It would be impossible, without making extensive quotations, to do justice to Sir Thomas More’s argument in favour of the old Catholic practice of pilgrimages. He points out that the whole matter turns upon the question whether or no Almighty God does manifest His power and presence more in one place of His world than in another. That He does so, he thinks cannot be questioned; why He should do so, it is not for us to guess, but the single example of the Angel and the pool of Bethsaida related in St. John’s Gospel is sufficient proof of the fact—at least to Sir Thomas More’s intelligence. Moreover, he thinks also that in many cases the special holiness of a place of pilgrimage has been shown by the graces and favours, and even miracles, which have been granted by God at that particular spot, and on the “objector” waiving this argument aside on the plea that he does not believe in modern miracles, More declares that what is even more than miracles in his estimation is the “common belief in Christ’s Church” in the practice.
As to believing in miracles; they, like every other fact, depend on evidence and proof. It is unreasonable in the highest degree to disbelieve everything which we have not seen or which we do not understand. Miracles, like everything else, must be believed on the evidence of credible witnesses. What in their day, he says, is believed in by all would have been deemed impossible a century or two before; for example, that the earth is round and “sails in mid-air,” and that “men walk on it foot to foot” and ships sail on its seas “bottom to bottom.” Again, “It is not fifty years ago,” he says, “since the first man, as far as men have heard, came to London who ever parted the silver gilt from the silver, consuming shortly the silver into dust with a very fair water.” At first the gold and silver smiths laughed at the suggestion as absurd and impossible. Quite recently also More had been told that it was possible to melt iron and make it “to run as silver or lead doeth, and make it take a print.” More had never, he says, seen this, but he had seen the new invention of drawing out silver into thread-like wires. The “objector” was incredulous, and when More went on to tell him that if a piece of silver had been gilded, it could be drawn out with the gilding into gilt wires, he expressed his disbelief in the possibility of such a thing, and was hardly more satisfied that he was not being deceived when the process was shown to him the next day.
These and such like things, argues More, show us that our knowledge is, after all, very limited, and that while some supposed miracles may be doubted, it is most unreasonable to doubt or deny the possibility of miracles generally. If nature and reason tell us there is a God, the same two prove that miracles are not impossible, and that God can act when He wills against the course of nature. Whether He does in this or that case is plainly a matter of evidence. The importance of Sir Thomas More’s opinion on the matter of Pilgrimage does not, of course, rest upon the nature of his views, which were those naturally of all good Catholic sons of Holy Church, but upon the fact that, in face of the objections which were then made and which were of the kind to which subsequent generations have been accustomed, so learned and liberal a man as he was, did not hesitate to treat them as groundless, and to defend the practice as it was then known in England. That there may have been “abuses” he would have no doubt fully admitted, but that the “abuses” were either so great or so serious as to be any reasonable ground against the “use” he would equally have indignantly denied.
No less clear and definite are his opinions as to “relics” and the honour shown them. The “adversary” in the Dyalogue takes up the usual objections urged against the reverence shown to the remains of the saints, and in particular to the wealth which was lavished upon their shrines. “May the taking up of a man’s bones,” he says, “and setting his carcase in a gay shrine, and then kissing his bare scalp, make a man a saint? And yet are there some unshrined, for no man knoweth where they lie. And men doubt whether some ever had any body at all or not, but to recompense that again some there are who have two bodies, to lend one to some good fellow that lacketh his. For … some one body lies whole in two places asunder, or else the monks of the one be beguiled. For both places plainly affirm that it lieth there, and at either place they show the shrine, and in the shrine they show a body which they say is the body, and boldly allege old writings and miracles also for the proof of it. Now must he confess that either the miracles at the one place be false and done by the devil, or else that the same saint had indeed two bodies. It is therefore likely that a bone worshipped for a relic of some holy saint in some place was peradventure ‘a bone (as Chaucer says) of some holy Jew’s sheep.’” More’s “adversary” then goes on to say that our Lord in reproving the Pharisees for “making fresh the sepulchres of the prophets” condemns the “gay golden shrines made for saints’ bodies, especially when we have no certainty that they are saints at all.”[394]
What all this really amounts to, replies More, is not that your reasons would condemn honour and worship to true relics of the saints, but that “we may be deceived in some that we take for saints—except you would say that if we might by any possibility mistake some, therefore we should worship none.” Few people would say this, and “I see,” says More, “no great peril to us from the danger of a mistake. If there came, for example, a great many of the king’s friends into your country, and for his sake you make them all great cheer; if among them there come unawares to you some spies that were his mortal enemies, wearing his badge and seeming to you and so reported as his familiar friends, would he blame you for the good cheer you made his enemies or thank you for the good cheer you gave his friends?” He then goes on at great length to suggest that, as in the case of the head of St. John the Baptist in which portions only existing in each place are each called “the head,” so, very frequently, only a portion of the body of a saint is called “the body.” He mentions having himself been present at the abbey of Barking thirty years before (i.e. in 1498), when a number of relics were discovered hidden in an old image, which must have been put there four or five hundred years since “when the abbey was burned by the infidels.” He thinks that in this way the names of relics are frequently either lost or changed. But he adds, “the name is not so very requisite but that we may mistake it without peril, so that we nevertheless have the relics of holy men in reverence.”
In replying to Tyndale also, More declares that he had never in all his life held views against relics of the saints or the honour due to their holy images. Tyndale had charged him with being compromised by the words used by Erasmus in the Enconium Moriæ, which was known to have been composed in More’s house, and was commonly regarded as almost the joint work of the two scholars. If there were anything like this in the Moriæ—any words that could mean or seem to mean anything against the true Catholic devotion to relics and images—then More rejects them from his heart. But they are not my words, he adds, “the book being made by another man, though he were my darling never so dear” (p. 422). But the real truth is that in the Moriæ Erasmus never said more or meant more than to “jest upon the abuses of such things.”
In this regard it is of interest to understand what was the real opinion of Erasmus in regard to devotions to particular saints and their images and relics. This is all the more important, as most people regard the account of his two pilgrimages to Walsingham and to Canterbury as full and conclusive evidence of his sentiments. In his tract Enchiridion Militis Christiani, published at Louvain in 1518, his views are stated with absolute clearness. “There are some,” he says, “who honour certain saints with some special ceremonies.… One salutes St. Christopher each day, and only in presence of his image. Why does he wish to see it? Simply because he will then feel safe that day from any evil death. Another honours Saint Roch—but why? Because he thinks that he will drive away infection from his body. Others murmur prayers to St. Barbara or St. George, so as not to fall into the hands of any enemy. One man fasts for St. Apollonia, not to have toothache. Some dedicate a certain portion of their gains to the poor so that their merchandise is not destroyed in shipwreck,” &c.[395]
Our author’s point is that in these and such-like things people pray for riches, &c., and do not think much about the right use of them; they pray for health and go on living evil lives. In so far such prayers to the saints are mere superstitions, and do not much differ from the pagan superstitions; the cock to Æsculapius, the tithe to Hercules, the bull to Neptune. “But,” he says, “I praise those who ask from St. Roch a life protected from disease if they would consecrate that life to Christ. I would praise them more if they would pray only for increased detestation of vice and love virtue. I will tolerate infirmity, but with Paul I show the better way.” He would think it, consequently, a more perfect thing to pray only for grace to avoid sin and to please God, and to leave life and death, sickness, health and riches to Him and His will.
“You,” he says farther on, “venerate the saints, you rejoice to possess their relics, but you despise the best thing they have left behind them, namely, the example of a pure life. No devotion is so pleasing to Mary as when you imitate her humility; no religion is so acceptable to the saints and so proper in itself as striving to copy their virtue. Do you wish to merit the patronage of Peter and Paul? Imitate the faith of the one and the charity of the other and you will do more than if you had made ten journeys to Rome. Do you wish to do something to show high honour to St. Francis? You are proud, you are a lover of riches, you are quarrelsome; give these to the saint, rule your soul and be more humble by the example of Francis; despise filthy lucre, and covet rather the good of the soul. Leave contentions aside and overcome evil by good. The saint will receive more honour in this way than if you were to burn a hundred candles to him. You think it a great thing if clothed in the habit of St. Francis you are borne to the grave. This dress will not profit you when you are dead if, when alive, your morals were unlike his.”
“People,” he continues, “honour the relics of St. Paul, and do not trouble to listen to his voice still speaking. They make much of a large portion of one of his bones looked at through a glass, and think little of honouring him really by understanding what he teaches and trying to follow that.” It is the same so often with the honour shown to the crucifix. “You honour,” he says, “the representation of Christ’s face fashioned of stone or of wood or painted in colours, the image of His mind ought to be more religiously honoured, which, by the work of the Holy Spirit, is set forth in the gospels. No Apelles ever sketched the form and figure of a human body in such a perfect way as to compare with the mental image formed in prayer.”