Miracles, in the middle ages, lost their miraculous character by their great frequency. "They became," as Jeremy Taylor observes, "a daily extraordinary, a supernatural natural event, a perpetual wonder, that is, a wonder and no wonder." They could, therefore, be sometimes dispensed with, and we are informed that abbot Stephen, of Liege, in the beginning of the eleventh century, prayed St. Wolbodo to refrain from working any more miracles, on account of the inconvenience which was felt by the brethren of the monastery, from the number of sick persons who came to be healed by day and by night![10] It should, however, be observed, that gross as was the credulity of the middle ages, in reference to the miracles of their saints, it scarcely surpasses the credulity of many of the fathers of the Nicene period. Ambrose, Augustus, and Jerome may be matched to a great extent, in this respect, with the legendary writers of a later period. It has often been asked, Were these stories the result of deliberate imposture, or the mere offspring of ignorance and superstition? No doubt there is room, in many cases, for the charitable interpretation so benevolently conceived and elegantly expressed by sir James Mackintosh: "The illusions of sight, the shades by which dreams sometimes fade into waking visions, the disturbance of the frame from long abstinence, and from the stimulants incautiously taken to relieve it, together with a permanent state of mental excitement, sanctioned by the firm faith which then prevailed in the frequent and ascertainable interpositions of Divine power, are sufficient to relieve us from the necessity of loading the teachers of our forefathers with a large share of fraudulent contrivance, and unmingled fiction. The progress of a tale of wonder, especially when aided by time or distance, from the smallest beginning to a stupendous prodigy, is too generally known to be more particularly called in aid of an attempt to enforce the reasonableness of dealing charitably, not to say justly, with the memory of those who diffused Christianity among ferocious barbarians."[11] But while the benefit of such a charitable construction may be extended to many instances of pretended miracles, it cannot be denied that a large portion of them were the work of fraud. Gregory of Tours, in the sixth century, candidly admits that a certain miracle which he records had been ascribed, not to the Divine power, but to the contrivance of the clergy. A writer of the eleventh century relates a characteristic instance of a man who was accustomed to dig up dead bodies, recently interred, and to dispose of them as wonder-working relics. On one occasion, at the dedication of a church, it was discovered, from conversation with the man himself, that the relic which he had sold, and to which most extraordinary virtues were ascribed, was a gross and flagrant imposture; but still the clergy, though convinced of the fraud, went