The hand of Providence

by J. H. Ward

The Roman pontiffs, owing to the ignorance of the times, had already built up a wide-spread system of superstition.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

They held almost imperial sway over the countless hordes of central and northern Europe. Even kings and emperors paid tribute, and sovereigns dared not disobey their commands. As an instance, might be mentioned Henry IV., of Germany, who having displeased Pope Gregory VII., was obliged, under penalty of losing his kingdom, to stand as a penitent at the pope's castle gate during three dreary winter days, seeking pardon and reconciliation of the inexorable pontiff.

It is not surprising that the popes, who had long trafficked in human credulity, saw, in the growth of relic-worship, an opportunity to increase their own power and the revenues of the church of Rome. Accordingly an understanding was made with the monks of Palestine and relics were manufactured in untold numbers.

An amusing and instructive chapter might be written on this subject: amusing because of its absurdity, and instructive as it shows to what extremes of folly men will go when left without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The crimes and corruptions of the papacy had destroyed public confidence. The devout instinctively turned with reverence towards every object that recalled the memories of the pure and good who once lived upon the earth.

No sooner had the wild rage for relics fairly set in than each monastery in the vicinity of Jerusalem made a specialty of some particular relic. The monks at Bethlehem sold thousands of pounds of half rotten rags, each fragment purporting to be a portion of the swaddling cloths of the infant Savior. The monks who guarded the supposed sepulchre of Christ, sold hundreds of thousands of little chips of stone said to have been broken off from the very walls of the tomb where the body of Jesus had lain. It does not seem to have shaken the credulity of the pilgrims in the least, that the tomb still remained in as good repair as ever, and showed no marks of demolition.

The monks who inhabited the monasteries on the banks of the Jordan could point to at least twenty places where it was said the Savior had been baptized, and each monastery possessed numerous pebbles which the monks claimed had been touched by His feet. No less than seven monasteries claimed to have the true cross in their possession, and thousands of pieces, of wood amounting to many tons in weight, were sold to devout pilgrims. Each of these pieces, it was claimed, was a part of the true cross.

But it would require a long and tedious list to even enumerate the various articles comprised in this relic-worship. In order to get some faint idea of their extent and variety, the relics which the Abbot Martin obtained for his monastery in Alsace might be mentioned. These, among other things, included "a piece of the true cross, a fragment of the infant Savior's swaddling cloths, some pebbles from the river Jordan which the Savior's feet had touched, a branch of the tree under which He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, a piece of the Savior's robe, for which the Roman soldiers cast lots," (see Matthew, 27th chapter), "a tooth of St. Mark, seven hairs of the martyr, Stephen, a thigh bone of the animal which Jesus rode into Jerusalem," (see Luke, 19th chapter), and (I hesitate to write such blasphemy) "a bottle of the milk of the mother of God."