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and little of her ever having even the least use of it; when, she being introduced to him and showing him the arm, which he thoroughly examined and tried, he was so affected at the sight and the recital of the manner of the cure as to shed tears, and exclaim, It is a special interposition of divine Providence."

I shall say little of the miraculous cure of Winefred White, a young woman of Wolverhampton, on the 28th of June, 1805, at Holy-well, having published a detailed account of it soon after it happened, which has been republished in England and in Ireland.* Let it suffice to say, 1st, that the disease was one of the most alarming of a topical nature of any that is known, namely, a curvature of the spine, as her physician and surgeon ascertained, who treated it accordingly, by making two great issues, one on each side of the spine, of which the marks are still imprinted on the patient's back; 2dly, that, besides the most acute pains throughout the whole nervous system, and particularly in the brain, this disease of the spine produced a hemiplegia, or palsy, on one side of the patient, so that when she could feebly crawl with the help of a crutch under her right arm, she was forced to drag her left leg and arm after her, just as if they constituted no part of her body; 3dly, that her disorder was of long continuance, namely, of three years' standing, though not in the same degree till the latter part of that time, and that it was publicly known to all her neighbors and a great many others; 4thly, that having performed the acts of devotion which she felt herself called to undertake, and having bathed in the fountain, she, in one instant of time, on the 28th of June, 1805, found herself freed from all her pains and disabilities, so as to be able to walk, run, and jump like any other young person, and to carry a greater weight with the left arm than she could with the right; 5thly, that she has continued in this state these thirteen years down to the present time; and that all the above-mentioned circumstances have been ascertained by me in the regular examination of the several witnesses of them, in the places of their respective residences, namely, in Staffordshire, Lancashire, and Wales, they being persons of different counties, no less than of different religions and situations in life. The authentic documents of the examination, and of the whole process of the cure, are contained in the work referred to above. Several of the witnesses are still living, as is Winefred White herself.†-I am, &c.

JOHN MILNER.

* By Keating & Brown, Duke-st., Grosvenor-sq., London; Coyne, Dublin. + She has since departed this life, namely, on the 13th of January, in the year 1824, being the nineteenth year since the cure of her hemiplegia. She died of a consumption.

DEAR SIR

LETTER XXIV.-TO JAMES BROWN, ESQ.

OBJECTIONS ANSWERED.

I SUBSCRIBE to the objection, which you say has been suggested to you by your learned friend, on the subject of miracles. Namely, I admit that a vast number of incredible and false miracles, as well as other fables, have been forged by some, and believed by other Catholics in every age of the church, including that of the apostles.* I agree with him and you in rejecting the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, the Speculum of Vincentius Belluacensis, the Saints' Lives of the Patrician Metaphrastes, and scores of similar legends, stuffed, as they are, with relations of miracles of every description. But, sir, are we to deny the truth of all history, because there are numberless false histories? Are we to question the four evangelists, because there have been several fabricated gospels? Most certainly not but we must make the best use we can of the discernment and judgment which God has given us, to distinguish false accounts of every kind from those which are true; and we ought, I allow, to make use of redoubled diligence and caution, in examining alleged revelations and events contrary to the general laws of nature.

Your friend's second objection, which impeaches the diligence, integrity, and discernment of the cardinals, prelates, and other ecclesiastics at Rome, appointed to examine into the proofs of the miracles there published, shows that he is little acquainted with the subject he talks of. In the first place, then, a juridical examination of each reported miracle must be made in the place where it is said to have happened, and the depositions of the several witnesses must be given upon oath; this examination is generally repeated two or three different times, at intervals. In the next place, the examiners at Rome are unquestionably men of character, talents, and learning, who, nevertheless, are not permitted to pronounce upon any cure or other effect in nature, till they have received a regular report of physicians and naturalists upon it. So far from being precipitate, it employs them whole years to come to a decision, on a few cases, respecting each saint; this is printed and handed about among indifferent persons, previously to its being laid before the pope. In short, so strict is the examination, that, according to an Italian

St. Jerom, in rejecting certain current fables concerning St. Paul and St. Thecla, mentions a priest who was deposed by St. John the Evangelist, for inventing similar stories.-De Script. Apost. Pope Gelasius, in the fifth century, condemned several apochryphal gospels and epistles, as also several false legends of saints, and among the latter, the common ones of St. George.

proverb, it is next to a miracle to get a miracle proved at Rome. It is reported by F. Daubenton, that an English Protestant gentleman, meeting, in that city, with a printed process of forty miracles, which had been laid before the congregation of rites, to which the examination of them belonged, was so well satisfied with the respective proofs of them, as to express a wish that Rome would never allow of any miracles, but such as were as strongly proved as those appeared to be, when, to his great surprise, he was informed that every one of these had been rejected by Rome, as not sufficiently proved!

Nor can I admit of the third objection of your friend, by which he rejects our miracles, on the alleged ground, that there was not sufficient cause for the performance of them; for, not to mention that many of them were performed for the conversion of infidels, I am bound to cry out with the apostle, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor !" Rom. xi. 34. Thus much is certain from Scripture, that the same Deity who preserved Jonas in the whale's belly to preach repentance to the Ninevites, created a gourd to shelter his head from the heat of the sun, (Jonas iv. 6,) and that as he sent fire from heaven to save his prophet Elias, so he caused iron to swim, in order to enable the son of a prophet to restore the axe which had been borrowed. 2 Kings, vi. 6. In like manner, we are not to reject miracles, sufficiently proved, under a pretext that they are mean, and unworthy the hand of Omnipotence; for we are assured, that God equally turned the dust of Egypt into lice, and the waters of it into blood. Exod. viii.

Having lately perused the works of several of the most celebrated Protestant writers, who, in defending the Scripture-miracles, endeavored to invalidate the credit of those they are pleased to call Popish miracles, I think it just, both to your cause and my own, to state the chief arguments they make use of, and the answers which occur to me in refutation of them. On this head, I cannot help expressing my surprise and concern that writers of character, and some of them of high dignity, should have published several gross falsehoods, not, I trust, intentionally, but from the blind precipitancy and infatuation which a panic fear of Popery generally produces. The late learned Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. J. Douglas, has borrowed from the infidel Gibbon what he calls, "A most satisfying proof that the miracles ascribed to the Romish saints are forgeries of an age posterior to that they lay claim to."* The latter 66 says, It may seem remarkable, that Bernard of Clairvaux, who records so

* The criterion, or rules, by which the true miracles of the New Testament are distinguished from the spurious miracles of pagans and papists, by John Douglas, D. D., Lord Bishop of Salisbury, p. 71, note.

many miracles of his friend St. Malachy, never takes notice of his own, which, in their turn, however, are carefully related by his companions and disciples. In the long series of ecclesiastical history, does there occur an instance of a saint asserting that he himself possessed the gift of miracles?""* Adopting this objection, the Bishop of Salisbury says: "I may safely challenge the admirers of the Romish saints to produce any writing of any of them, in which a power of working miracles is claimed."t Elsewhere he says: "From Xaverius himself (namely, from his published letters) we are furnished, not only with a negative evidence against his having any miraculous power, but also with a positive fact, which is the strongest possible presumption against it." Nevertheless, in spite of the confident assertions of these celebrated authors, it is certain (though the last things which true saints choose to speak of are their own supernatural favors) that several of them, when the occasion required it, have spoken of the miracles of which they were the instruments;§ and, among the rest, these two identical saints, St. Bernard and St. Francis Xaverius, whom Gibbon and Dr. Douglas instance to prove their assertion. I have already referred to the passages in the works of St. Bernard, where he speaks of his miracles as of notorious facts, and I here again insert them in a note. With respect to St. Xaverius, he not only mentions, in those very letters which Dr. Douglas appeals to, a miraculous cure, which he wrought upon a dying woman in the kingdom of Travancor, but he expressly calls it a MIRACLE, and affirms that it caused the conversion of the whole village in which she resided.¶

A second palpable falsehood is thus confidently advanced by the capital enemy of miracles, Dr. Middleton: "I might risk the merit of my argument on this single point, that, after the apostolic times, there is not, in all history, one instance, either

* Hist. of Decline and Fall, chap. xv.

+ Criterion, p. 369.

+ Ibid. p. 76.

The great St. Martin acknowledged his own miracles, since, according to his friend and biographer, Sulpicius, Dialogue 2, he used to say that he was not endowed with so great a power of working them, after he was a a bishop, as he had been before.

|| Addressing himself to P. Eugenius III., in answer to his enemies, who reproached him with the ill success of the second crusade, he says: "Sed dicunt forsitan isti: Unde scimus quod a Domino sermo egressus sit? Quæ signa tu facis ut credamus tibi? Non est quod ad ista ipse respondeam: parcendum verecundiæ meæ responde tu pro me et pro te ipso, secundum ea quæ vidisti et audisti."-De Consid. 1. ii. c. 1. In like manner, writing to the people of Thoulouse, of his miracles wrought there, he says: “Mora quidem brevis apud vos sed non infructuosa: veritate nimirum per nos man. ifestatâ, non solum in sermone sed etiam in virtute."-Ep. 241. TEpist. S. F. Xaq. 1. i. ep. iv.

In

well attested, or even so much as mentioned, of any particular person who had ever exercised that gift, (of tongues,) or pretended to exercise it, in any age or country whatsoever."* case your learned friend is disposed to take up the cause of Middleton, I beg to refer him to the history of St. Pacomius, the Egyptian abbot, and founder of the Cenobites, who, "though he never learned the Greek or Latin language, yet sometimes miraculously spoke them both," as his disciple and biographer reports; and to that of the renowned preacher, St. Vincent Ferrer, who, having the gift of tongues, preached indifferently to Jews, Moors, and Christians, in their respective languages, and converted incredible numbers of each of these descriptions.‡ In like manner, the bull of the canonization of St. Lewis Bertrand, A.D. 1671, declares that he possessed the gift of tongues, by means of which he converted as many as 10,000 Indians of different tribes in South America, in the space of three years.§ Lastly, let your friend peruse the history of the great Apostle of the East Indies, St. Xaverius, who, though he ordinarily studied the languages of the several nations to whom he announced the word of God, yet on particular occasions, he was empowered to speak those which he had not learned. This was the case in Travancor, as his companion Vaz testifies; so as to enable him to convert and instruct 10,000 infidels, all of whom he baptized with his own hand. This was the case again at Amanguchi, in Japan, where he met with a number of Chinese merchants. Finally, the bull of St. Xaverius's canonization by Urban VIII. proclaims to the world, that this saint was illustrated with the gift of tongues. So false is the bold assertion of Middleton, adopted in part by Bishop Douglas and other Protestants, that "there is not, in all history, one instance, either well attested, or so much as mentioned, of any person who had ever exercised the gift of tongues, or pretended to exercise it."

Nor is there more truth in what the Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Paley, &c., maintain, namely, that "the Popish miracles," as they insultingly call them, "were not wrought to confirm any truth, and that no converts were made by them!"¶ In refutation of this, I may again refer to the epitaph of our apostle, St. Augustin, and to the miracles of St. Bernard at Sarlat, mentioned above. To these instances, I may add the prodigy of

* Inquiry into Mirac. Powers, p. 120, &c.

+ Tillemont. Mem. Ecc. tom. vii.

See his Life by Lanzano, Bishop of Lucca, also Spondanus ad An. 1403. § See Alban Butler's Saints' Lives, Oct. 9.

See Bouhour's Life of St. Xaverius, translated by Dryden, &c.
Criterion, p. 369. View of Evidences, by Dr. Paley, vol. i. p. 346.

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