thorough legal investigation has twice utterly disproved the miracle which gives sacredness to the place, 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 center; 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.
As to all these the argument 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 Besançon? 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 people in all parts of Europe?[1]
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
- ↑ For sacred fountains in modern times, see Pettigrew, as above, p. 42; also, Palyell, Parker Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 82 and following; also, Montalembert, Les Moines d'Occident, t. 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 Pocuments relative to the Miraculous Cure of Winefrid White, of the Town of Wolverhampton, at Holywell, Flintshire, on the 28th of June, 1805, by John Milner, P. P., 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, 12 and 356. For one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction, showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous powers in a fashionable spring in France, see Gustave Proz, Autour d'Une Source.
