The replies to it have been numerous, very numerous—in fact, so numerous as to lose all real value: they are so wonderfully discordant and so contradictory.
The liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius has occurred, during
the last two hundred and fifty years—to go no further back just now—at least four thousand times; in public, without any attempt at concealment, under the eyes of believers and unbelievers alike, standing on every side and within a few feet, it may be, in immediate contact with the officiating clergyman, and, therefore, possessing ample opportunity for the closest and most critical inspection of everything concerning it. Under such circumstances, it is inconceivable that the precise trick, or fraud, or secret, if there were any, should remain undiscovered. Yet, that no such discovery has been made is perfectly clear from this striking disagreement among those who charge that there is fraud, as soon as they undertake to state distinctly in what the fraud or trick consists. What one proposes is scouted by another as so weak and so contrary to the facts of the case, that it is virtually a surrender of the cause. One declares it to be “one of the most bungling tricks he ever saw”; but he is entirely silent as to the nature of the trick so obvious to him. Another states it to be a trick “of great ingenuity,” as well as of “long standing”; but, with equal prudence, he also is mute as to its character. A third will explain the manner in which A. thought it was done; and the very different manner in which B. held that it was performed; while C. with equal shrewdness proposed a third mode. The reader is considerately left free
to select which he pleases. Which of them or whether any one of them be actually true is apparently a question of minor importance. The grand purpose aimed at—and for that, any one of them, even if a mistake, will, it is thought, be sufficient—is to find some passable or colorable pretext to relieve the reader from the exceedingly disagreeable necessity of admitting a popish miracle.
When two and a half centuries of keen and critical examinations, covering so many thousand instances of the liquefaction, have resulted only in such utter confusion and disagreement among those who profess to have discovered the fraud, we may legitimately conclude that in reality there has been no discovery of any trickery or fraud whatsoever.
Not to tax the reader’s patience too much, we will endeavor to classify the various modes in which we are assured by these discordant voices that the fraud is perpetrated.
The first class attributes the liquefaction, or seeming liquefaction, to some kind of jugglery or legerdemain practised by the officiating clergymen during the exposition of the relics.
But when, or how, it would puzzle Houdin himself, or the Fakir of Ava, to say.
Is it, as some have suggested, the adroit substitution of a second reliquary which contains a liquid, and which, at a suitable moment, is presented to the bystanders, instead of the original reliquary containing a hard substance?
Most certainly not. The officiating priest stands in front of an altar built of marble and bronze, without drawers or hiding-places. The reliquary in his hands is of considerable bulk—twelve inches high, five inches broad, and two and a half or three inches thick—entirely too large to