then left to die; and of the
death-roll numbering at last fifty thousand out of a population
of less than ninety thousand.

In the midst of these fearful scenes stood a body of men and
women worthy to be held in eternal honour--the physicians from
Paris and Montpellier; the mayor of the city, and one or two of
his associates; but, above all, the Chevalier Roze and Bishop
Belzunce. The history of these men may well make us glory in
human nature; but in all this noble group the figure of Belzunce
is the most striking. Nobly and firmly, when so many others even
among the regular and secular ecclesiastics fled, he stood by his
flock: day and night he was at work in the hospitals, cheering
the living, comforting the dying, and doing what was possible for
the decent disposal of the dead. In him were united the, two
great antagonistic currents of religion and of theology. As a
theologian he organized processions and expiatory services,
which, it must be confessed, rather increased the disease than
diminished it; moreover, he accepted that wild dream of a
hysterical nun--the worship of the material, physical sacred
heart of Jesus--and was one of the first to consecrate his
diocese to it; but, on the other hand, the religious spirit gave
in him one of its most beautiful manifestations in that or any
other century; justly have the people of Marseilles placed his
statue in the midst of their city in an attitude of prayer and
blessing.

In every part of Europe and America, down to a recent period, we
find pestilences resulting from carelessness or superstition
still called "inscrutable providences."  As late as the end of
the eighteenth century, when great epidemics made fearful havoc
in Austria, the main means against them seem to have been
grovelling before the image of St. Sebastian and calling in
special "witch-doctors"--that is, monks who cast out devils. To
seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighbourhood of these
monastic centres, very generally considered impious, and the
enormous death rate in such neighbourhoods was only diminished in
the present century, when scientific hygiene began to make its
way.

The old view of pestilence had also its full course in
Calvinistic Scotland; the only difference being that, while in
Roman Catholic countries relief was sought by fetiches, gifts,
processions, exorcisms, burnings of witches, and other works of
expiation, promoted by priests; in Scotland, after the
Reformation, it was sought in fast-days and executions of witches
promoted by Protestant elders. Accounts of the filthiness of
Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within this
century, seem monstrous. All that in these days is swept into
the sewers was in those allowed to remain around the houses or
thrown into the streets. The old theological theory, that "vain
is the help of man," checked scientific thought and paralyzed
sanitary endeavour. The result was natural: between the
thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty notable epidemics
swept the country, and some of them carried off multitudes; but
as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement; they were
called "visitations," attributed to Divine wrath against human
sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the
particular sin concerned and to declaim against it. Amazing
theories were thus propounded--theories which led to spasms of
severity; and, in some of these, offences generally punished much
less severely were visited with death. Every pulpit interpreted
the ways of God to man in such seasons so as rather to increase
than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of thus seeking
supernatural causes rather than natural may be seen in such facts
as the death by plague of one fourth of the whole population of
the city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth century,
other towns suffering similarly both then and afterward.

Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavoured to
push sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to clean
the streets of Edinburgh; but the chroniclers tell us that "the
magistrates and ministers gave no heed."  One sort of calamity,
indeed, came in as a mercy--the great fires which swept through
the cities, clearing and cleaning them. Though the town council
of Edinburgh declared the noted fire of 1700 "a fearful rebuke of
God," it was observed that, after it had done its work, disease
and death were greatly diminished.[337]

[337] For the plague at Marseilles and its depopulation, see
Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xv, especially document
cited in appendix; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xliii;
also Rambaud. For the resort to witch doctors in Austria against
pestilence, down to the end of the eighteenth century, see
Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. For the
resort to St. Sebastian, see the widespread editions of the Vita
et Gesta Sancti Sebastiani, contra pestem patroni, prefaced with
commendations from bishops and other high ecclesiastics. The
edition in the Cornell University Library is that of Augsburg,
1693. For the reign of filth and pestilence in Scotland, see
Charles Rogers, D. D., Social Life in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1884,
vol. i, pp. 305-316; see also Buckle's second volume.

III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE.

But by those standing in the higher places of thought some
glimpses of scientific truth had already been obtained, and
attempts at compromise between theology and science in this field
began to be made, not only by ecclesiastics, but first of all, as
far back as the seventeenth century, by a man of science eminent
both for attainments and character--Robert Boyle. Inspired by
the discoveries in other fields, which had swept away so much of
theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction
that some epidemics are due--in his own words--"to a tragical
concourse of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these
may be the result of Divine interpositions provoked by human
sins. As time went on, great difficulties showed themselves in
the way of this compromise--difficulties theological not less
than difficulties scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more
hard to explain the theological grounds why so many orthodox
cities, firm in the faith, were punished, and so many heretical
cities spared; and why, in regions devoted to the Church, the
poorer people, whose faith in theological fetiches was
unquestioning, died in times of pestilence like flies, while
sceptics so frequently escaped. Difficulties of the same sort
beset devoted Protestants; they, too, might well ask why it was
that the devout peasantry in their humble cottages perished,
while so much larger a proportion of the more sceptical upper
classes were untouched. Gradually it dawned both upon Catholic
and Protestant countries that, if any sin be punished by
pestilence, it is the sin of filthiness; more and more it began
to be seen by thinking men of both religions that Wesley's great
dictum stated even less than the truth; that not only was
"cleanliness akin to godliness," but that, as a means of keeping
off pestilence, it was far superior to godliness as godliness was
then generally understood.[338]

[338] For Boyle's attempt at compromise, see Discourse on the
Air, in his works, vol. iv, pp. 288, 289, cited by Buckle, vol.
i, pp. 128, 129, note.

The recent history of sanitation in all civilized countries shows
triumphs which might well fill us with wonder, did there not rise
within us a far greater wonder that they were so long delayed.
Amazing is it to see how near the world has come again and again
to discovering the key to the cause and cure of pestilence. It
is now a matter of the simplest elementary knowledge that some of
the worst epidemics are conveyed in water. But this fact seems
to have been discovered many times in human history. In the
Peloponnesian war the Athenians asserted that their enemies had
poisoned their cisterns; in the Middle Ages the people generally
declared that the Jews had poisoned their wells; and as late as
the cholera of 1832 the Parisian mob insisted that the
water-carriers who distributed water for drinking purposes from
the Seine, polluted as it was by sewage, had poisoned it, and in
some cases murdered them on this charge: so far did this feeling
go that locked covers were sometimes placed upon the
water-buckets. Had not such men as Roger Bacon and his long line
of successors been thwarted by theological authority,--had not
such men as Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and Albert the
Great been drawn or driven from the paths of science into the
dark, tortuous paths of theology, leading no whither,--the world
to-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, would have arrived
at the solution of great problems and the enjoyment of great
results which will only be reached at the end of the twentieth
century, and even in generations more remote. Diseases like
typhoid fever, influenza and pulmonary consumption, scarlet
fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and la grippe, which now carry off
so many most precious lives, would have long since ceased to
scourge the world.

Still, there is one cause for satisfaction: the law governing
the relation of theology to disease is now well before the world,
and it is seen in the fact that, just in proportion as the world
progressed from the sway of Hippocrates to that of the ages of
faith, so it progressed in the frequency and severity of great
pestilences; and that, on the other hand, just in proportion as
the world has receded from that period when theology was
all-pervading and all-controlling, plague after plague has
disappeared, and those remaining have become less and less
frequent and virulent.[339]

[339] For the charge of poisoning water and producing pestilence
among the Greeks, see Grote, History of Greece, vol. vi, p. 213.
For a similar charge against the Jews in the Middle Ages, see
various histories already cited; and for the great popular
prejudice against water-carriers at Paris in recent times, see
the larger recent French histories.

The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long
series of victories, and these may well be studied in Great
Britain and the United States. In the former, though there had
been many warnings from eminent physicians, and above all in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from men like Caius, Mead,
and Pringle, the result was far short of what might have been
gained; and it was only in the year 1838 that a systematic
sanitary effort was begun in England by the public authorities.
The state of things at that time, though by comparison with the
Middle Ages happy, was, by comparison with what has since been
gained, fearful: the death rate among all classes was high, but
among the poor it was ghastly. Out of seventy-seven thousand
paupers in London during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen
thousand were suffering from fever, and of these nearly six
thousand from typhus. In many other parts of the British Islands
the sanitary condition was no better. A noble body of men
grappled with the problem, and in a few years one of these rose
above his fellows--the late Edwin Chadwick. The opposition to
his work was bitter, and, though many churchmen aided him, the
support given by theologians and ecclesiastics as a whole was
very far short of what it should have been. Too many of them
were occupied in that most costly and most worthless of all
processes, "the saving of souls" by the inculcation of dogma.
Yet some of the higher ecclesiastics and many of the lesser
clergy did much, sometimes risking their lives, and one of them,
Sidney Godolphin Osborne, deserves lasting memory for his
struggle to make known the sanitary wants of the peasantry.

Chadwick began to be widely known in 1848 as a member of the
Board of Health, and was driven out for a time for overzeal; but
from one point or another, during forty years, he fought the
opposition, developed the new work, and one of the best exhibits
of its results is shown in his address before the Sanitary
Conference at Brighton in 1888. From this and other perfectly
trustworthy sources some idea may be gained of the triumph of the
scientific over the theological method of dealing with disease,
whether epidemic or sporadic.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century the annual
mortality of London is estimated at not less than eighty in a
thousand; about the middle of this century it stood at
twenty-four in a thousand; in 1889 it stood at less than
eighteen in a thousand; and in many parts the most recent
statistics show that it has been brought down to fourteen or
fifteen in a thousand. A quarter of a century ago the death rate
from disease in the Royal Guards at London was twenty in a
thousand; in 1888 it had been reduced to six in a thousand. In
the army generally it had been seventeen in a thousand, but it
has been reduced until it now stands at eight. In the old Indian
army it had been sixty-nine in a thousand, but of late it has
been brought down first to twenty, and finally to fourteen. Mr.
Chadwick in his speech proved that much more might be done, for
he called attention to the German army, where the death rate from
disease has been reduced to between five and six in a thousand.
The Public Health Act having been passed in 1875, the death rate
in England among men fell, between 1871 and 1880, more than four
in a thousand, and among women more than six in a thousand. In
the decade between 1851 and 1860 there died of diseases
attributable to defective drainage and impure water over four
thousand persons in every million throughout England: these
numbers have declined until in 1888 there died less than two
thousand in every million. The most striking diminution of the
deaths from such causes was found in 1891, in the case of typhoid
fever, that diminution being fifty per cent. As to the scourge
which, next to plagues like the Black Death, was formerly the
most dreaded--smallpox--there died of it in London during the
year 1890 just one person. Drainage in Bristol reduced the death
rate by consumption from 4.4 to 2.3; at Cardiff, from 3.47 to
2.31; and in all England and Wales, from 2.68 in 1851 to 1.55 in
1888.

What can be accomplished by better sanitation is also seen to-day
by a comparison between the death rate among the children outside
and inside the charity schools. The death rate among those
outside in 1881 was twelve in a thousand; while inside, where
the children were under sanitary regulations maintained by
competent authorities, it has been brought down first to eight,
then to four, and finally to less than three in a thousand.

In view of statistics like these, it becomes clear that Edwin
Chadwick and his compeers among the sanitary authorities have in
half a century done far more to reduce the rate of disease and
death than has been done in fifteen hundred years by all the
fetiches which theological reasoning could devise or
ecclesiastical power enforce.

Not less striking has been the history of hygiene in France:
thanks to the decline of theological control over the
universities, to the abolition of monasteries, and to such
labours in hygienic research and improvement as those of Tardieu,
Levy, and Bouchardat, a wondrous change has been wrought in
public health. Statistics carefully kept show that the mean
length of human life has been remarkably increased. In the
eighteenth century it was but twenty-three years; from 1825 to
1830 it was thirty-two years and eight months; and since 1864,
thirty-seven years and six months.

IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION.

The question may now arise whether this progress in sanitary
science has been purchased at any real sacrifice of religion in
its highest sense. One piece of recent history indicates an
answer to this question. The Second Empire in France had its
head in Napoleon III, a noted Voltairean. At the climax of his
power he determined to erect an Academy of Music which should be
the noblest building of its kind. It was projected on a scale
never before known, at least in modern times, and carried on for
years, millions being lavished upon it. At the same time the
emperor determined to rebuild the Hotel-Dieu, the great Paris
hospital; this, too, was projected on a greater scale than
anything of the kind ever before known, and also required
millions. But in the erection of these two buildings the
emperor's determination was distinctly made known, that with the
highest provision for aesthetic enjoyment there should be a
similar provision, moving on parallel lines, for the relief of
human suffering. This plan was carried out to the letter: the
Palace of the Opera and the Hotel-Dieu went on with equal steps,
and the former was not allowed to be finished before the latter.
Among all the "most Christian kings" of the house of Bourbon who
had preceded him for five hundred years, history shows no such
obedience to the religious and moral sense of the nation.
Catharine de' Medici and her sons, plunging the nation into the
great wars of religion, never showed any such feeling; Louis XIV,
revoking the Edict of Nantes for the glory of God, and bringing
the nation to sorrow during many generations, never dreamed of
making the construction of his palaces and public buildings wait
upon the demands of charity. Louis XV, so subservient to the
Church in all things, never betrayed the slightest consciousness
that, while making enormous expenditures to gratify his own and
the national vanity, he ought to carry on works, pari passu, for
charity. Nor did the French nation, at those periods when it was
most largely under the control of theological considerations,
seem to have any inkling of the idea that nation or monarch
should make provision for relief from human suffering, to justify
provision for the sumptuous enjoyment of art: it was reserved
for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop this
feeling so strongly, though quietly, that Napoleon III,
notoriously an unbeliever in all orthodoxy, was obliged to
recognise it and to set this great example.

Nor has the recent history of the United States been less
fruitful in lessons. Yellow fever, which formerly swept not only
Southern cities but even New York and Philadelphia, has now been
almost entirely warded off. Such epidemics as that in Memphis a
few years since, and the immunity of the city from such
visitations since its sanitary condition was changed by Mr.
Waring, are a most striking object lesson to the whole country.
Cholera, which again and again swept the country, has ceased to
be feared by the public at large. Typhus fever, once so deadly,
is now rarely heard of. Curious is it to find that some of the
diseases which in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in
every country, now cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought
of little account, and for the cure of which people therefore
rely, to their cost, on quackery instead of medical science.

This development of sanitary science and hygiene in the United
States has also been coincident with a marked change in the
attitude of the American pulpit as regards the theory of disease.
In this country, as in others, down to a period within living
memory, deaths due to want of sanitary precautions were
constantly dwelt upon in funeral sermons as "results of national
sin," or as "inscrutable Providences."  That view has mainly
passed away among the clergy of the more enlightened parts of the
country, and we now find them, as a rule, active in spreading
useful ideas as to the prevention of disease. The religious
press has been especially faithful in this respect, carrying to
every household more just ideas of sanitary precautions and
hygienic living.

The attitude even of many among the most orthodox rulers in
church and state has been changed by facts like these. Lord
Palmerston refusing the request of the Scotch clergy that a fast
day be appointed to ward off cholera, and advising them to go
home and clean their streets,--the devout Emperor William II
forbidding prayer-meetings in a similar emergency, on the ground
that they led to neglect of practical human means of help,--all
this is in striking contrast to the older methods.

Well worthy of note is the ground taken in 1893, at Philadelphia,
by an eminent divine of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The
Bishop of Pennsylvania having issued a special call to prayer in
order to ward off the cholera, this clergyman refused to respond
to the call, declaring that to do so, in the filthy condition of
the streets then prevailing in Philadelphia, would be
blasphemous.

In summing up the whole subject, we see that in this field, as in
so many others, the triumph of scientific thought has gradually
done much to evolve in the world not only a theology but also a
religious spirit more and more worthy of the goodness of God and
of the destiny of man.[340]

[340] On the improvement in sanitation in London and elsewhere in
the north of Europe, see the editorial and Report of the
Conference  on Sanitation at Brighton, given in the London Times
of August 27, 1888. For the best authorities on the general
subject in England, see Sir John Simon on English Sanitary
Institutions, 1890; also his published Health Reports for 1887,
cited in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1891. See also
Parkes's Hygiene, passim. For the great increase in the mean
length of life in France under better hygienic conditions, see
Rambaud, La Civilisation contemporaine en France, p. 682. For
the approach to depopulation at Memphis, under the cesspool
system in 1878, see Parkes, Hygiene, American appendix, p. 397.
For the facts brought out in the investigation of the department
of the city of New York by the Committee of the State Senate, of
which the present writer was a member, see New York Senate
Documents for 1865. For decrease of death rate in New York city
under the new Board of Health, beginning in 1866, and especially
among children, see Buck, Hygiene and Popular Health, New York,
1879, vol. ii, p. 573; and for wise remarks on religious duties
during pestilence, see ibid., vol. ii, p. 579. For a contrast
between the old and new ideas regarding pestilences, see Charles
Kingsley in Fraser's Magazine, vol. lviii, p. 134; also the
sermon of Dr. Burns, in 1875, at the Cathedral of Glasgow before
the Social Science Congress. For a particularly bright and
valuable statement of the triumphs of modern sanitation, see Mrs.
Plunkett's article in The Popular Science Monthly for June, 1891.
For the reply of Lord Palmerston to the Scotch clergy, see the
well-known passage in Buckle. For the order of the Emperor
William, see various newspapers for September, 1892, and
especially Public Opinion for September 24th.

CHAPTER XV.

FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY.

I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT.

Of all the triumphs won by science for humanity, few have been
farther-reaching in good effects than the modern treatment of the
insane. But this is the result of a struggle long and severe
between two great forces. On one side have stood the survivals
of various superstitions, the metaphysics of various
philosophies, the dogmatism of various theologies, the literal
interpretation of various sacred books, and especially of our
own--all compacted into a creed that insanity is mainly or
largely demoniacal possession; on the other side has stood
science, gradually accumulating proofs that insanity is always
the result of physical disease.

I purpose in this chapter to sketch, as briefly as I may, the
history of this warfare, or rather of this evolution of truth out
of error.

Nothing is more simple and natural, in the early stages of
civilization, than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of
evil. Troubles and calamities come upon man; his ignorance of
physical laws forbids him to attribute them to physical causes;
he therefore attributes them sometimes to the wrath of a good
being, but more frequently to the malice of an evil being.

Especially is this the case with diseases. The real causes of
disease are so intricate that they are reached only after ages of
scientific labour; hence they, above all, have been attributed
to the influence of evil spirits.[341]

[341] On the general attribution of disease to demoniacal
influence, see Sprenger, History of Medicine, passim (note, for a
later attitude, vol. ii, pp. 150-170, 178); Calmeil, De la Folie,
Paris, 1845, vol. i, pp. 104, 105; Esquirol, Des Maladies
Mentales, Paris, 1838, vol. i, p. 482; also Tylor, Primitive
Culture. For a very plain and honest statement of this view in
our own sacred books, see Oort, Hooykaas, and Kuenen, The Bible
for Young People, English translation, chap. v, p. 167 and
following; also Farrar's Life of Christ, chap. xvii. For this
idea in Greece and elsewhere, see Maury, La Magie, etc., vol.
iii, p. 276, giving, among other citations, one from book v of
the Odyssey. On the influence of Platonism, see Esquirol and
others, as above--the main passage cited is from the Phaedo. For
the devotion of the early fathers and doctors to this idea, see
citations from Eusebius, Lactantius, St. Jerome, St. Augustine,
St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, in Tissot,
L'Imagination, p. 369; also Jacob (i.e., Paul Lecroix), Croyances
Populaires, p. 183. For St. Augustine, see also his De Civitate
Dei, lib. xxii, chap. vii, and his Enarration in Psal., cxxxv, 1.
For the breaking away of the religious orders in Italy from the
entire supremacy of this idea, see Becavin, L'Ecole de Salerne,
Paris, 1888; also Daremberg, Histoire de la Medecine. Even so
late as the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther maintained
(Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, London, 1872, pp. 250, 256)
that "Satan produces all the maladies which afflict mankind."

But, if ordinary diseases were likely to be attributed to
diabolical agency, how much more diseases of the brain, and
especially the more obscure of these! These, indeed, seemed to
the vast majority of mankind possible only on the theory of
Satanic intervention: any approach to a true theory of the
connection between physical causes and mental results is one of
the highest acquisitions of science.

Here and there, during the whole historic period, keen men had
obtained an inkling of the truth; but to the vast multitude,
down to the end of the seventeenth century, nothing was more
clear than that insanity is, in many if not in most cases,
demoniacal possession.

Yet at a very early date, in Greece and Rome, science had
asserted itself, and a beginning had been made which seemed
destined to bring a large fruitage of blessings.[342] In the
fifth century before the Christian era, Hippocrates of Cos
asserted the great truth that all madness is simply disease of
the brain, thereby beginning a development of truth and mercy
which lasted nearly a thousand years. In the first century after
Christ, Aretaeus carried these ideas yet further, observed the
phenomena of insanity with great acuteness, and reached yet more
valuable results. Near the beginning of the following century,
Soranus went still further in the same path, giving new results
of research, and strengthening scientific truth. Toward the end
of the same century a new epoch was ushered in by Galen, under
whom the same truth was developed yet further, and the path
toward merciful treatment of the insane made yet more clear. In
the third century Celius Aurelianus received this deposit of
precious truth, elaborated it, and brought forth the great idea
which, had theology, citing biblical texts, not banished it,
would have saved fifteen centuries of cruelty--an idea not fully
recognised again till near the beginning of the present
century--the idea that insanity is brain disease, and that the
treatment of it must be gentle and kind. In the sixth century
Alexander of Tralles presented still more fruitful researches,
and taught the world how to deal with melancholia; and, finally,
in the seventh century, this great line of scientific men,
working mainly under pagan auspices, was closed by Paul of
Aegina, who under the protection of Caliph Omar made still
further observations, but, above all, laid stress on the cure of
madness as a disease, and on the absolute necessity of mild
treatment.

[342] It is significant of this scientific attitude that the
Greek word for superstition means, literally, fear of gods or
demons.

Such was this great succession in the apostolate of science:
evidently no other has ever shown itself more directly under
Divine grace, illumination, and guidance. It had given to the
world what might have been one of its greatest blessings.[343]

[343] For authorities regarding this development of scientific
truth and mercy in antiquity, see especially Krafft-Ebing,
Lehrbuch des Psychiatrie, Stuttgart, 1888, p. 40 and the pages
following; Trelat, Recherches Historiques sur la Folie, Paris,
1839; Semelaigne, L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquitie, Paris,
1869; Dagron, Des Alienes, Paris, 1875; also Calmeil, De la
Folie, Sprenger, and especially Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin,
Berlin, 1840.

This evolution of divine truth was interrupted by theology.
There set into the early Church a current of belief which was
destined to bring all these noble acquisitions of science and
religion to naught, and, during centuries, to inflict tortures,
physical and mental, upon hundreds of thousands of innocent men
and women--a belief which held its cruel sway for nearly eighteen
centuries; and this belief was that madness was mainly or largely
possession by the devil.

This idea of diabolic agency in mental disease had grown
luxuriantly in all the Oriental sacred literatures. In the
series of Assyrian mythological tablets in which we find those
legends of the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and other early
conceptions from which the Hebrews so largely drew the accounts
wrought into the book of Genesis, have been discovered the
formulas for driving out the evil spirits which cause disease.
In the Persian theology regarding the struggle of the great
powers of good and evil this idea was developed to its highest
point. From these and other ancient sources the Jews naturally
received this addition to their earlier view: the Mocker of the
Garden of Eden became Satan, with legions of evil angels at his
command; and the theory of diabolic causes of mental disease took
a firm place in our sacred books. Such cases in the Old
Testament as the evil spirit in Saul, which we now see to have
been simply melancholy--and, in the New Testament, the various
accounts of the casting out of devils, through which is refracted
the beautiful and simple story of that power by which Jesus of
Nazareth soothed perturbed minds by his presence or quelled
outbursts of madness by his words, give examples of this. In
Greece, too, an idea akin to this found lodgment both in the
popular belief and in the philosophy of Plato and Socrates; and
though, as we have seen, the great leaders in medical science had
taught with more or less distinctness that insanity is the result
of physical disease, there was a strong popular tendency to
attribute the more troublesome cases of it to hostile spiritual
influence.[344]

[344] For the exorcism against disease found at Ninevah, see G.
Smith, Delitzsch's German translation, p. 34. For a very
interesting passage regarding the representaion of a diabolic
personage on a Babylonian bronze, and for a very frank statement
regarding the transmission of ideas regarding Satanic power to
our sacred books, see Sayce, Herodotus, appendix ii, p. 393. It
is, indeed, extremely doubtful whether Plato himself or his
contemporaries knew anything of evil demons, this conception
probably coming into the Greek world, as into the Latin, with the
Oriental influences that began to prevail about the time of the
birth of Christ; but to the early Christians, a demon was a
demon, and Plato's, good or bad, were pagan, and therefore
devils. The Greek word "epilepsy" is itself a survival of the
old belief, fossilized in a word, since its literal meaning
refers to the SEIZURE of the patient by evil spirits.

From all these sources, but especially from our sacred books and
the writings of Plato, this theory that mental disease is caused
largely or mainly by Satanic influence passed on into the early
Church. In the apostolic times no belief seems to have been more
firmly settled. The early fathers and doctors in the following
age universally accepted it, and the apologists generally spoke
of the power of casting out devils as a leading proof of the
divine origin of the Christian religion.

This belief took firm hold upon the strongest men. The case of
St. Gregory the Great is typical. He was a pope of exceedingly
broad mind for his time, and no one will think him unjustly
reckoned one of the four Doctors of the Western Church. Yet he
solemnly relates that a nun, having eaten some lettuce without
making the sign of the cross, swallowed a devil, and that, when
commanded by a holy man to come forth, the devil replied: "How
am I to blame?  I was sitting on the lettuce, and this woman,
not having made the sign of the cross, ate me along with
it."[345]

[345] For a striking statement of the Jewish belief in diabolical
interference, see Josephus, De Bello Judaico, vii, 6, iii; also
his Antiquities, vol. viii, Whiston's translation. On the "devil
cast out," in Mark ix, 17-29, as undoubtedly a case of epilepsy,
see Cherullier, Essai sur l'Epilepsie; also Maury, art. Demonique
in the Encyclopedie Moderne. In one text, at least, the popular
belief is perfectly shown as confounding madness and possession:
"He hath a devil,and is mad," John x, 20. Among the multitude of
texts, those most relied upon were Matthew viii, 28, and Luke x,
17; and for the use of fetiches in driving out evil spirits, the
account of the cures wrought by touching the garments of St. Paul
in Acts xix, 12. On the general subject, see authorities already
given, and as a typical passage, Tertullian, Ad. Scap., ii. For
the very gross view taken by St. Basil, see Cudworth,
Intellectual System, vol. ii, p. 648; also Archdeacon Farrar's
Life of Christ. For the case related by St. Gregory the Great
with comical details, see the Exempla of Archbishop Jacques de
Vitrie, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, p.
59, art. cxxx. For a curious presentation of Greek views, see
Lelut, Le demon Socrate, Paris, 1856; and for the transmission of
these to Christianity, see the same, p. 201 and following.

As a result of this idea, the Christian Church at an early period
in its existence virtually gave up the noble conquests of Greek
and Roman science in this field, and originated, for persons
supposed to be possessed, a regular discipline, developed out of
dogmatic theology. But during the centuries before theology and
ecclesiasticism had become fully dominant this discipline was, as
a rule, gentle and useful. The afflicted, when not too violent,
were generally admitted to the exercises of public worship, and a
kindly system of cure was attempted, in which prominence was
given to holy water, sanctified ointments, the breath or spittle
of the priest, the touching of relics, visits to holy places, and
submission to mild forms of exorcism. There can be no doubt that
many of these things, when judiciously used in that spirit of
love and gentleness and devotion inherited by the earlier
disciples from "the Master," produced good effects in soothing
disturbed minds and in aiding their cure.

Among the thousands of fetiches of various sorts then resorted to
may be named, as typical, the Holy Handkerchief of Besancon.
During many centuries multitudes came from far and near to touch
it; for, it was argued, if touching the garments of St. Paul at
Ephesus had cured the diseased, how much more might be expected
of a handkerchief of the Lord himself!

With ideas of this sort was mingled a vague belief in medical
treatment, and out of this mixture were evolved such
prescriptions as the following:

"If an elf or a goblin come, smear his forehead with this salve,
put it on his eyes, cense him with incense, and sign him
frequently with the sign of the cross."

"For a fiend-sick man: When a devil possesses a man, or controls
him from within with disease, a spew-drink of lupin, bishopswort,
henbane, garlic. Pound these together, add ale and holy water."

And again: "A drink for a fiend-sick man, to be drunk out of a
church bell: Githrife, cynoglossum, yarrow, lupin,
flower-de-luce, fennel, lichen, lovage. Work up to a drink with
clear ale, sing seven masses over it, add garlic and holy water,
and let the possessed sing the Beati Immaculati; then let him
drink the dose out of a church bell, and let the priest sing over
him the Domine Sancte Pater Omnipotens."[346]

[346] See Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wort-cunning, and Star-Craft of
Early England in the Rolls Series, vol. ii, p. 177; also pp. 355,
356. For the great value of priestly saliva, see W. W. Story's
essays.

Had this been the worst treatment of lunatics developed in the
theological atmosphere of the Middle Ages, the world would have
been spared some of the most terrible chapters in its history;
but, unfortunately, the idea of the Satanic possession of
lunatics led to attempts to punish the indwelling demon. As this
theological theory and practice became more fully developed, and
ecclesiasticism more powerful to enforce it, all mildness began
to disappear; the admonitions to gentle treatment by the great
pagan and Moslem physicians were forgotten, and the treatment of
lunatics tended more and more toward severity: more and more
generally it was felt that cruelty to madmen was punishment of
the devil residing within or acting upon them.

A few strong churchmen and laymen made efforts to resist this
tendency. As far back as the fourth century, Nemesius, Bishop of
Emesa, accepted the truth as developed by pagan physicians, and
aided them in strengthening it. In the seventh century, a
Lombard code embodied a similar effort. In the eighth century,
one of Charlemagne's capitularies seems to have had a like
purpose. In the ninth century, that great churchman and
statesman, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, superior to his time in
this as in so many other things, tried to make right reason
prevail in this field; and, near the beginning of the tenth
century, Regino, Abbot of Prum, in the diocese of Treves,
insisted on treating possession as disease. But all in vain; the
current streaming most directly from sundry texts in the
Christian sacred books, and swollen by theology, had become
overwhelming.[347]

[347]  For a very thorough and interesting statement on the
general subject, see Kirchhoff, Beziehungen des Damonen- und
Hexenwesens zur deutschen Irrenpflege in the Allgemeine
Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie, Berlin, 1888, Bd. xliv, Heft 25.
For Roman Catholic authority, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic
Dictionary, article Energumens. For a brief and eloquent
summary, see Krefft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, as above;
and for a clear view of the transition from pagan mildness in the
care of the insane to severity and cruelty under the Christian
Church, see Maudsley, The Pathology of the Mind, London, 1879, p.
523. See also Buchmann, Die undfreie und die freie Kirche,
Bresleau, 1873, p. 251. For other citations, see Kirchoff, as
above, pp. 334-346. For Bishop Nemesius, see Trelat, p. 48. For
an account of Agobard's general position in regard to this and
allied superstitions, see Reginald Lane Poole's Illustrations of
the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884.

The first great tributary poured into this stream, as we approach
the bloom of the Middle Ages, appears to have come from the brain
of Michael Psellus. Mingling scriptural texts, Platonic
philosophy, and theological statements by great doctors of the
Church, with wild utterances obtained from lunatics, he gave
forth, about the beginning of the twelfth century, a treatise on
The Work of Demons. Sacred science was vastly enriched thereby
in various ways; but two of his conclusions, the results of his
most profound thought, enforced by theologians and popularized by
preachers, soon took special hold upon the thinking portion of
the people at large. The first of these, which he easily based
upon Scripture and St. Basil, was that, since all demons suffer
by material fire and brimstone, they must have material bodies;
the second was that, since all demons are by nature cold, they
gladly seek a genial warmth by entering the bodies of men and
beasts.[348]

[348] See Baas and Werner, cited by Kirchhoff,as above; also
Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 68, and note, New York,
1884. As to Basil's belief in the corporeality of devils, see
his Commentary on Isaiah, cap. i.

Fed by this stream of thought, and developed in the warm
atmosphere of medieval devotion, the idea of demoniacal
possession as the main source of lunacy grew and blossomed and
bore fruit in noxious luxuriance.

There had, indeed, come into the Middle Ages an inheritance of
scientific thought. The ideas of Hippocrates, Celius Aurelianus,
Galen, and their followers, were from time to time revived; the
Arabian physicians, the School of Salerno, such writers as
Salicetus and Guy de Chauliac, and even some of the religious
orders, did something to keep scientific doctrines alive; but
the tide of theological thought was too strong; it became
dangerous even to seem to name possible limits to diabolical
power. To deny Satan was atheism; and perhaps nothing did so
much to fasten the epithet "atheist" upon the medical profession
as the suspicion that it did not fully acknowledge diabolical
interference in mental disease. Following in the lines of the
earlier fathers, St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent
of Beauvais, all the great doctors in the medieval Church, some
of them in spite of occasional misgivings, upheld the idea that
insanity is largely or mainly demoniacal possession, basing their
belief steadily on the sacred Scriptures; and this belief was
followed up in every quarter by more and more constant citation
of the text "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."  No other
text of Scripture--save perhaps one--has caused the shedding of
so much innocent blood.

As we look over the history of the Middle Ages, we do, indeed,
see another growth from which one might hope much; for there
were two great streams of influence in the Church, and never were
two powers more unlike each other.

On one side was the spirit of Christianity, as it proceeded from
the heart and mind of its blessed Founder, immensely powerful in
aiding the evolution of religious thought and effort, and
especially of provision for the relief of suffering by religious
asylums and tender care. Nothing better expresses this than the
touching words inscribed upon a great medieval hospital, "Christo
in pauperibus suis."  But on the other side was the theological
theory--proceeding, as we have seen, from the survival of ancient
superstitions, and sustained by constant reference to the texts
in our sacred books--that many, and probably most, of the insane
were possessed by the devil or in league with him, and that the
cruel treatment of lunatics was simply punishment of the devil
and his minions. By this current of thought was gradually
developed one of the greatest masses of superstitious cruelty
that has ever afflicted humanity. At the same time the stream of
Christian endeavour, so far as the insane were concerned, was
almost entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during
the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was
for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries, indeed, gave
them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at the
London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in
the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black
Penitents in the south of France, by certain Franciscans in
northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by
various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously
enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church
was stimulated by the Mohammedans. Certain monks, who had much
to do with them in redeeming Christian slaves, found in the
fifteenth century what John Howard found in the eighteenth, that
the Arabs and Turks made a large and merciful provision for
lunatics, such as was not seen in Christian lands; and this
example led to better establishments in Spain and Italy.

All honour to this work and to the men who engaged in it; but,
as a rule, these establishments were few and poor, compared with
those for other diseases, and they usually degenerated into
"mad-houses," where devils were cast out mainly by
cruelty.[349]

[349] For a very full and learned, if somewhat one-sided, account
of the earlier effects of this stream of charitable thought, see
Tollemer, Des Origines de la Charite Catholique, Paris, 1858. It
is instructive to note that, while this book is very full in
regard to the action of the Church on slavery and on provision
for the widows and orphans, the sick, infirm, captives, and
lepers, there is hardly a trace of any care for the insane. This
same want is incidentally shown by a typical example in Kriegk,
Aerzte, Heilanstalten und Geisteskranke im mittelalterlichen
Frankfurt, Frankfurt a. M., 1863, pp. 16, 17; also Kirschhof, pp.
396, 397. On the general subject, see Semelaigne, as above, p.
214; also Calmeil, vol. i, pp. 116, 117. For the effect of
Muslem example in Spain and Italy, see Krafft-Ebing, as above, p.
45, note.

The first main weapon against the indwelling Satan continued to
be the exorcism; but under the influence of inferences from
Scripture farther and farther fetched, and of theological
reasoning more and more subtle, it became something very
different from the gentle procedure of earlier times, and some
description of this great weapon at the time of its highest
development will throw light on the laws which govern the growth
of theological reasoning, as well as upon the main subject in
hand.

A fundamental premise in the fully developed exorcism was that,
according to sacred Scripture, a main characteristic of Satan is
pride. Pride led him to rebel; for pride he was cast down;
therefore the first thing to do, in driving him out of a lunatic,
was to strike a fatal blow at his pride,--to disgust him.

This theory was carried out logically, to the letter. The
treatises on the subject simply astound one by their wealth of
blasphemous and obscene epithets which it was allowable for the
exorcist to use in casting out devils. The Treasury of
Exorcisms contains hundreds of pages packed with the vilest
epithets which the worst imagination could invent for the purpose
of overwhelming the indwelling Satan.[350]

[350] Thesaurus Exorcismorum atque Conjurationum terribilium,
potentissimorum, efficacissimorum, cum PRACTICA probatissima:
quibus spiritus maligni, Daemones Maleficiaque omnia de
Corporibus humanis obsessis, tanquam Flagellis Fustibusque
fugantur, expelluntur, . . . Cologne, 1626. Many of the books of
the exorcists were put upon the various indexes of the Church,
but this, the richest collection of all, and including nearly all
those condemned, was not prohibited until 1709. Scarcely less
startling manuals continued even later in use; and exorcisms
adapted to every emergency may of course still be found in all
the Benedictionals of the Church, even the latest. As an
example, see the Manuale Benedictionum, published by the Bishop
of Passau in 1849, or the Exorcismus in Satanam, etc., issued in
1890 by the present Pope, and now on sale at the shop of the
Propoganda in Rome.

Some of those decent enough to be printed in these degenerate
days ran as follows:

"Thou lustful and stupid one,...thou lean sow, famine-stricken
and most impure,...thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou
beast of all beasts the most beastly,...thou mad spirit,...
thou bestial and foolish drunkard,...most greedy wolf,...most
abominable whisperer,...thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!...I cast
thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen!...
Loathsome cobbler,...dingy collier,...filthy sow (scrofa
stercorata),...perfidious boar,...envious crocodile,...
malodorous drudge,...wounded basilisk,...rust-coloured
asp,... swollen toad,...entangled spider,...lousy swine-herd
(porcarie pedicose),...lowest of the low,...cudgelled ass," etc.

But, in addition to this attempt to disgust Satan's pride with
blackguardism, there was another to scare him with tremendous
words. For this purpose, thunderous names, from Hebrew and
Greek, were imported, such as Acharon, Eheye, Schemhamphora,
Tetragrammaton, Homoousion, Athanatos, Ischiros, Aecodes, and the
like.[351]

[351] See the Conjuratio on p. 300 of the Thesaurus, and the
general directions given on pp. 251, 251.

Efforts were also made to drive him out with filthy and
rank-smelling drugs; and, among those which can be mentioned in
a printed article, we may name asafoetida, sulphur, squills,
etc., which were to be burned under his nose.

Still further to plague him, pictures of the devil were to be
spat upon, trampled under foot by people of low condition, and
sprinkled with foul compounds.

But these were merely preliminaries to the exorcism proper. In
this the most profound theological thought and sacred science of
the period culminated.

Most of its forms were childish, but some rise to almost Miltonic
grandeur. As an example of the latter, we may take the
following:

"By the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which God hath given to make
known unto his servants those things which are shortly to be;
and hath signified, sending by his angel,...I exorcise you, ye
angels of untold perversity!

"By the seven golden candlesticks,...and by one like unto the
Son of man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks; by his
voice, as the voice of many waters;...by his words, `I am
living, who was dead; and behold, I live forever and ever; and
I have the keys of death and of hell,' I say unto you, Depart, O
angels that show the way to eternal perdition!"

Besides these, were long litanies of billingsgate, cursing, and
threatening. One of these "scourging" exorcisms runs partly as
follows:

"May Agyos strike thee, as he did Egypt, with frogs!...May all
the devils that are thy foes rush forth upon thee, and drag thee
down to hell!...May...Tetragrammaton...drive thee forth and
stone thee, as Israel did to Achan!...May the Holy One trample
on thee and hang thee up in an infernal fork, as was done to the
five kings of the Amorites!...May God set a nail to your skull,
and pound it in with a hammer, as Jael did unto Sisera!...
May...Sother...break thy head and cut off thy hands, as was done
to the cursed Dagon!...May God hang thee in a hellish yoke, as
seven men were hanged by the sons of Saul!"  And so on, through
five pages of close-printed Latin curses.[352]

[352] Thesaurus Exorcismorum, pp. 812-817.

Occasionally the demon is reasoned with, as follows: "O
obstinate, accursed, fly!...why do you stop and hold back, when
you know that your strength is lost on Christ?  For it is hard
for thee to kick against the pricks; and, verily, the longer it
takes you to go, the worse it will go with you. Begone, then:
take flight, thou venomous hisser, thou lying worm, thou begetter
of vipers!"[353]

[353] Ibid., p. 859.

This procedure and its results were recognised as among the
glories of the Church. As typical, we may mention an exorcism
directed by a certain Bishop of Beauvais, which was so effective
that five devils gave up possession of a sufferer and signed
their names, each for himself and his subordinate imps, to an
agreement that the possessed should be molested no more. So,
too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583, gloried in the fact
that in such a contest they had cast out twelve thousand six
hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical annals
of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in
boasts of such "mighty works."[354]

[354] In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I
have quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a
very large collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I
have mainly availed myself of the copious translations given by
M. H. Dziewicki, in his excellent article in The Nineteenth
Century for October, 1888, entitled Exorcizo Te. For valuable
citations on the origin and spread of exorcism, see Lecky's
European Morals (third English edition), vol. i, pp. 379-385.

Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning,
by the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in
Scripture and partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and
his work among men.

Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against "science
falsely so called," the world had come a long way indeed from the
soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the
noblest of his titles that of "The Great Physician."  The result
was natural: the treatment of the insane fell more and more into
the hands of the jailer, the torturer, and the executioner.

To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate
development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in
the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded
the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the
Visigothic Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of
some good enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose
distempered minds might have been restored to health by
gentleness and skill, were driven into hopeless madness by
noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere
lunatics--they were surrendered to general carelessness, and
became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast
numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan.

One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the
most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body
of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment
of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and
as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued,
as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities
frequently felt justified in driving out the demons by
torture.[355]

[355] For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More,
see D. H. Tuke's History of Insanity in the British Isles,
London, 1882, p. 41.

Interesting monuments of this idea, so fruitful in evil, still
exist. In the great cities of central Europe, "witch towers,"
where witches and demoniacs were tortured, and "fool towers,"
where the more gentle lunatics were imprisoned, may still be
seen.

In the cathedrals we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and
imps, struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under
cornices, peer out from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals,
nestle under benches, flame in windows. Above the great main
entrance, the most common of all representations still shows
Satan and his imps scowling, jeering, grinning, while taking
possession of the souls of men and scourging them with serpents,
or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains into
the flaming mouth of hell. Even in the most hidden and sacred
places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations of
Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In
these representations the painter and the glass-stainer vied with
the sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known
example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched
near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it
issues from his mouth, and only kept off by the efforts of the
attendant priest. Typical are the colossal portrait of Satan,
and the vivid picture of the devils cast out of the possessed and
entering into the swine, as shown in the cathedral-windows of
Strasburg. So, too, in the windows of Chartres Cathedral we see
a saint healing a lunatic: the saint, with a long devil-scaring
formula in Latin issuing from his mouth; and the lunatic, with a
little detestable hobgoblin, horned, hoofed, and tailed, issuing
from HIS mouth. These examples are but typical of myriads in
cathedrals and abbeys and parish churches throughout Europe; and
all served to impress upon the popular mind a horror of
everything called diabolic, and a hatred of those charged with
it. These sermons in stones preceded the printed book; they
were a sculptured Bible, which preceded Luther's pictorial
Bible.[356]

[356] I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have
personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking
examples of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright's History of
Caricature and the Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois's Stalles de
la Cathedrale de Rouen, 1838; Adeline's Les Sculptures Grotesques
et Symboliques, Rouen, 1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de
l'Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur l'Architecture, etc. For a
reproduction of an illuminated manuscript in which devils fly out
of the mouths of the possessed under the influence of exorcisms,
see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d' Archeologie for 1874,
p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim's mouth in a puff
of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de
Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate xxxii.

Satan and his imps were among the principal personages in every
popular drama, and "Hell's Mouth" was a piece of stage scenery
constantly brought into requisition. A miracle-play without a
full display of the diabolic element in it would have stood a
fair chance of being pelted from the stage.[357]

[357] See Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque; F. J.
Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters, Carlsruhe, 1846; Dr. Karl
Hase, Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, Boston,1880 (translation
from the German). Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in
Marriott's Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone's
Ancient Mysteries; in T. Sharpe's Dissertaion on the Pageants . .
. anciently performed at Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the
publications of the Shakespearean and other societies. See
especially The Harrowing of Hell, a miracle-play, edited from the
original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell, London,
1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid
for keeping a fire burning in hell's mouth. Says Hase (as above,
p. 42): "In wonderful satyrlike masquerade, in which neither
horns, tails, nor hoofs were ever . . . wanting, the devil
prosecuted on the stage his business of fetching souls," which
left the mouths of the dying "in the form of small images."

Not only the popular art but the popular legends embodied these
ideas. The chroniclers delighted in them; the Lives of the
Saints abounded in them; sermons enforced them from every
pulpit. What wonder, then, that men and women had vivid dreams
of Satanic influence, that dread of it was like dread of the
plague, and that this terror spread the disease enormously, until
we hear of convents, villages, and even large districts, ravaged
by epidemics of diabolical possession![358]

[358] I shall discuss these epidemics of possession, which form a
somewhat distinct class of phenomena, in the next chapter.

And this terror naturally bred not only active cruelty toward
those supposed to be possessed, but indifference to the
sufferings of those acknowledged to be lunatics. As we have
already seen, while ample and beautiful provision was made for
every other form of human suffering, for this there was
comparatively little; and, indeed, even this little was
generally worse than none. Of this indifference and cruelty we
have a striking monument in a single English word--a word
originally significant of gentleness and mercy, but which became
significant of wild riot, brutality, and confusion-- Bethlehem
Hospital became "Bedlam."

Modern art has also dwelt upon this theme, and perhaps the most
touching of all its exhibitions is the picture by a great French
master, representing a tender woman bound to a column and exposed
to the jeers, insults, and missiles of street ruffians.[359]

[359] The typical picture representing a priest's struggle with
the devil is in the city gallery of Rouen. The modern picture is
Robert Fleury's painting in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris.

Here and there, even in the worst of times, men arose who
attempted to promote a more humane view, but with little effect.
One expositor of St. Matthew, having ventured to recall the fact
that some of the insane were spoken of in the New Testament as
lunatics and to suggest that their madness might be caused by the
moon, was answered that their madness was not caused by the moon,
but by the devil, who avails himself of the moonlight for his
work.[360]

[360] See Geraldus Cambrensis, cited by Tuke, as above, pp. 8, 9.

One result of this idea was a mode of cure which especially
aggravated and spread mental disease: the promotion of great
religious processions. Troops of men and women, crying, howling,
imploring saints, and beating themselves with whips, visited
various sacred shrines, images, and places in the hope of driving
off the powers of evil. The only result was an increase in the
numbers of the diseased.

For hundreds of years this idea of diabolic possession was
steadily developed. It was believed that devils entered into
animals, and animals were accordingly exorcised, tried, tortured,
convicted, and executed. The great St. Ambrose tells us that a
priest, while saying mass, was troubled by the croaking of frogs
in a neighbouring marsh; that he exorcised them, and so stopped
their noise. St. Bernard, as the monkish chroniclers tell us,
mounting the pulpit to preach in his abbey, was interrupted by a
cloud of flies; straightway the saint uttered the sacred formula
of excommunication, when the flies fell dead upon the pavement in
heaps, and were cast out with shovels! A formula of exorcism
attributed to a saint of the ninth century, which remained in use
down to a recent period, especially declares insects injurious to
crops to be possessed of evil spirits, and names, among the
animals to be excommunicated or exorcised, mice, moles, and
serpents. The use of exorcism against caterpillars and
grasshoppers was also common. In the thirteenth century a Bishop
of Lausanne, finding that the eels in Lake Leman troubled the
fishermen, attempted to remove the difficulty by exorcism, and
two centuries later one of his successors excommunicated all the
May-bugs in the diocese. As late as 1731 there appears an entry
on the Municipal Register of Thonon as follows: "RESOLVED, That
this town join with other parishes of this province in obtaining
from Rome an excommunication against the insects, and that it
will contribute pro rata to the expenses of the same."

Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed by
Satan, he was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of
Satan into the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and to the casting
of devils into swine by the Founder of Christianity
himself.[361]

[361] See Menabrea, Proces au Moyen Age contre les Animaux,
Chambery, 1846, pp. 31 and following; also Desmazes, Supplices,
Prisons et Grace en France, pp. 89, 90, and 385-395. For a
formula and ceremonies used in excommunicating insects, see
Rydberg, pp. 75 and following.

One part of this superstition most tenaciously held was the
belief that a human being could be transformed into one of the
lower animals. This became a fundamental point. The most
dreaded of predatory animals in the Middle Ages were the wolves.
Driven from the hills and forests in the winter by hunger, they
not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came into the
villages and seized children. From time to time men and women
whose brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed
into various animals, and especially into wolves. On their
confessing this, and often implicating others, many executions of
lunatics resulted; moreover, countless sane victims, suspected of
the same impossible crime, were forced by torture to confess it,
and sent unpitied to the stake. The belief in such a
transformation pervaded all Europe, and lasted long even in
Protestant countries. Probably no article in the witch creed had
more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its
resultant horrors.

The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the
doctrines of witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed
them still further. No one urged their fundamental ideas more
fully than Luther. He did, indeed, reject portions of the
witchcraft folly; but to the influence of devils he not only
attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly everything
that thwarted or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon his
book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be
devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his
ideas, he attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate's
heart; to his disciples he told stories of men who had been
killed by rashly resisting the devil. Insanity, he was quite
sure, was caused by Satan, and he exorcised sufferers. Against
some he appears to have advised stronger remedies; and his horror
of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence, was so great,
that on one occasion he appears to have advised the killing of an
idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet Luther
was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range
of literature there is hardly anything more touching than his
words and tributes to children. In enforcing his ideas regarding
insanity, he laid stress especially upon the question of St.
Paul as to the bewitching of the Galatians, and, regarding
idiocy, on the account in Genesis of the birth of children whose
fathers were "sons of God" and whose mothers were "daughters of
men."  One idea of his was especially characteristic. The
descent of Christ into hell was a frequent topic of discussion in
the Reformed Church. Melanchthon, with his love of Greek
studies, held that the purpose of the Saviour in making such a
descent was to make himself known to the great and noble men of
antiquity--Plato, Socrates, and the rest; but Luther insisted
that his purpose was to conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle.

This idea of diabolic influence pervaded his conversation, his
preaching, his writings, and spread thence to the Lutheran Church
in general. Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having
more power with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it
out with yet greater harshness. Beza was especially severe
against those who believed insanity to be a natural malady, and
declared, "Such persons are refuted both by sacred and profane
history."

Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the
older Church and in the new, this superstition was developed more
and more into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in
the sculptures and windows and mural decorations of the great
medieval cathedrals, had done much to develop it among the
people, so Luther's translation of the Bible, especially in the
numerous editions of it illustrated with engravings, wrought with
enormous power to spread and deepen it. In every peasant's
cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil bearing
Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of the
Temple--of the woman with seven devils--of the devils cast into
the swine. Every peasant's child could be made to understand the
quaint pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which
illustrated vividly all those texts. In the ideas thus deeply
implanted, the men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries struggled against this mass of folly and cruelty found
the worst barrier to right reason.[362]

[362] For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar passages
in his works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, pp. 251,
252. As to the grotesques in mediaeval churches, the writer of
this article, in visiting the town church of Wittenberg, noticed,
just opposite the pulpit where Luther so often preached, a very
spirited figure of an imp peering out upon the congregation. One
can but suspect that this mediaeval survival frequently suggested
Luther's favourite topic during his sermons. For Beza, see his
Notes on the New Testament, Matthew iv, 24.

Such was the treatment of demoniacs developed by theology, and
such the practice enforced by ecclesiasticism for more than a
thousand years.

How an atmosphere was spread in which this belief began to
dissolve away, how its main foundations were undermined by
science, and how there came in gradually a reign of humanity,
will now be related.

II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.

We have now seen the culmination of the old procedure regarding
insanity, as it was developed under theology and enforced by
ecclesiasticism; and we have noted how, under the influence of
Luther and Calvin, the Reformation rather deepened than weakened
the faith in the malice and power of a personal devil. Nor was
this, in the Reformed churches any more than in the old, mere
matter of theory. As in the early ages of Christianity, its
priests especially appealed, in proof of the divine mission, to
their power over the enemy of mankind in the bodies of men, so
now the clergy of the rival creeds eagerly sought opportunities
to establish the truth of their own and the falsehood of their
opponents' doctrines by the visible casting out of devils. True,
their methods differed somewhat: where the Catholic used holy
water and consecrated wax, the Protestant was content with texts
of Scripture and importunate prayer; but the supplementary
physical annoyance of the indwelling demon did not greatly vary.
Sharp was the competition for the unhappy objects of treatment.
Each side, of course, stoutly denied all efficacy to its
adversaries' efforts, urging that any seeming victory over Satan
was due not to the defeat but to the collusion of the fiend. As,
according to the Master himself, "no man can by Beelzebub cast
out devils," the patient was now in greater need of relief than
before; and more than one poor victim had to bear alternately
Lutheran, Roman, and perhaps Calvinistic exorcism.[363]

[363] For instances of this competition, see Freytag, Aus dem
Jahrh. d. Reformation, pp. 359-375. The Jesuit Stengel, in his
De judiciis divinis (Ingolstadt, 1651), devotes a whole chapter
to an exorcism, by the great Canisius, of a spirit that had
baffled Protestant conjuration. Among the most jubilant Catholic
satires of the time are those exulting in Luther's alleged
failure as an exorcist.

But far more serious in its consequences was another rivalry to
which in the sixteenth century the clergy of all creeds found
themselves subject. The revival of the science of medicine,
under the impulse of the new study of antiquity, suddenly bade
fair to take out of the hands of the Church the profession of
which she had enjoyed so long and so profitable a monopoly. Only
one class of diseases remained unquestionably hers--those which
were still admitted to be due to the direct personal interference
of Satan--and foremost among these was insanity.[364]] It was
surely no wonder that an age of religious controversy and
excitement should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the
mind; and, to men who mutually taught the utter futility of that
baptismal exorcism by which the babes of their misguided
neighbours were made to renounce the devil and his works, it
ought not to have seemed strange that his victims now became more
numerous.[365] But so simple an explanation did not satisfy
these physicians of souls; they therefore devised a simpler one:
their patients, they alleged, were bewitched, and their increase
was due to the growing numbers of those human allies of Satan
known as witches.

[364] For the attitude of the Catholic clergy, the best sources
are the confidential Jesuit Litterae Annuae. To this day the
numerous treatises on "pastoral medicine" in use in the older
Church devote themselves mainly to this sort of warfare with the
devil.

[365] Baptismal exorcism continued in use among the Lutherans
till the eighteenth century, though the struggle over its
abandonment had been long and sharp. See Krafft, Histories vom
Exorcismo, Hamburg, 1750.

Already, before the close of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent
VIII had issued the startling bull by which he called on the
archbishops, bishops, and other clergy of Germany to join hands
with his inquisitors in rooting out these willing bond-servants
of Satan, who were said to swarm throughout all that country and
to revel in the blackest crimes. Other popes had since
reiterated the appeal; and, though none of these documents
touched on the blame of witchcraft for diabolic possession, the
inquisitors charged with their execution pointed it out most
clearly in their fearful handbook, the Witch-Hammer, and
prescribed the special means by which possession thus caused
should be met. These teachings took firm root in religious minds
everywhere; and during the great age of witch-burning that
followed the Reformation it may well be doubted whether any
single cause so often gave rise to an outbreak of the persecution
as the alleged bewitchment of some poor mad or foolish or
hysterical creature. The persecution, thus once under way, fed
itself; for, under the terrible doctrine of "excepted cases," by
which in the religious crimes of heresy and witchcraft there was
no limit to the use of torture, the witch was forced to confess
to accomplices, who in turn accused others, and so on to the end
of the chapter.[366]

[366] The Jesuit Stengel, professor at Ingolstadt, who (in his
great work, De judiciis divinis) urges, as reasons why a merciful
God permits illness, his wish to glorify himself through the
miracles wrought by his Church, and his desire to test the faith
of men by letting them choose between the holy aid of the Church
and the illicit resort to medicine, declares that there is a
difference between simple possession and that brought by
bewitchment, and insists that the latter is the more difficult to
treat.

The horrors of such a persecution, with the consciousness of an
ever-present devil it breathed and the panic terror of him it
inspired, could not but aggravate the insanity it claimed to
cure. Well-authenticated, though rarer than is often believed,
were the cases where crazed women voluntarily accused themselves
of this impossible crime. One of the most eminent authorities on
diseases of the mind declares that among the unfortunate beings
who were put to death for witchcraft he recognises well-marked
victims of cerebral disorders; while an equally eminent
authority in Germany tells us that, in a most careful study of
the original records of their trials by torture, he has often
found their answers and recorded conversations exactly like those
familiar to him in our modern lunatic asylums, and names some
forms of insanity which constantly and un mistakably appear among
those who suffered for criminal dealings with the devil.[367]
The result of this widespread terror was naturally, therefore, a
steady increase in mental disorders. A great modern authority
tells us that, although modern civilization tends to increase
insanity, the number of lunatics at present is far less than in
the ages of faith and in the Reformation period. The treatment
of the "possessed," as we find it laid down in standard
treatises, sanctioned by orthodox churchmen and jurists, accounts
for this abundantly. One sort of treatment used for those
accused of witchcraft will also serve to show this--the "tortura
insomniae."  Of all things in brain-disease, calm and regular
sleep is most certainly beneficial; yet, under this practice,
these half-crazed creatures were prevented, night after night and
day after day, from sleeping or even resting. In this way
temporary delusion became chronic insanity, mild cases became
violent, torture and death ensued, and the "ways of God to man"
were justified.[368]  But the most contemptible creatures in
all those centuries were the physicians who took sides with
religious orthodoxy. While we have, on the side of truth, Flade
sacrificing his life, Cornelius Agrippa his liberty, Wier and
Loos their hopes of preferment, Bekker his position, and
Thomasius his ease, reputation, and friends, we find, as allies
of the other side, a troop of eminently respectable doctors
mixing Scripture, metaphysics, and pretended observations to
support the "safe side" and to deprecate interference with the
existing superstition, which seemed to them "a very safe belief
to be held by the common people."[369]

[367] See D. H. Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in
the British Isles, London, 1822, p. 36; also Kirchhoff, p. 340.
The forms of insanity especially mentioned are "dementia senilis"
and epilepsy. A striking case of voluntary confession of
witchcraft by a woman who lived to recover from the delusion is
narrated in great detail by Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of
Witchcraft, London, 1584. It is, alas, only too likely that the
"strangeness" caused by slight and unrecognised mania led often
to the accusation of witchcraft instead of to the suspicion of
possession.

[368] See Kirchhoff, as above.

[369] For the arguments used by creatures of this sort, see
Diefenbach, Der Hexenwahn vor und nach der Glaubensspaltung in
Deutschland, pp. 342-346. A long list of their infamous names is
given on p. 345.

Against one form of insanity both Catholics and Protestants were
especially cruel. Nothing is more common in all times of
religious excitement than strange personal hallucinations,
involving the belief, by the insane patient, that he is a divine
person. In the most striking representation of insanity that has
ever been made, Kaulbach shows, at the centre of his wonderful
group, a patient drawing attention to himself as the Saviour of
the world.

Sometimes, when this form of disease took a milder hysterical
character, the subject of it was treated with reverence, and even
elevated to sainthood: such examples as St. Francis of Assisi
and St. Catherine of Siena in Italy, St. Bridget in Sweden, St.
Theresa in Spain, St. Mary Alacoque in France, and Louise Lateau
in Belgium, are typical. But more frequently such cases shocked
public feeling, and were treated with especial rigour: typical
of this is the case of Simon Marin, who in his insanity believed
himself to be the Son of God, and was on that account burned
alive at Paris and his ashes scattered to the winds.[370]

[370] As to the frequency among the insane of this form of
belief, see Calmeil, vol. ii, p. 257; also Maudsley, Pathology of
Mind, pp. 201, 202, and 418-424; also Rambaud, Histoire de la
Civilisation en France, vol. ii, p. 110. For the peculiar
abberations of the saints above named and other ecstatics, see
Maudsley, as above, pp. 71, 72, and 149, 150. Maudsley's
chapters on this and cognate subjects are certainly among the
most valuable contributions to modern thought. For a discussion
of the most recent case, see Warlomont, Louise Lateau, Paris,
1875.

The profundity of theologians and jurists constantly developed
new theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the
"possessed."  One such theory was that Satan could be taken into
the mouth with one's food--perhaps in the form of an insect
swallowed on a leaf of salad, and this was sanctioned, as we have
seen, by no less infallible an authority than Gregory the Great,
Pope and Saint--Another theory was that Satan entered the body
when the mouth was opened to breathe, and there are
well-authenticated cases of doctors and divines who, when casting
out evil spirits, took especial care lest the imp might jump into
their own mouths from the mouth of the patient. Another theory
was that the devil entered human beings during sleep; and at a
comparatively recent period a King of Spain was wont to sleep
between two monks, to keep off the devil.[371]

[371] As to the devil's entering into the mouth while eating, see
Calmeil, as above, vol. ii, pp. 105, 106. As to the dread of Dr.
Borde lest the evil spirit, when exorcised, might enter his own
body, see Tuke, as above, p. 28. As to the King of Spain, see
the noted chapter in Buckle's History of Civilization in England.

The monasteries were frequent sources of that form of mental
disease which was supposed to be caused by bewitchment. From the
earliest period it is evident that monastic life tended to
develop insanity. Such cases as that of St. Anthony are typical
of its effects upon the strongest minds; but it was especially
the convents for women that became the great breeding-beds of
this disease. Among the large numbers of women and girls thus
assembled--many of them forced into monastic seclusion against
their will, for the reason that their families could give them no
dower--subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions,
bickerings, petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so inevitable
in convent life--mental disease was not unlikely to be developed
at any moment. Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes
sometimes comical, but more generally tragical. Noteworthy is it
that the last places where executions for witchcraft took place
were mainly in the neighbourhood of great nunneries; and the
last famous victim, of the myriads executed in Germany for this
imaginary crime, was Sister Anna Renata Singer, sub-prioress of a
nunnery near Wurzburg.[372]

[372] Among the multitude of authorities on this point, see
Kirchhoff, as above, p. 337; and for a most striking picture of
this dark side of convent life, drawn, indeed, by a devoted Roman
Catholic, see Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. On Anna Renata there is
a striking essay by the late Johannes Scherr, in his
Hammerschlage und Historien. On the general subject of hysteria
thus developed, see the writings of Carpenter and Tuke; and as to
its natural development in nunneries, see Maudsley,
Responsibility in Mental Disease, p. 9. Especial attention will
be paid to this in the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria.

The same thing was seen among young women exposed to sundry
fanatical Protestant preachers. Insanity, both temporary and
permanent, was thus frequently developed among the Huguenots of
France, and has been thus produced in America, from the days of
the Salem persecution down to the "camp meetings" of the present
time.[373]

[373] This branch of the subject will be discussed more at length
in a future chapter.

At various times, from the days of St. Agobard of Lyons in the
ninth century to Pomponatius in the sixteenth, protests or
suggestions, more or less timid, had been made by thoughtful men
against this system. Medicine had made some advance toward a
better view, but the theological torrent had generally
overwhelmed all who supported a scientific treatment. At last,
toward the end of the sixteenth century, two men made a beginning
of a much more serious attack upon this venerable superstition.
The revival of learning, and the impulse to thought on material
matters given during the "age of discovery," undoubtedly produced
an atmosphere which made the work of these men possible. In the
year 1563, in the midst of demonstrations of demoniacal
possession by the most eminent theologians and judges, who sat in
their robes and looked wise, while women, shrieking, praying, and
blaspheming, were put to the torture, a man arose who dared to
protest effectively that some of the persons thus charged might
be simply insane; and this man was John Wier, of Cleves.

His protest does not at this day strike us as particularly bold.
In his books, De Praestigiis Daemonum and De Lamiis, he did his
best not to offend religious or theological susceptibilities;
but he felt obliged to call attention to the mingled fraud and
delusion of those who claimed to be bewitched, and to point out
that it was often not their accusers, but the alleged witches
themselves, who were really ailing, and to urge that these be
brought first of all to a physician.

His book was at once attacked by the most eminent theologians.
One of the greatest laymen of his time, Jean Bodin, also wrote
with especial power against it, and by a plentiful use of
scriptural texts gained to all appearance a complete victory:
this superstition seemed thus fastened upon Europe for a thousand
years more. But doubt was in the air, and, about a quarter of a
century after the publication of Wier's book there were published
in France the essays of a man by no means so noble, but of far
greater genius--Michel de Montaigne. The general scepticism
which his work promoted among the French people did much to
produce an atmosphere in which the belief in witchcraft and
demoniacal possession must inevitably wither. But this process,
though real, was hidden, and the victory still seemed on the
theological side.

The development of the new truth and its struggle against the old
error still went on. In Holland, Balthazar Bekker wrote his
book against the worst forms of the superstition, and attempted
to help the scientific side by a text from the Second Epistle of
St. Peter, showing that the devils had been confined by the
Almighty, and therefore could not be doing on earth the work
which was imputed to them. But Bekker's Protestant brethren
drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped with his life.

The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently
the worst. So it proved in this case. In the first half of
the seventeenth century the cruelties arising from the old
doctrine were more numerous and severe than ever before. In
Spain, Sweden, Italy, and, above all, in Germany, we see constant
efforts to suppress the evolution of the new truth.

But in the midst of all this reactionary rage glimpses of right
reason began to appear. It is significant that at this very
time, when the old superstition was apparently everywhere
triumphant, the declaration by Poulet that he and his brother and
his cousin had, by smearing themselves with ointment, changed
themselves into wolves and devoured children, brought no severe
punishment upon them. The judges sent him to a mad-house. More
and more, in spite of frantic efforts from the pulpit to save the
superstition, great writers and jurists, especially in France,
began to have glimpses of the truth and courage to uphold it.
Malebranche spoke against the delusion; Seguier led the French
courts to annul several decrees condemning sorcerers; the great
chancellor, D'Aguesseau, declared to the Parliament of Paris
that, if they wished to stop sorcery, they must stop talking
about it--that sorcerers are more to be pitied than
blamed.[374]

[374] See Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, vol. i, pp. 488, 489;
vol. ii, p. 529.

But just at this time, as the eighteenth century was approaching,
the theological current was strengthened by a great
ecclesiastic--the greatest theologian that France has produced,
whose influence upon religion and upon the mind of Louis XIV was
enormous--Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. There had been reason to
expect that Bossuet would at least do something to mitigate the
superstition; for his writings show that, in much which before
his day had been ascribed to diabolic possession, he saw simple
lunacy. Unfortunately, the same adherence to the literal
interpretation of Scripture which led him to oppose every other
scientific truth developed in his time, led him also to attack
this: he delivered and published two great sermons, which, while
showing some progress in the form of his belief, showed none the
less that the fundamental idea of diabolic possession was still
to be tenaciously held. What this idea was may be seen in one
typical statement: he declared that "a single devil could turn
the earth round as easily as we turn a marble."[375]

[375] See the two sermons, Sur les Demons (which are virtually
but two versions of the same sermon), in Bousset's works, edition
of 1845, vol. iii, p. 236 et seq.; also Dziewicki, in The
Nineteenth Century, as above. On Bousset's resistance to other
scientific truths, especially in astronomy, geology, and
political economy, see other chapters in this work.

III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.--
PINEL AND TUKE.

The theological current, thus re-enforced, seemed to become again
irresistible; but it was only so in appearance. In spite of it,
French scepticism continued to develop; signs of quiet change
among the mass of thinking men were appearing more and more; and
in 1672 came one of great significance, for, the Parliament of
Rouen having doomed fourteen sorcerers to be burned, their
execution was delayed for two years, evidently on account of
scepticism among officials; and at length the great minister of
Louis XIV, Colbert, issued an edict checking such trials, and
ordering the convicted to be treated for madness.

Victory seemed now to incline to the standard of science, and in
1725 no less a personage than St. Andre, a court physician,
dared to publish a work virtually showing "demoniacal possession"
to be lunacy.

The French philosophy, from the time of its early development in
the eighteenth century under Montesquieu and Voltaire, naturally
strengthened the movement; the results of post-mortem
examinations of the brains of the "possessed" confirmed it; and
in 1768 we see it take form in a declaration by the Parliament of
Paris, that possessed persons were to be considered as simply
diseased. Still, the old belief lingered on, its life
flickering up from time to time in those parts of France most
under ecclesiastical control, until in these last years of the
nineteenth century a blow has been given it by the researches of
Charcot and his compeers which will probably soon extinguish it.
One evidence of Satanic intercourse with mankind especially, on
which for many generations theologians had laid peculiar stress,
and for which they had condemned scores of little girls and
hundreds of old women to a most cruel death, was found to be
nothing more than one of the many results of hysteria.[376]

[376] For Colbert's influence, see Dagron, p. 8; also Rambaud, as
above, vol. ii, p. 155. For St. Andre, see Lacroix, as above,
pp. 189, 190. For Charcot's researches into the disease now
known as Meteorismus hystericus, but which was formerly regarded
in the ecclesiastical courts as an evidence of pregnancy through
relations with Satan, see Snell, Hexenprocesse un Geistesstorung,
Munchen, 1891, chaps. xii and xiii.

In England the same warfare went on. John Locke had asserted
the truth, but the theological view continued to control public
opinion. Most prominent among those who exercised great power
in its behalf was John Wesley, and the strength and beauty of his
character made his influence in this respect all the more
unfortunate. The same servitude to the mere letter of Scripture
which led him to declare that "to give up witchcraft is to give
up the Bible," controlled him in regard to insanity. He
insisted, on the authority of the Old Testament, that bodily
diseases are sometimes caused by devils, and, upon the authority
of the New Testament, that the gods of the heathen are demons; he
believed that dreams, while in some cases caused by bodily
conditions and passions, are shown by Scripture to be also caused
by occult powers of evil; he cites a physician to prove that
"most lunatics are really demoniacs."  In his great sermon on
Evil Angels, he dwells upon this point especially; resists the
idea that "possession" may be epilepsy, even though ordinary
symptoms of epilepsy be present; protests against "giving up to
infidels such proofs of an invisible world as are to be found in
diabolic possession"; and evidently believes that some who have
been made hysterical by his own preaching are "possessed of
Satan."  On all this, and much more to the same effect, he
insisted with all the power given to him by his deep religious
nature, his wonderful familiarity with the Scriptures, his
natural acumen, and his eloquence.

But here, too, science continued its work. The old belief was
steadily undermined, an atmosphere favourable to the truth was
more and more developed, and the act of Parliament, in 1735,
which banished the crime of witchcraft from the statute book, was
the beginning of the end.

In Germany we see the beginnings of a similar triumph for
science. In Prussia, that sturdy old monarch, Frederick William
I, nullified the efforts of the more zealous clergy and orthodox
jurists to keep up the old doctrine in his dominions; throughout
Protestant Germany, where it had raged most severely, it was, as
a rule, cast out of the Church formulas, catechisms, and hymns,
and became more and more a subject for jocose allusion. From
force of habit, and for the sake of consistency, some of the more
conservative theologians continued to repeat the old arguments,
and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely
necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had
become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they
believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of
the insane.[377]

[377] For John Locke, see King's Life of Locke, pp. 326, 327.
For Wesley, out of his almost innumerable writings bearing on the
subject, I may select the sermon on Evil Angels, and his Letter
to Dr. Middleton; and in his collected works, there are many
striking statements and arguments, especially in vols. iii, vi,
and ix. See also Tyerman's Life of Wesley, vol. ii, pp. 260 et
seq. Luther's great hymn, Ein' feste Burg, remained, of course, a
prominent exception to the rule; but a popular proverb came to
express the general feeling: "Auf Teufel reimt sich Zweifel."
See Langin, as above, pp. 545, 546.

In Austria, the government set Dr. Antonio Haen at making
careful researches into the causes of diabolic possession. He
did not think it best, in view of the power of the Church, to
dispute the possibility or probability of such cases, but simply
decided, after thorough investigation, that out of the many cases
which had been brought to him, not one supported the belief in
demoniacal influence. An attempt was made to follow up this
examination, and much was done by men like Francke and Van
Swieten, and especially by the reforming emperor, Joseph II, to
rescue men and women who would otherwise have fallen victims to
the prevalent superstition. Unfortunately, Joseph had arrayed
against himself the whole power of the Church, and most of his
good efforts seemed brought to naught. But what the noblest of
the old race of German emperors could not do suddenly, the German
men of science did gradually. Quietly and thoroughly, by proofs
that could not be gainsaid, they recovered the old scientific
fact established in pagan Greece and Rome, that madness is simply
physical disease. But they now established it on a basis that
can never again be shaken; for, in post-mortem examinations of
large numbers of "possessed" persons, they found evidence of
brain-disease. Typical is a case at Hamburg in 1729. An
afflicted woman showed in a high degree all the recognised
characteristics of diabolic possession: exorcisms, preachings,
and sanctified remedies of every sort were tried in vain; milder
medical means were then tried, and she so far recovered that she
was allowed to take the communion before she died: the autopsy,
held in the presence of fifteen physicians and a public notary,
showed it to be simply a case of chronic meningitis. The work of
German men of science in this field is noble indeed; a great
succession, from Wier to Virchow, have erected a barrier against
which all the efforts of reactionists beat in vain.[378]

[378] See Kirchhoff, pp. 181-187; also Langin, Religion und
Hexenprozess, as above cited.

In America, the belief in diabolic influence had, in the early
colonial period, full control. The Mathers, so superior to
their time in many things, were children of their time in this:
they supported the belief fully, and the Salem witchcraft horrors
were among its results; but the discussion of that folly by Calef
struck it a severe blow, and a better influence spread rapidly
throughout the colonies.

By the middle of the eighteenth century belief in diabolic
possession had practically disappeared from all enlightened
countries, and during the nineteenth century it has lost its hold
even in regions where the medieval spirit continues strongest.
Throughout the Middle Ages, as we have seen, Satan was a leading
personage in the miracle-plays, but in 1810 the Bavarian
Government refused to allow the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau if
Satan was permitted to take any part in it; in spite of heroic
efforts to maintain the old belief, even the childlike faith of
the Tyrolese had arrived at a point which made a representation
of Satan simply a thing to provoke laughter.

Very significant also was the trial which took place at Wemding,
in southern Germany, in 1892. A boy had become hysterical, and
the Capuchin Father Aurelian tried to exorcise him, and charged a
peasant's wife, Frau Herz, with bewitching him, on evidence that
would have cost the woman her life at any time during the
seventeenth century. Thereupon the woman's husband brought suit
against Father Aurelian for slander. The latter urged in his
defence that the boy was possessed of an evil spirit, if anybody
ever was; that what had been said and done was in accordance
with the rules and regulations of the Church, as laid down in
decrees, formulas, and rituals sanctioned by popes, councils, and
innumerable bishops during ages. All in vain. The court
condemned the good father to fine and imprisonment. As in a
famous English case, "hell was dismissed, with costs."  Even more
significant is the fact that recently a boy declared by two
Bavarian priests to be possessed by the devil, was taken, after
all Church exorcisms had failed, to Father Kneipp's hydropathic
establishment and was there speedily cured.[379]

[379] For remarkably interesting articles showing the recent
efforts of sundry priests in Italy and South Germany to revive
the belief in diabolic possession--efforts in which the Bishop of
Augsburg took part--see Prof. E. P. Evans, on Modern Instances of
Diabolic Possession, and on Recent Recrudescence of Superstition
in The Popular Science Monthly for Dec. 1892, and for Oct., Nov.,
1895.

Speaking of the part played by Satan at Ober-Ammergau, Hase says:
"Formerly, seated on his infernal throne, surrounded by his hosts
with Sin and Death, he opened the play, . . . and . . . retained
throughout a considerable part; but he has been surrendered to
the progress of that enlightenment which even the Bavarian
highlands have not been able to escape" (p. 80).

The especial point to be noted is, that from the miracle-play of
the present day Satan and his works have disappeared. The
present writer was unable to detect, in a representation of the
Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau, in 1881, the slightest reference
to diabolic interference with the course of events as represented
from the Old Testament, or from the New, in a series of tableaux
lasting, with a slight intermission, from nine in the morning to
after four in the afternoon. With the most thorough exhibition
of minute events in the life of Christ, and at times with
hundreds of figures on the stage, there was not a person or a
word which recalled that main feature in the mediaeval Church
plays. The present writer also made a full collection of the
photographs of tableaux, of engravings of music, and of works
bearing upon these representations for twenty years before, and
in none of these was there an apparent survival of the old
belief.

But, although the old superstition had been discarded, the
inevitable conservatism in theology and medicine caused many old
abuses to be continued for years after the theological basis for
them had really disappeared. There still lingered also a
feeling of dislike toward madmen, engendered by the early feeling
of hostility toward them, which sufficed to prevent for many
years any practical reforms.

What that old theory had been, even under the most favourable
circumstances and among the best of men, we have seen in the fact
that Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to be publicly
flogged; and it will be remembered that Shakespeare makes one of
his characters refer to madmen as deserving "a dark house and a
whip."  What the old practice was and continued to be we know but
too well. Taking Protestant England as an example--and it was
probably the most humane--we have a chain of testimony. Toward
the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital was reported
too loathsome for any man to enter; in the seventeenth century,
John Evelyn found it no better; in the eighteenth, Hogarth's
pictures and contemporary reports show it to be essentially what
it had been in those previous centuries.[380]

[380] On Sir Thomas More and the condition of Bedlam, see Tuke,
History of the Insane in the British Isles, pp. 63-73. One of
the passages of Shakespeare is in As You Like It, Act iii, scene
2. As to the survival of indifference to the sufferings of the
insane so long after the belief which caused it had generally
disappeared, see some excellent remarks in Maudsley's
Responsibility in Mental Disease, London, 1885, pp. 10-12.

The older English practice is thus quaintly described by Richard
Carew (in his Survey of Cornwall, London, 1602, 1769): "In our
forefathers' daies, when devotion as much exceeded knowledge, as
knowledge now commeth short of devotion, there were many
bowssening places, for curing of mad men, and amongst the rest,
one at Alternunne in this Hundred, called S. Nunnespoole, which
Saints Altar (it may be) . . . gave name to the church. . . The
watter running from S. Nunnes well, fell into a square and close
walled plot, which might bee filled at what depth they listed.
Vpon this wall was the franticke person set to stand, his backe
towards the poole, and from thence with a sudden blow in the
brest, tumbled headlong into the pond; where a strong fellowe,
provided for the nonce, tooke him, and tossed him vp and downe,
alongst and athwart the water, vntill the patient, by forgoing
strength, had somewhat forgot his fury. Then there was hee
conveyed to the Church, and certain Masses sung over him; vpon
which handling, if his right wits returned, S. Nunne had the
thanks; but if there appeared any small amendment, he was
bowsened againe, and againe, while there remayned in him any hope
of life, for recovery."

The first humane impulse of any considerable importance in this
field seems to have been aroused in America. In the year 1751
certain members of the Society of Friends founded a small
hospital for the insane, on better principles, in Pennsylvania.
To use the language of its founders, it was intended "as a good
work, acceptable to God."  Twenty years later Virginia
established a similar asylum, and gradually others appeared in
other colonies.

But it was in France that mercy was to be put upon a scientific
basis, and was to lead to practical results which were to convert
the world to humanity. In this case, as in so many others, from
France was spread and popularized not only the scepticism which
destroyed the theological theory, but also the devotion which
built up the new scientific theory and endowed the world with a
new treasure of civilization.

In 1756 some physicians of the great hospital at Paris known as
the Hotel-Dieu protested that the cruelties prevailing in the
treatment of the insane were aggravating the disease; and some
protests followed from other quarters. Little effect was
produced at first; but just before the French Revolution, Tenon,
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and others took up the subject, and
in 1791 a commission was appointed to undertake a reform.

By great good fortune, the man selected to lead in the movement
was one who had already thrown his heart into it--Jean Baptiste
Pinel. In 1792 Pinel was made physician at Bicetre, one of the
most extensive lunatic asylums in France, and to the work there
imposed upon him he gave all his powers. Little was heard of
him at first. The most terrible scenes of the French Revolution
were drawing nigh; but he laboured on, modestly and
devotedly--apparently without a thought of the great political
storm raging about him.

His first step was to discard utterly the whole theological
doctrine of "possession," and especially the idea that insanity
is the result of any subtle spiritual influence. He simply put
in practice the theory that lunacy is the result of bodily
disease.

It is a curious matter for reflection, that but for this sway of
the destructive philosophy of the eighteenth century, and of the
Terrorists during the French Revolution, Pinel's blessed work
would in all probability have been thwarted, and he himself
excommunicated for heresy and driven from his position.
Doubtless the same efforts would have been put forth against him
which the Church, a little earlier, had put forth against
inoculation as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time the
great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing
this particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping
their own heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was
passing in the head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace,
and in a short time the reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended.
What the exorcisms and fetiches and prayers and processions, and
drinking of holy water, and ringing of bells, had been unable to
accomplish during eighteen hundred years, he achieved in a few
months. His method was simple: for the brutality and cruelty
which had prevailed up to that time, he substituted kindness and
gentleness. The possessed were taken out of their dungeons,
given sunny rooms, and allowed the liberty of pleasant ground for
exercise; chains were thrown aside. At the same time, the
mental power of each patient was developed by its fitting
exercise, and disease was met with remedies sanctioned by
experiment, observation, and reason. Thus was gained one of the
greatest, though one of the least known, triumphs of modern
science and humanity.

The results obtained by Pinel had an instant effect, not only in
France but throughout Europe: the news spread from hospital to
hospital. At his death, Esquirol took up his work; and, in the
place of the old training of judges, torturers, and executioners
by theology to carry out its ideas in cruelty, there was now
trained a school of physicians to develop science in this field
and carry out its decrees in mercy.[381]

[381] For the services of Tenon and his associates, and also for
the work of Pinel, see especially Esquirol, Des Maladies
mentales, Paris, 1838, vol. i, p. 35; and for the general
subject, and the condition of the hospitals at this period, see
Dagron, as above.

A similar evolution of better science and practice took place in
England. In spite of the coldness, and even hostility, of the
greater men in the Established Church, and notwithstanding the
scriptural demonstrations of Wesley that the majority of the
insane were possessed of devils, the scientific method steadily
gathered strength. In 1750 the condition of the insane began to
attract especial attention; it was found that mad-houses were
swayed by ideas utterly indefensible, and that the practices
engendered by these ideas were monstrous. As a rule, the
patients were immured in cells, and in many cases were chained to
the walls; in others, flogging and starvation played leading
parts, and in some cases the patients were killed. Naturally
enough, John Howard declared, in 1789, that he found in
Constantinople a better insane asylum than the great St. Luke's
Hospital in London. Well might he do so; for, ever since Caliph
Omar had protected and encouraged the scientific investigation of
insanity by Paul of Aegina, the Moslem treatment of the insane
had been far more merciful than the system prevailing throughout
Christendom.[382]

[382] See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 110; also Trelat, as already
cited.

In 1792--the same year in which Pinel began his great work in
France--William Tuke began a similar work in England. There
seems to have been no connection between these two reformers;
each wrought independently of the other, but the results arrived
at were the same. So, too, in the main, were their methods; and
in the little house of William Tuke, at York, began a better era
for England.

The name which this little asylum received is a monument both of
the old reign of cruelty and of the new reign of humanity.
Every old name for such an asylum had been made odious and
repulsive by ages of misery; in a happy moment of inspiration
Tuke's gentle Quaker wife suggested a new name; and, in
accordance with this suggestion, the place became known as a
"Retreat."

From the great body of influential classes in church and state
Tuke received little aid. The influence of the theological
spirit was shown when, in that same year, Dr. Pangster published
his Observations on Mental Disorders, and, after displaying much
ignorance as to the causes and nature of insanity, summed up by
saying piously, "Here our researches must stop, and we must
declare that `wonderful are the works of the Lord, and his ways
past finding out.'" Such seemed to be the view of the Church at
large: though the new "Retreat" was at one of the two great
ecclesiastical centres of England, we hear of no aid or
encouragement from the Archbishop of York or from his clergy.
Nor was this the worst: the indirect influence of the
theological habit of thought and ecclesiastical prestige was
displayed in the Edinburgh Review. That great organ of opinion,
not content with attacking Tuke, poured contempt upon his work,
as well as on that of Pinel. A few of Tuke's brother and sister
Quakers seem to have been his only reliance; and in a letter
regarding his efforts at that time he says, "All men seem to
desert me."[383]

[383] See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 116-142, and 512; also the
Edinburgh Review for April, 1803.

In this atmosphere of English conservative opposition or
indifference the work could not grow rapidly. As late as 1815,
a member of Parliament stigmatized the insane asylums of England
as the shame of the nation; and even as late as 1827, and in a
few cases as late as 1850, there were revivals of the old
absurdity and brutality. Down to a late period, in the hospitals
of St. Luke and Bedlam, long rows of the insane were chained to
the walls of the corridors. But Gardner at Lincoln, Donnelly at
Hanwell, and a new school of practitioners in mental disease,
took up the work of Tuke, and the victory in England was gained
in practice as it had been previously gained in theory.

There need be no controversy regarding the comparative merits of
these two benefactors of our race, Pinel and Tuke. They clearly
did their thinking and their work independently of each other,
and thereby each strengthened the other and benefited mankind.
All that remains to be said is, that while France has paid high
honours to Pinel, as to one who did much to free the world from
one of its most cruel superstitions and to bring in a reign of
humanity over a wide empire, England has as yet made no fitting
commemoration of her great benefactor in this field. York
Minster holds many tombs of men, of whom some were blessings to
their fellow-beings, while some were but "solemnly constituted
impostors" and parasites upon the body politic; yet, to this
hour, that great temple has received no consecration by a
monument to the man who did more to alleviate human misery than
any other who has ever entered it.

But the place of these two men in history is secure. They stand
with Grotius, Thomasius, and Beccaria--the men who in modern
times have done most to prevent unmerited sorrow. They were
not, indeed, called to suffer like their great compeers; they
were not obliged to see their writings--among the most blessed
gifts of God to man--condemned, as were those of Grotius and
Beccaria by the Catholic Church, and those of Thomasius by a
large section of the Protestant Church; they were not obliged to
flee for their lives, as were Grotius and Thomasius; but their
effort is none the less worthy. The French Revolution, indeed,
saved Pinel, and the decay of English ecclesiasticism gave Tuke
his opportunity; but their triumphs are none the less among the
glories of our race; for they were the first acknowledged victors
in a struggle of science for humanity which had lasted nearly two
thousand years.

CHAPTER XVI.

FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA.

I. THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION."

In the foregoing chapter I have sketched the triumph of science
in destroying the idea that individual lunatics are "possessed by
devils," in establishing the truth that insanity is physical
disease, and in substituting for superstitious cruelties toward
the insane a treatment mild, kindly, and based upon ascertained
facts.

The Satan who had so long troubled individual men and women thus
became extinct; henceforth his fossil remains only were
preserved: they may still be found in the sculptures and storied
windows of medieval churches, in sundry liturgies, and in popular
forms of speech.

But another Satan still lived--a Satan who wrought on a larger
scale--who took possession of multitudes. For, after this
triumph of the scientific method, there still remained a class of
mental disorders which could not be treated in asylums, which
were not yet fully explained by science, and which therefore gave
arguments of much apparent strength to the supporters of the old
theological view: these were the epidemics of "diabolic
possession" which for so many centuries afflicted various parts
of the world.

When obliged, then, to retreat from their old position in regard
to individual cases of insanity, the more conservative
theologians promptly referred to these epidemics as beyond the
domain of science--as clear evidences of the power of Satan;
and, as the basis of this view, they cited from the Old Testament
frequent references to witchcraft, and, from the New Testament,
St. Paul's question as to the possible bewitching of the
Galatians, and the bewitching of the people of Samaria by Simon
the Magician.

Naturally, such leaders had very many adherents in that class, so
large in all times, who find that

"To follow foolish precedents and wink
With both our eyes, is easier than to think."[384]

[384] As to eminent physicians' finding a stumbling-block in
hysterical mania, see Kirchhoff's article, p. 351, cited in
previous chapter.

It must be owned that their case seemed strong. Though in all
human history, so far as it is closely known, these phenomena had
appeared, and though every classical scholar could recall the
wild orgies of the priests, priestesses, and devotees of Dionysus
and Cybele, and the epidemic of wild rage which took its name
from some of these, the great fathers and doctors of the Church
had left a complete answer to any scepticism based on these
facts; they simply pointed to St. Paul's declaration that the
gods of the heathen were devils: these examples, then, could be
transformed into a powerful argument for diabolic
possession.[385]

[385] As to the Maenads, Corybantes, and the disease
"Corybantism," see, for accessible and adequate statements,
Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities and Lewis and Short's Lexicon;
also reference in Hecker's Essays upon the Black Death and the
Dancing Mania. For more complete discussion, see Semelaigne,
L'Alienation mentale dans l'Antiquite, Paris, 1869.

But it was more especially the epidemics of diabolism in medieval
and modern times which gave strength to the theological view, and
from these I shall present a chain of typical examples.

As early as the eleventh century we find clear accounts of
diabolical possession taking the form of epidemics of raving,
jumping, dancing, and convulsions, the greater number of the
sufferers being women and children. In a time so rude, accounts
of these manifestations would rarely receive permanent record;
but it is very significant that even at the beginning of the
eleventh century we hear of them at the extremes of Europe--in
northern Germany and in southern Italy. At various times during
that century we get additional glimpses of these exhibitions, but
it is not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that we
have a renewal of them on a large scale. In 1237, at Erfurt, a
jumping disease and dancing mania afflicted a hundred children,
many of whom died in consequence; it spread through the whole
region, and fifty years later we hear of it in Holland.

But it was the last quarter of the fourteenth century that saw
its greatest manifestations. There was abundant cause for them.
It was a time of oppression, famine, and pestilence: the
crusading spirit, having run its course, had been succeeded by a
wild, mystical fanaticism; the most frightful plague in human
history--the Black Death--was depopulating whole
regions--reducing cities to villages, and filling Europe with
that strange mixture of devotion and dissipation which we always
note during the prevalence of deadly epidemics on a large scale.

It was in this ferment of religious, moral, and social disease
that there broke out in 1374, in the lower Rhine region, the
greatest, perhaps, of all manifestations of "possession"--an
epidemic of dancing, jumping, and wild raving. The cures
resorted to seemed on the whole to intensify the disease: the
afflicted continued dancing for hours, until they fell in utter
exhaustion. Some declared that they felt as if bathed in blood,
some saw visions, some prophesied.

Into this mass of "possession" there was also clearly poured a
current of scoundrelism which increased the disorder.

The immediate source of these manifestations seems to have been
the wild revels of St. John's Day. In those revels sundry old
heathen ceremonies had been perpetuated, but under a nominally
Christian form: wild Bacchanalian dances had thus become a
semi-religious ceremonial. The religious and social atmosphere
was propitious to the development of the germs of diabolic
influence vitalized in these orgies, and they were scattered far
and wide through large tracts of the Netherlands and Germany, and
especially through the whole region of the Rhine. At Cologne we
hear of five hundred afflicted at once; at Metz of eleven
hundred dancers in the streets; at Strasburg of yet more painful
manifestations; and from these and other cities they spread
through the villages and rural districts.

The great majority of the sufferers were women, but there were
many men, and especially men whose occupations were sedentary.
Remedies were tried upon a large scale-exorcisms first, but
especially pilgrimages to the shrine of St. Vitus. The
exorcisms accomplished so little that popular faith in them grew
small, and the main effect of the pilgrimages seemed to be to
increase the disorder by subjecting great crowds to the diabolic
contagion. Yet another curative means was seen in the flagellant
processions--vast crowds of men, women, and children who wandered
through the country, screaming, praying, beating themselves with
whips, imploring the Divine mercy and the intervention of St.
Vitus. Most fearful of all the main attempts at cure were the
persecutions of the Jews. A feeling had evidently spread among
the people at large that the Almighty was filled with wrath at
the toleration of his enemies, and might be propitiated by their
destruction: in the principal cities and villages of Germany,
then, the Jews were plundered, tortured, and murdered by tens of
thousands. No doubt that, in all this, greed was united with
fanaticism; but the argument of fanaticism was simple and
cogent; the dart which pierced the breast of Israel at that time
was winged and pointed from its own sacred books: the biblical
argument was the same used in various ages to promote
persecution; and this was, that the wrath of the Almighty was
stirred against those who tolerated his enemies, and that because
of this toleration the same curse had now come upon Europe which
the prophet Samuel had denounced against Saul for showing mercy
to the enemies of Jehovah.

It is but just to say that various popes and kings exerted
themselves to check these cruelties. Although the argument of
Samuel to Saul was used with frightful effect two hundred years
later by a most conscientious pope in spurring on the rulers of
France to extirpate the Huguenots, the papacy in the fourteenth
century stood for mercy to the Jews. But even this intervention
was long without effect; the tide of popular superstition had
become too strong to be curbed even by the spiritual and temporal
powers.[386]

[386] See Wellhausen, article Israel, in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, ninth edition; also the reprint of it in his History
of Israel, London, 1885, p. 546. On the general subject of the
demoniacal epidemics, see Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, vol.
i, pp. 260 et seq.; also Hecker's essay. As to the history of
Saul, as a curious landmark in the general development of the
subject, see The Case of Saul, showing that his Disorder was a
Real Spiritual Possession, by Granville Sharp, London, 1807,
passim. As to the citation of Saul's case by the reigning Pope
to spur on the French kings against the Huguenots, I hope to give
a list of authorities in a future chapter on The Church and
International Law. For the general subject, with interesting
details, see Laurent, Etudes sur l'Histoire de l'Humanities. See
also Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquite et au
Moyen Age.

Against this overwhelming current science for many generations
could do nothing. Throughout the whole of the fifteenth century
physicians appeared to shun the whole matter. Occasionally some
more thoughtful man ventured to ascribe some phase of the disease
to natural causes; but this was an unpopular doctrine, and
evidently dangerous to those who developed it.

Yet, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, cases of
"possession" on a large scale began to be brought within the
scope of medical research, and the man who led in this evolution
of medical science was Paracelsus. He it was who first bade
modern Europe think for a moment upon the idea that these
diseases are inflicted neither by saints nor demons, and that the
"dancing possession" is simply a form of disease, of which the
cure may be effected by proper remedies and regimen.

Paracelsus appears t