Relic

“ Of two things we may be sure, that the true history of a relic would probably be far stranger than its legend, and that whatever marvels the southerner saw or heard, he came across nothing more novel or more miraculous than the ebb and flow of the northern tides. ”

“ At that time my grandfather, along with his eight sons, formed the last relic in our province of that race of petty feudal tyrants by which France had been overrun and harassed for so many centuries. Civilization, already advancing rapidly towards the great convulsion of the Revolution, was gradually stamping out the systematic extortions of these robbers. ”

“ Very often pottery and ornaments are discovered, and now and again a more striking relic still—the pick strikes into a Roman grave and lays bare a manly form which once marched with the legions, or the figure of a Roman maiden, whose ornaments still lie among her mortal remains. ”

“ Everything about the plate tallies with everything in the journal; its authenticity cannot be doubted. As a reminder of the plucky attempt of ancestors, acting under the most trying difficulties the new-found relic has a truly sacred character, for Frenchmen and for Americans both. ”

“ He had nothing to look forward to, you remember; he did not wish to live. His assassins were those who were concerned in the recovery of the relic, for why else was he mutilated but in order to discover whether he had concealed it with more than superficial craft—perhaps even swallowed it? ”

“ Viewed in this light the frequent occurrence of such relics in the cist, or under the memorial cairn, may be pregnant with a far higher meaning than the mere ornamental fibula or amulet. When found with the spear and sword, the ring may indicate the grave of the warrior-priest or lawgiver,—a union of offices so consistent with society in a primitive state; while, in the female barrow, amid the bracelets and necklaces which once adorned the primitive British matron, the curious relic may, with no undue indulgence of fancy, be looked upon as the spousal pledge, and the literal wedding-ring. ”

“ There is a mystery attached to this relic (for a relic it is) , which as yet has been confided to my wife and holy men alone."
"And if trusted to holy men, surely it may be trusted to sincere friendship, than which nothing is more holy."
"But I have a presentiment that the knowledge of my secret would prove fatal to you. ”

“ Then it came to me that, if the skill of man failed us, we should ask for help from above. It happened that I possessed a relic of the blessed Saint Vincent de Paul, which was contained in a small gold reliquary, and which I had been permitted by the Father General to keep. I proposed to Vitalis that we should apply the relic and make a special appeal to the saint for help, and also that he should promise to dedicate some part of his great possessions to the service of God. ”

“ The eagerness with which rival princes and republics disputed with each other the possession of these wonder-working fetiches, and the manner in which the holy objects were obtained by force or fraud and defended by the same methods, form a curious chapter in the history of human credulity, and show how completely the miraculous virtue was held to reside in the relic itself, wholly irrespective of the crimes through which it was acquired or the frame of mind of the possessor. ”

“ The canons of that church, seeing at once the great profits to be derived from such a relic, lost no time in exhibiting it, and their church was soon crowded with devotees. The bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, finding however no proofs of the authenticity of this relic, prohibited it to be shown as an object of worship, and it remained unheeded for twenty-four years. ”

“ If 63you cut a piece off to sell to a distinguished pilgrim, or to send to a powerful prince for a consideration, this invaluable relic, by a certain inherent vis viva, repaired itself and became whole again, as it had been before. So that, if the owners had chosen, a piece might have been cut off for every man in the world, and yet the wood have been no smaller. ”

“ Then it must not be forgotten that the traditionary history of the relic is often of doubtful authenticity—resting perhaps upon the word of those who had a commodity of indefinite value to sell;—or the workmanship may be of a later age than the antiquary is willing to admit;—or the inscription may have been placed by authority out of the reach of that opinion to which an historian is always amenable. An arrogant republic, or a vain-glorious tyrant, might, without fear, stamp bold lies upon coins, or engrave impudent untruths upon the entablatures of [Pg 335] temples ”

“ Great saints, great sinners; great philosophers, great quacks; great conquerors, great murderers; great ministers, great thieves; each and all have had their admirers, ready to ransack earth, from the equator to either pole, to find a relic of them.
The reliquism of modern times dates its origin from the centuries immediately preceding the Crusades. The first pilgrims to the Holy Land brought back to Europe thousands of apocryphal relics, in the purchase of which they had expended all their store. ”

“ Everywhere about these temples there are uniformed guards whose duty it is to protect the remains against the vandal and the relic hunter. The guard follows a few feet behind you as you roam through the many acres of toppling ruin. He is afraid that you will steal something. Inasmuch as the smallest fragment of one of these huge statues, or obelisks, would weigh probably six hundred pounds, we felt that he was not justified in suspecting us. ”

“ There was some discussion as to what these relics were, which was set at rest by the Globe, January 10, 1889:—"The Prince of Wales and the Relic of Charles I. Considerable curiosity, says the Whitehall Review, was aroused the other day as to what the relic could have been which the Prince of Wales deposited in the tomb of Charles I. at Windsor. The relic in question was, we believe, part of the vertebræ joining the head to the body of the unfortunate monarch. ”

“ The ashes of the dead are ransacked, not only for hidden treasure, and for interesting relics, but there is a figurative species of raking and scratching, among them, in quest of one’s ancestors. This is, too frequently, a periculous experiment; for the searcher sometimes finds his progress—the pleasure of his employment, at least—rudely interrupted, by an offensive stump, which proves to be the relic of the whipping-post, or the gallows. ”

“ My own idea, on first catching sight of the object, was that it was a Roman relic of some sort,—relic of what I do not know, possibly of a coffin.
The neighbourhood of the upper Thames is rich in Roman relics, and my surmise seemed to me a very probable one; but our serious young man, who is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the fossil of a whale ”

“ Women and children flock round these relic-carriers, and in return for grain, cloth, silver, and gold they will fasten a small yellow thread, a bead, an amulet, or a precious bit of some dead saint's bone—these, however, they part with only for gold or silver—around their wrists, arms, neck, and feet, to preserve the wearer not only from the evil eye, which is much dreaded in the East, but from all diseases and from sudden death. ”

“ Many of them have since been planted in different parts of Europe, and have grown into trees as large as their parent. Relic-hunters, who are unable to procure a twig of the original, are content with one from these. Several of them are growing in the neighbourhood of London.
But in relics, as in every thing else, there is the use and the abuse. The undoubted relics of great men, or great events, will always possess attractions for the thinking and refined. ”

“ Doubtless, many a precious relic has been appropriated by modern barbarians to common uses, and so perished out of sight. But with joy we learn that the government has taken measures to prevent the continuance of such destruction, and that the remaining monuments are safe, however they may be mixed up with the houses and shops of the present generation. ”

“ In one of his Saints' Days sermons he explained the waste of relic worship as shrewdly as a modern man of business:—
"It would be to the benefit of the Church, and to the honour of the saints, if the costly ornaments so foolishly lavished upon their graves were divided among the poor, I am well aware, however, that the man who would sharply and fully expose this error would be held for a manifest heretic by the image worshippers and the greedy people who make gain of such graves ”

“ This is indeed no difficulty for those who will only exercise their reason, for amongst the numerous evident impostures we have here mentioned, where may we find one real relic of which we may feel certain that it is such as is represented?
Moreover, all those that I have enumerated are nothing comparatively to the remainder yet untold by me. Even whilst this treatise is in the press, I have been informed of many relics not mentioned in it; and if a general visitation of all existing relics were possible, a hundredfold more discoveries would be made. ”

“ Guy was driven by avarice to the crime of pillaging the shrine and, according to one story, even killing the bishop, who was then resident there. Anyhow, the bishop uttered a curse which was to fall on anybody who should continue to withhold the gold cross from its resting-place in his tomb, or should take steps to disturb it when it had returned there. The feudal lord raised the money for the horse by selling the gold relic to a goldsmith in the town ”

“ Having asked the keeper of the relics whether any robbery had been committed, the man began to laugh, and pointed out to them how impossible such a crime was, but from the moment I had plunged my profane hand into venerable relics, I was no longer worthy of my fair-haired and delicate betrothed. ”

“ If he stole, whether under forcibly imposed treaty or by sheer brute force, the accepted masterpieces of painting and sculptur belonging to the States which he overcame, he stole, with a certain reverence; much as the believer steals the most sacred treasures from the temple, or the most precious relics of the Passion and the saints from the church or the tomb. ”

“ Robert king of France, perceiving how frequently men forswore themselves upon the relics of saints, and less shocked apparently at the crime than at the sacrilege, caused an empty reliquary of crystal to be used, that those who touched it might incur less guilt in fact, though not in intention. ”

“ We must now leave our first group of objects—the axes, the knives, the arrow-tips, with fire-kindlers, pottery, querns, spindle-whorls, and all similar appliances, in order to give some attention to the next division of the relics. This class, it will be remembered, comprises amulets, talismans, and symbolical objects. Some difficulty arises when we try to separate these from the purely decorative articles, but there are certain relics whose purpose does not seem to admit of doubt. ”

“ In short, if all the relics were collected into one heap, the only astonishment would be that such a silly and clumsy imposition could have blinded the whole earth.
As every, even the smallest Catholic church has a heap of bones and other small rubbish, what would it be if all those things which are contained in two or three thousand bishoprics, twenty or thirty thousand abbeys, more than forty thousand convents, and so many parish churches and chapels, were collected into one mass? ”

“ One can understand how that certain churches should be greedy to possess relics, and steal, or even invent them, because the possession brought money into their coffers; but the money would not have come had there not been, deep-seated in the hearts of the people, a conviction that there was something supernatural, a divine power surrounding and emanating from these relics. ”

“ But this pious reverence gave place to a more mercenary spirit, and the trade in relics became a traffic of infamy and disgrace. Not only were the bodies of the so-called martyrs torn asunder and their limbs sold to diverse and distant places, but with sacrilegious fraud the relics of favourite saints were multiplied till as many different cities claimed to have their only true and genuine heads, arms, or bodies, as contended for the honour of being the birth-place of Homer. ”

“ No one tired of hearing of those saintly lives, and no sacrifice was too great to show the heart’s devotion. King René and his consort’s offerings took the form of costly reliquaries in gold, enamels, and jewels, depositories upon high-altars for holy relics. ”

“ In every doubtful case we can only judge by conjecture, and, in following this out, the adherents of the Eastern Churches are sure of success, because their claims are more probable than those of their opponents. It is indeed a difficult point for the defenders of relics to settle. ”

“ Mistakes of this kind must frequently happen to the worshippers of relics, for there is such confusion amongst them that it is quite impossible to worship the bones of a martyr without danger of rendering such honours by mistake to the bones of some brigand or thief, or even to those of a horse, a dog, or a donkey. ”

“ Years of neglect cause indifference to the contents of a scrapheap, and we read occasionally of the dispersal of relics among which, unknown to either sellers or buyers, there may be antiquities of more than passing interest if their original ownership could only be traced, for in the personal relics of great warriors in our national museums there clings a halo of hero-worship, and what to many would be considered fictitious values are attached to such curios. ”