“If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by _false_ Science, endeavoring, as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses....[97] [Signed] “_The Father Ventura de Raulica_, etc., etc.” Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--_on faith_, as usual-- that the power of the spirits of hell is closely related to certain rites, words, and formal signs. “In the diabolical Catholicism,” he says “as well as in the _divine_ Catholicism, potential grace is _bound_ (_liée_) to certain signs.” While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, “is forced to submission” before the holy minister of God--“_he dares not_ LIE.”[98] We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the “spirits” lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the “great number of false relics, as well as false legends,” and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. “It was on the occasion _of one of our Saviour’s teeth_,” writes the author of _Demonologia_, “that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ.”[99] “A monk of St. Antony,” says Stephens,[100] “having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of _the finger of the Holy Ghost_, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the _Verbum caro factum_ (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael’s sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. ‘All which things,’ observes the monkish treasurer of relics, ‘I have brought with me home very devoutly.’”