The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi | Page 7

which religion is concerned, is very dangerous; it often makes
a destructive progress, for its first attempts embolden it. Persons are
easily persuaded that all miraculous narratives are false, though the
Church guarantees the truth of many; and when this same Church
pronounces on dogmatical facts, declaring: such and such propositions
to be heretical which are in such and such a book, and exacts an interior
submission of heart and mind, do these doubters show more docility?
Do they not cloak their disobedience by a respectful silence, always ill
kept and finally broken through by open rebellion? Do we not see
persons in the world speaking irreverently of relics, purgatory,
indulgences, and even of the holy mysteries, after having treated
contemptuously the marvels of the Lives of the Saints?
Certain critics admit these marvels, but have imbibed the idea that
falsehood is so mixed up with the truth, that they cannot be separated
but by using certain rules, which they take upon themselves to lay
down. This prejudice is not less dangerous, nor less unreasonable than
the other.
Because some inconsiderate writers, who cannot be too severely
censured, have given scope to their imagination in certain legends, and
have employed fiction for the embellishment of their narratives, the
doubters pretend that the whole history of the saints is full of
impostures; nevertheless, pure sources have been the basis of their
authentic acts, in the works of the Fathers, and in an infinity of authors
well worthy of credit, and in the Bulls of Canonization. An Asiatic
priest, as related by St. Jerome, who quotes Tertullian, composed false
acts of St. Thecla through an ill-understood sentiment of

devotion:--does it follow from that that the truth of many other acts
which were there read, and which we still possess, is to be set aside?
Moreover, the Church has remedied the evil; she has rejected the false
prodigies; she has expunged from the legends the indiscreet additions; a
new edition has been long since placed in the hands of the faithful,
which only contains the well-authenticated and certain miracles.
A learned man has demonstrated that the rules of these critics for the
elucidation of these miracles are not judicious; that they are extravagant,
and that it would be risking too much to follow them; that they are
contradictory, and not in unison with each other; that it often happens
that they reject or admit miracles against their own principles. If they
find splendid ones, and many of them in the same legend, they hold
them to be suppositions or altered, although, the oldest and most
authentic documents contain similar ones; they reject them as false,
without assigning any reason in proof of their having been falsified;
they pretend that the authors who have recorded them were too
credulous, though they received other articles on the testimony of these
same authors. In order to believe them, they require perfect certainty,
although they give credit to many circumstances in ecclesiastical and
profane history on mere probabilities. One of them professes not to
omit a single miracle which is vouched for by good authority,
nevertheless, he suppresses many of the most considerable; and many
of those which he feels compelled to bring forward, he does so in terms
which mark doubtfulness, to say nothing more.
Thus, the ultra-critics while admitting the wonders of the Lives of the
Saints, reduce them to nothing by rules, which they invent for
separating truth from falsehood, as those who profess to believe an
infallible authority in the Church make that infallibility to depend on so
many conditions, that they may always maintain that the Church,
dispersed or assembled, has never come to any decision in opposition
to their errors.
It is, they say, the love of truth which induces them to examine most
scrupulously the miracles of the saints; nothing should be believed, or
be proposed to belief, but what is true. But Bossuet said of bad critics:
"They are content, provided they can pass for more subtle observers
than others, and they find themselves sharper, in not giving credit to so
many wonders." The love of truth does not consist in denying its

existence, where so many persons of first-rate genius have found it; it
does not depend on rendering obscure the light it sheds, nor in giving to
the public Lives of Saints accompanied by a dry, bitter, and licentious
criticism, calculated to throw doubt on all that is extraordinary in them,
and thereby to give scandal. The learned Jesuits, the continuators of
Bollandus, show, by the precision of their researches, that they are
sincere lovers of truth, but we do not see that they endeavor to diminish
the number of miracles: "They have no idea of taking them for fictions;
nothing astonishes them in the lives of the friends