SECT. IV.
With regard to virtue and vice, the instances of the one of them having been mistaken by the public for the other in particular people, are so numerous, that history stumbles upon them, at almost every step; nothing can illustrate this more evidently, than the greatest impostors the world has produced, having passed for repositories of the secrets of heaven. Numa Pompilius, introduced among the Romans, whatever policy and religion he thought fit, by means of the fiction, that all he proposed was dictated to him by the nymph Egeria. The Spaniards fought blindly against the Romans, under the banners of Sertorius, he having made them believe, that through a white doe, which he artfully made use of, and had trained for his purpose, he received by occult means, all sorts of information, which was communicated to the doe by the goddess Diana. Mahomed persuaded a great part of Asia, that Heaven had sent the Angel Gabriel to him as a Nuncio in the shape of a dove, which he had taught to put its bill into his ear. Most heretical opinions, although stained with manifest impurities, were reputed in many places, to proceed from the venerable archives of the divine mysteries.
XII. We have even seen such monsters, engendered in the bosom of the Roman church. In the eleventh century, Tranquilenus, a man given openly to all kinds of debauchery, was venerated as a saint by the people of Antwerp, and to such a pitch did they carry their adoration, that they preserved as a relic the water in which he had washed himself. In the republic of Florence, where the people were never thought rude, or uncultivated, Francis Jeronimo Savonarola, a man of prodigious genius, and great sagacity, was many years respected as a saint, and a person endued with the spirit of prophecy; he made the people believe, that his political predictions were divine revelations, though they were founded on secret advices which he received from France, and notwithstanding many of those predictions were proved false, such as the second coming of Charles the Eighth into Italy, the recovery of John Pico de Mirandola from a fit of sickness, of which he died two days afterwards, &c. And although he was publicly burnt on the parade at Florence for an impostor, still, all was not sufficient to eradicate his deceptions from the minds of many people; for not only the heretics venerate him as a heavenly man, and consider him as a forerunner of Luther, on account of his vehement declamations against the court of Rome, but some Catholics were his panegyrists likewise, among whom Marcus Antonius Flaminius excelled all the others, by the following beautiful though false epigram.
Dum fera flamma tuos, Hieronyme, pascitur artus,
Religio sacras dilaniata comas
Flevit, et O, dixit, crudeles, parcite, flammæ,
Parcite; sunt isto viscera nostra rogo.
XIII. But what has been the most monstrous in these sort of cases is, that some churches have celebrated, and even worshiped as saints, perverse men, who died separated from the Roman communion. The church of Limogines, addressed for a long time in a direct prayer (which prayer exists at this day in the antient breviary of that church) Eusebius Cæsarius, who lived and died in the Arian heresy, they having, as is most probable, mistaken him at first, for Eusebius Bishop of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, who was the successor of Saint Basil; whereas the man we have now been mentioning, was Bishop of Cæsarea in Palestine; I am very well aware, some authors assert, that at the council of Nice, he conformed to the Catholic faith, in which he remained steady ever after, but there are so many testimonies to contradict this, and among the rest his own writings, that what is said in his defence seems void of all probability. The church of Turin venerated a thief as a martyr, and erected an altar to him, which St. Martin destroyed, after having convinced them of their error; this is related by Sulpicius in his Life of St. Martin.