138 Eusebius relates, that Abgarus, king of Edessa, having heard of Christ’s teaching and miracles, sent an embassy to acknowledge our Lord’s divinity, and to invite him to his kingdom, in order to cure Abgarus of a complaint of long standing; upon which Christ sent him the likeness mentioned in the text. Now, it is impossible for one moment to admit, that, if such an important fact had any truthful foundation, it would have been left unrecorded by the apostles. 139 The Roman Catholic Church maintains that the Blessed Virgin was carried to heaven by angels, and it commemorates this event by the festival of the Assumption on the 15th August. This belief was unknown to the primitive church; for, according to a Roman Catholic writer of undoubted orthodoxy, the Empress Pulcheria, in the fifth century, requested the Bishop of Jerusalem, Juvenal, to allow her to have the body of the Virgin, in order to display it for the public adoration of the faithful at Constantinople.—(Tillerant’s “Memoires Ecclesiastiques.”)—There are many other proofs that, even at that time, when many idolatrous practices had begun to corrupt the church, the Virgin’s body was generally believed to be in earth, and not in heaven. 140 Vials filled with such milk were shown in several churches at Rome, at Venice in the church of St Mark, at Aix in Provence, in the church of the Celestins at Avignon, in that of St Anthony at Padua, &c. &c., and many absurd stories are related about the miracles performed with these relics. 141 There are about twenty gowns of the Blessed Virgin exhibited in various places. Many of them are of costly textures, which, if true, would prove that she had an expensive wardrobe. 142 The number of miraculous images of the Virgin in countries following the tenets of the Roman Catholic and Greek Churches is _legion_, and a separate volume would be required if we were to give even an abridged account of them. 143 “The most celebrated relic of St Joseph is his ‘_han_,’ _i.e._, the sound or groan which issues from the chest of a man when he makes an effort, and which St Joseph emitted when he was splitting a log of wood. It was preserved in a bottle at a place called Concaiverny, near Blois, in France.”—_D’Aubigne’s Confessions de Sancy_, chap. ii. _apud_ Colin de Plancy. 144 It is said that as late as 1784, at Mount St Michael in Bretagne, a Swiss was vending feathers from the archangel Michael’s wings, and that he found purchasers for his wares.