g clamor of the sick to
whom he gave health. The great Turonese pontiff also tells us that
one day Aredius, traversing Paris, found Chilperic prostrate with a
grievous fever. The royal sufferer sought the saint's prayers as an
irresistible curative.
The daughter of a Teutonic nobleman was brought to St. Gall (556-640)
seriously ill with an incurable disorder, presenting the livid
appearance of an animated cadaver. The saint approached the
unconscious invalid as she reclined on her mother's knee, and assuming
the bended attitude of invocation by her side, made a fervent prayer
and evoked the demon producing the sickness to instantly depart. The
effort was all that was desired. Shortly after this, about the year
648, St. Vardrille, the founder of Fontanelle, exercised his remedial
potency in healing the palsied arm of a forester whose indiscreet zeal
had induced him to transfix the sainted abbot with a lance.
We have rather a strange case from the beginning of the seventh
century, where the moral and mental element seems to have been strong.
Abbe Eustasius returning from Rome, whither a mission of Clothair II
had called him, was urgently summoned by the sorrowful parent of a
Burgundian maiden, in the last agonies of a frightful malady, to
appear and cure the moribund daughter. On answering the call he found
that the child had in her youth been consecrated by the vows of
chastity, and on account of this shrunk from a marriage sanctioned by
her parents. Eustasius reproached the father for his efforts to
violate the solemn obligations of the virgin, and upon obtaining a
formal renunciation of further attempts to coerce her into matrimony,
the saint, by personal intercession, obtained a complete cure.
It was found that certain remedies in the hands of certain saints were
efficacious, but they did not have the same power if administered by
others. For instance, Franciscus de Paula succored an anchylosed joint
by the energetic surgery of three dried figs which he gave the
suffering patient to eat. Similarly, a maiden grieving under a
cancerous disease which surgical skill had frankly admitted was
incurable, was restored to robust vigor by the administering of some
mild herbs. This savored rather too much of medicine, and other holy
healers used more orthodox means. Hugo the Holy abstracted a serpent
from the infirm body of a woman by the use of holy water, and Coleta,
the saintess, awakened from the dreamless slumber of d
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