The unanimous testimony of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Leo, St. Cyprian, St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and of all the most illustrious Fathers of the Greek, African, Eastern, Roman, and Gallican Churches, proves that the worship of martyrs, of the places of their nativity (_natalia_), of their burial-places, and of their relics, was established in the Christian world before the close of the fourth century (Fig. 280). The various liturgies, sacramentaries, missals, and rituals confirm this testimony. Moreover, the primitive Church had, in a measure, joined the worship of relics to the sacrifice of the eucharist by celebrating the latter upon the tombs of the martyrs. This ancient usage was raised into a liturgical law under the pontificate of St. Felix (269), as St. Athanasius affirms in his biography of that saint. When the persecutions had ceased, basilicas _sub dio_, or under the open sky, were raised over the crypts which held the bodies of the martyr-saints. The enormous sum of five hundred golden sous, representing seven pounds of gold, the price for the body of an obscure martyr in the third century, fails to give an idea of the fabulous sums which were expended at that period to obtain possession of the bodies of the saints. Men hoped, to use an expression borrowed from the Acts of St. Firmus and St. Rusticus, that by so doing they were laying up treasures for the life to come; and this explains why Luitprand, King of the Lombards, purchased the relics of St. Augustine for their weight in gold. The flow of pilgrims into Rome, Jerusalem, and other places was so great towards the close of the fourth century, and still more in the fifth, that it became necessary to regulate this display of devotion by some strict rules of discipline. Many ecclesiastical writers, while deploring the abuses to which it gave rise, were unable to point out any effectual remedy; it being difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, to distinguish the false pilgrims from the true, and to prevent vagabonds, ever ready to rob any wealthy travellers they might fall in with, from assuming the garb of piety and religion. [Illustration: Fig. 281.--“Count Renier bearing the Body of St. Veronica to the Church of St. Waudru, in Mons.”--After a Miniature in the “Chroniques de Hainaut” (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century), Burgundian Library, Brussels.] Every church, abbey, and chapel became at this period a place of refuge, ever open for pilgrims, who were certain of being hospitably received there at all hours, for their purse was generally light, and they lived upon alms, if only for the sake of doing penance. Charity devoted itself to the task of sheltering and feeding them during their journeys, whence they often returned ill and weak, and poorer than when they started, but always rich in indulgences, consolations, and relics.