This popular canonisation has often far outrun the regular official acceptance, as in the case of Joan of Arc in France at the present day, or of “Maister John Schorn, that blessed man born,” in the Kent of the middle ages. Thus countries like Wales and Cornwall are full of local and patriotic saints, often of doubtful Catholicity, like St. Cadoc, St. Padern, St. Petrock, St. Piran, St. Ruan, and St. Illtyd, not to mention more accepted cases, like St. Asaph and St. David. The fact is, men have everywhere felt the natural desire for a near, a familiar, a recent, and a present god or saint; they have worshipped rather the dead whom they loved and revered themselves than the elder gods and the remoter martyrs who have no body among them, no personal shrine, no local associations, no living memories. “I have seen in Brittany,” says a French correspondent of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, “the tomb of a pious and charitable priest covered with garlands: people flocked to it by hundreds to pray of him that he would procure them restoration to health, and guard over their children.” There, with the Christian addition of the supreme God, we get once more the root-idea of religion.
I should like to add that beyond such actual veneration of the bodies of saints and martyrs, there has always existed a definite theory in the Roman church that no altar can exist without a relic. The altar, being itself a monumental stone, needs a body or part of a body to justify and consecrate it. Dr. Rock, a high authority, says in his Hierurgia, “By the regulations of the Church it is ordained that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass be offered upon an altar which contains a stone consecrated by a Bishop, enclosing the relics of some saint or martyr; and be covered with three linen cloths that have been blessed for that purpose with an appropriate form of benediction.” The consecration of the altar, indeed, is considered even more serious than the consecration of the church itself; for without the stone and its relic, the ceremony of the Mass cannot be performed at all. Even when Mass has to be said in a private house, the priest brings a consecrated stone and its relic along with him; and other such stones were carried in the retables or portable altars so common in military expeditions of the middle ages. The church is thus a tomb, with chapel tombs around it; it contains a stone monument covering a dead body or part of a body; and in it is made and exhibited the Body of Christ, in the form of the consecrated and transmuted wafer.
Not only, however, is the altar in this manner a reduced or symbolical tomb, and not only is it often placed above the body of a saint, as at St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s, but it also sometimes consists itself of a stone sarcophagus. One such sarcophagus exists in the Cathedral at St. Malo; I have seen other coffin-shaped altars in the monastery of La Trappe near Algiers and elsewhere. When, however, the altar stands, like that at St. Peter’s, above the actual body of a saint, it does not require to contain a relic; otherwise it does. That is to say, it must be either a real or else an attenuated and symbolical sarcophagus.
In the eastern church, a sort of relic-bag, called an Antimins, is necessary for the proper performance of the Holy Eucharist. It consists of a square cloth, laid on the altar or wrapped up in its coverings, and figured with a picture representing the burial of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Women. This brings it very near to the Adonis and Hoseyn ceremonies. But it must necessarily contain some saintly relic.
Apart from corpse-worship and relic-worship in the case of saints, Catholic Christendom has long possessed an annual Commemoration of the Dead, the Jour des Morts, which links itself on directly to earlier ancestor-worship. It is true, this commemoration is stated officially, and no doubt correctly, to owe its origin (in its recognised form) to a particular historical person, Adam de Saint Victor: but when we consider how universal such commemorations and annual dead-feasts have been in all times and places, we can hardly doubt that the church did but adopt and sanctify a practice which, though perhaps accounted heathenish, had never died out at all among the mass of believers. The very desire to be buried in a church or churchyard, and all that it implies, link on Christian usage here once more to primitive corpse-worship. Compare with the dead who sleep with Osiris. In the middle ages, many people were buried in chapels containing the body (or a relic) of their patron saint.
In short, from first to last, religion never gets far away from these its earliest and profoundest associations. “God and immortality,”—those two are its key-notes. And those two are one; for the god in the last resort is nothing more than the immortal ghost, etherealised and extended.
On the other hand, whenever religion travels too far afield from its emotional and primal base in the cult of the nearer dead, it must either be constantly renewed by fresh and familiar objects of worship, or it tends to dissipate itself into mere vague pantheism. A new god, a new saint, a “revival of religion,” is continually necessary. The Sacrifice of the Mass is wisely repeated at frequent intervals; but that alone does not suffice; men want the assurance of a nearer, a more familiar deity. In our own time, and especially in Protestant and sceptical England and America, this need has made itself felt in the rise of spiritualism and kindred beliefs, which are but the doctrine of the ghost or shade in its purified form, apart, as a rule, from the higher conception of a supreme ruler. ~And what is Positivism itself save the veneration of the mighty dead, just tinged with vague ethical yearnings after the abstract service of living humanity? I have known many men of intellect, suffering under a severe bereavement—the loss of a wife or a dearly-loved child—take refuge for a time either in spiritualism or Catholicism. The former seems to give them the practical assurance of actual bodily intercourse with the dead, through mediums or table-turning; the latter supplies them with a theory of death which makes reunion a probable future for them. This desire for direct converse with the dead we saw exemplified in a very early or primitive stage in the case of the Mandan wives who talk lovingly to their husbands’ skulls; it probably forms the basis for the common habit of keeping the head while burying the body, whose widespread results we have so frequently noticed. I have known two instances of modern spiritualists who similarly had their wives’ bodies embalmed, in order that the spirit might return and inhabit them.
Thus the Cult of the Dead, which is the earliest origin of all religion, in the sense of worship, is also the last relic of the religious spirit which survives the gradual decay of faith due to modern scepticism. To this cause I refer on the whole the spiritualistic utterances of so many among our leaders of modern science. They have rejected religion, but they cannot reject the inherited and ingrained religious emotions.