I omit here a multitude of miraculous adventures that happened to the publican, in order to come to the most important. A celestial cavalier, armed cap-a-pie, preceded by a celestial flambeau, descends from the height of the empyrean, conducts the publican to the lake in the midst of storms, drives away all the soldiers who guard the shore, and gives Theodotus time to fish up the seven old women and to bury them.
The nephew of St. Thecusa unfortunately went and told all. Theodotus was seized, and for three days all sorts of punishments were tried in vain to kill him. They could only attain their object by cleaving his skull; an operation which saints are never proof against.
He was still to be buried. His friend the minister Fronton—to whom Theodotus, in his capacity of publican, had given two leathern bottles filled with wine—made the guards drunk, and carried off the body. Theodotus then appeared in body and spirit to the minister: "Well, my friend," he said to him, "did I not say well, that you should have relics for your chapel?"
Such is what is narrated by St. Nil, an eye-witness, who could neither be deceived nor deceive; such is what Don Ruinart has quoted as a genuine act. Now every man of sense, every intelligent Christian, will ask himself, whether a better mode could be adopted of dishonoring the most holy and venerated religion in the world, and of turning it into ridicule?
I shall not speak of the Eleven Thousand Virgins; I shall not discuss the fable of the Theban legion, composed—says the author—of six thousand six hundred men, all Christians coming from the East by Mount St. Bernard, suffering martyrdom in the year 286, the period of the most profound peace as regarded the Church, and in the gorge of a mountain where it is impossible to place 300 men abreast; a fable written more than 550 years after the event; a fable in which a king of Burgundy is spoken of who never existed; a fable, in short, acknowledged to be absurd by all the learned who have not lost their reason.
Behold what Don Ruinart narrates seriously! Let us pray to God for the good sense of Don Ruinart!
SECTION II.
How does it happen that, in the enlightened age in which we live, learned and useful writers are still found who nevertheless follow the stream of old errors, and who corrupt many truths by admitted fables? They reckon the era of the martyrs from the first year of the empire of Diocletian, who was then far enough from inflicting martyrdom on anybody. They forget that his wife Prisca was a Christian, that the principal officers of his household were Christians; that he protected them constantly during eighteen years; that they built at Nicomedia a church more sumptuous than his palace; and that they would never have been persecuted if they had not outraged the Cæsar Valerius.
Is it possible that any one should still dare to assert "that Diocletian died of age, despair, and misery;" he who was seen to quit life like a philosopher, as he had quitted the empire; he who, solicited to resume the supreme power loved better to cultivate his fine gardens at Salonica, than to reign again over the whole of the then known world?
Oh, ye compilers! will you never cease to compile? You have usefully employed your three fingers; employ still more usefully your reason.