Tempest.
Ev. The science of chemistry has unfolded most of the secrets of material miracles, as Psychology those of the intellect and senses.
Not that I would attempt thus to explain your wonders of Palingenesy, Astrophel; I will rather favour you with another batch, for I was once fond of unkennelling these sly foxes.
It is solemnly attested by the noble secretary of a Duke of Guise, that, in company with many scientific men, he saw the face of a person in his blood, which had been given by a bishop, for experiment, to La Pierre, the chemist, of Le Temple, near Paris.
There is an old book of one Dr. Garmann, “De Miraculis Mortuorum,” and thus he writes:—“When human salt, extracted and depurated from the skull of a man, was placed in a water dish, there appeared next morning in the mass, figures of men fixed to a cross;” and “when human skulls, on which mosses had vegetated, were pounded, the family of the apothecary who pounded them were alarmed in the night by strange and terrific noises from the chamber.”
The body of the Cid, Ruy Diaz, as we read in Heywood’s “Hierarchie,” sat in state at the altar of the cathedral at Toledo for ten years. A Jew one day attempted, in derision, to pull him by the beard; but on the first touch, the Cid started up, and in high resentment scared the Israelite away by the unsheathing of his mighty sword. And Master Planche has brought you legends from the church of Maria Taferl, in Lower Austria, and other noted spots on the Danube.
When Bernini’s bust of Charles I. was being conveyed in a barge on the Thames, from a strange bird there descended a drop of blood on the bust, which could never be effaced.
This is nothing but a fact in nature mystified, and (like the growth of the Christmas flowering thorn of Glastonbury, from the walking-staff of Joseph of Arimathæa) is too glaring to be misconstrued.
Other of these blood miracles are still more easy of solution. The blood spots from David Rizzio are shown to this day in Holyrood: and it was believed, that after the Irish massacre the blood of the victims then slain on Portnedown Bridge, has indelibly stained its battlements. But these spots are nothing but the brown vegetative stains which geology has discovered on many fossils.
Now listen to Father Gregory of Tours. “A thief was committing sacrilege at the tomb of Saint Helius, when the saint caught him by the skirt, and held him fast.” Probably his garment hitched on a nail. Another old man, while removing a stone from the grave of a saint, was in a moment struck blind, dumb, and deaf. Probably the mephitic gases exhaling from the tomb were the source of all this mystery.