Protestants. As to its
results, we must bear in mind that, while there is no need to attribute
the mass of stories regarding miraculous cures to conscious fraud,
there was without doubt, at a later period, no small admixture of belief
biased by self-interest, with much pious invention and suppression of
facts. Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and churches
in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their healing powers. Every
cathedral, every great abbey, and nearly every parish church claimed
possession of healing relics. While, undoubtedly, a childlike faith
was at the bottom of this belief, there came out of it unquestionably
a great development of the mercantile spirit. The commercial value
of sundry relics was often very high. In the year 1056 a French
ruler pledged securities to the amount of ten thousand solidi for the
production of the relics of St. Just and St. Pastor, pending a legal
decision regarding the ownership between him and the Archbishop
of Narbonne. The Emperor of Germany on one occasion demanded, as a
sufficient pledge for the establishment of a city market, the arm of St.
George. The body of St. Sebastian brought enormous wealth to the Abbey
of Soissons; Rome, Canterbury, Treves, Marburg, every great city, drew
large revenues from similar sources, and the Venetian Republic ventured
very considerable sums in the purchase of relics.

Naturally, then, corporations, whether lay or ecclesiastical, which drew
large revenue from relics looked with little favour on a science which
tended to discredit their investments.

Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe can the philosophy of this development of
fetichism be better studied to-day than at Cologne. At the cathedral,
preserved in a magnificent shrine since about the twelfth century, are
the skulls of the Three Kings, or Wise Men of the East, who, guided by
the star of Bethlehem, brought gifts to the Saviour. These relics
were an enormous source of wealth to the cathedral chapter during many
centuries. But other ecclesiastical bodies in that city were both
pious and shrewd, and so we find that not far off, at the church of St.
Gereon, a cemetery has been dug up, and the bones distributed over the
walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his Theban band of martyrs! Again,
at the neighbouring church of St. Ursula, we have the later spoils of
another cemetery, covering the interior walls of the church as the bones
of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand vi