Note 38 — Chapter II · RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul; assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.

This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was held in all its naïveté by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples, a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success. Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared. “I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest the head like pyrethrig.”