rs, who
was present, related a circumstance which had happened to him a short
time before. "A cavalier of my diocese, having been killed in
excommunication, I would not accede to the prayers of his friends, who
implored to grant him absolution; I desired to make an example of him,
in order to inspire others with fear. But he was interred by soldiers
or gentlemen (_milites_) without my permission, without the presence
of the priests, in a church dedicated to St. Peter. The next morning
his body was found out of the ground, and thrown naked far from the
spot; his grave remaining entire, and without any sign of having been
touched. The soldiers or gentlemen (_milites_) who had interred him,
having opened the grave, found in it only the linen in which he had
been wrapped; they buried him again, and covered him with an enormous
quantity of earth and stones. The next day they found the corpse
outside the tomb, without its appearing that any one had worked at it.
The same thing happened five times; at last they buried him as they
could, at a distance from the cemetery, in unconsecrated ground; which
filled the neighboring seigneurs with so much terror that they all
came to me to make their peace. That is a fact, invested with
everything which can render it incontestable."

Footnotes:

[500] Vit. S. Gothardi, Saecul. vi. Bened. parte c. p. 434.

[501] Tom. ix. Concil. an 1031, p. 702.

CHAPTER XXIV.

AN INSTANCE OF AN EXCOMMUNICATED MARTYR BEING CAST OUT OF THE EARTH.

We read in the _menees_ of the Greeks, on the 15th of October, that a
monk of the Desert of Sheti, having been excommunicated by him who had
the care of his conduct, for some act of disobedience, he left the
desert, and came to Alexandria, where he was arrested by the governor
of the city, despoiled of his conventual habit, and ardently solicited
to sacrifice to false gods. The solitary resisted nobly, and was
tormented in various ways, until at last they cut off his head, and
threw his body outside of the city, to be devoured by dogs. The
Christians took it away in the night, and having embalmed it and
enveloped it in fine linen, they interred it in the church as a
martyr, in an honorable place; but during the holy sacrifice, the
deacon having cried aloud, as usual, that the catechumens and those
who did not take the communion were to withdraw, they suddenly beheld
the martyr's tomb open of itself, and his body retire into the
vestibule of the