Page 13 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

LIFE OF SAINT GERARD MAJELLA

hypotheses and sophistical theories are, on this account, called hard
names — fanatical, credulous, narrow-minded, retrogressive,
Priestridden, and the like — it is always a consolation to remember
that hard names are the one resource which yet remains to a
discredited cause that has no other weapons left in its armoury.
The author also feels — to borrow the words of the late Cardinal
Dechamps — that “when the miraculous is undeniable, we should
not hesitate to proclaim it to the praise of God Who is glorified in
His Saints, and for the benefit of the Faithful whose confidence is
reanimated by these prodigies.”
For those who still call themselves Christians, to deny the
existence of the supernatural, would seem to be peculiarly
2
inconsistent. The history of the chosen people was highly fraught

2 If it were not inexpressibly sad it would be highly entertaining to watch the
tactics of Protestant controversialists in this matter. They seem all to follow in
the steps and to borrow the arguments of one Dr. Conyers Middleton, who
wrote towards the end of the last century a dissertation entitled, “A free
inquiry into the miraculous powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the
Christian Church from the earliest ages through several successive centuries”
etc. This doughty champion of the Reformation tells his readers frankly that if
they admit the authority of the Fathers of the Church as to the existence of
miracles in the first ages of ecclesiastical history, they must of necessity admit
the customs and doctrines in corroboration of which these miracles were
worked, or with which they are at least inseparably connected. But such
customs and doctrines are precisely those which every good Protestant rejects
— for example, Monasticism, the cultus of Relics and Holy Pictures, Prayers for
the Dead, the Invocation of Saints, and the like. Therefore (mark the
conclusion) the evidence as to the truth of the miracles must be rejected. —
Vide Introductory Discourse, p. 51.

This bitterly hostile writer makes the following significant admissions:

“As far as the Church historians can illustrate or throw light upon anything,
there is not a single point in all history so constantly, explicitly, and
unanimously affirmed by them all, as the continual succession of these powers
of working miracles through all ages from the earliest Fathers, who first
mentions them, down to the time of the Reformation; which same succession
is still farther deduced by persons of the most eminent character for their

3