he True Cross are at Rome and elsewhere, that the Crib
of Bethlehem is at Rome, and the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul
also.... Many men when they hear an educated man so speak, will at
once impute the avowal to insanity, or to an idiosyncrasy, or to
imbecility of mind, or to decrepitude of powers, or to fanaticism, or
to hypocrisy. They have a right to say so, if they will; and we have
a right to ask them why they do not say it of those who bow down
before the Mystery of mysteries, the Divine Incarnation?"

In my Essay on Miracles of the year 1826, I proposed three questions
about a professed miraculous occurrence, 1. is it antecedently
_probable_? 2. is it in its _nature_ certainly miraculous? 3. has it
sufficient _evidence_? These are the three heads under which I still
wish to conduct the inquiry into the miracles of ecclesiastical
history.

6. Popular Religion

This writer uses much rhetoric against a lecture of mine, in which I
bring out, as honestly as I can, the state of countries which have
long received the Catholic Faith, and hold it by the force of
tradition, universal custom, and legal establishment; a lecture in
which I give pictures, drawn principally from the middle ages, of
what, considering the corruption of the human race generally, that
state is sure to be--pictures of its special sins and offences, _sui
generis_, which are the result of that faith when it is separated
from love or charity, or of what Scripture calls a "dead faith," of
the light shining in darkness, and the truth held in unrighteousness.
The nearest approach which this writer is able to make towards
stating what I have said in this lecture, is to state the very
reverse. Observe: we have already had some instances of the haziness
of his ideas concerning the "Notes of the Church." These notes are,
as any one knows who has looked into the subject, certain great and
simple characteristics, which He who founded the Church has stamped
upon her in order to draw both the reason and the imagination of men
to her, as being really a divine work, and a religion distinct from
all other religious communities; the principal of these notes being
that she is Holy, One, Catholic, and Apostolic, as the Creed says.
Now, to use his own word, he has the incredible "audacity" to say,
that I have declared, not the divine characteristics of the Church,
but the sins and scandals in her, to be her Notes--as if I made God
the author of evil. He says dis