blood be annihilated or putrefied and that all the blood which he shed be glorified with his body.
The second argument proved that the alleged miracles performed at Wylsnack were deceptions upon the basis of the testimony of persons reported to have been cured. The relic was said to have restored sight to the blind and to have helped the prisoner to escape from jail. But the commission discovered that two women, who were reported to have received their sight, swore before a notary that they had never been blind, and a boy, reported as having had a foot healed, was worse off after his visit to Wylsnack than he was when he went there.
In spite of the commission’s report, Huss’s tract and Zbynek’s decree, the relic continued, doing its mission of deceiving the unwary for more than a century. But the discussion, started in the university over the question whether any of Christ’s blood is on the earth, excited interest beyond Prague. It was made the subject of discussion in the university of Vienna, received special notice in the universities of Leipzig and Erfurt, and a synod held in Magdeburg, 1412, called upon the bishop of Havelberg, in whose diocese Wylsnack was located, to put an end to the deception. Huss declared that at Wylsnack they did not know what they adored, but that “we adore Christ’s body and blood, extant at the right hand of God and hidden in the venerable sacrament.” Wylsnack was still a place of pilgrimage in Luther’s day, as Luther tells us in his Address to the German Nobility. In 1552 the pyx was broken in which the relic was held and the relic itself thrown into the fire.
The most notable case of Christ’s blood was the relic which reached England in 1247. Its arrival was celebrated with distinguished solemnity. The king of England, Henry III, after fasting and keeping watch all night, accompanied by the priests of London in full canonicals and with tapers burning, carried the vase containing the holy liquid from St.
