righteous man availeth much." All the more is it to be regretted that even in those days of genuine piety and rapturous faith, foreign elements should at once have been mixed up with the true doctrine; for already Caspar Bersaeus ascribed some of his cures to the Holy Virgin; and soon the power passed away, when the honor was no longer given to Him to whom alone it was due. From that day the power to perform miraculous cures has been but rarely and exceptionably granted to a few individuals. Thus Matthias Will, a German divine of the seventeenth century, was as famous for his marvelous power over the sick and the possessed as for his fervent piety, his incessant praying and fasting, and his utter self-abnegation. Sufferers were brought to him from every part of Christendom, and hundreds who had been given up by their physicians were healed by his earnest prayers and the blessing he invoked from on high. His memory still survives in his home, and an inscription on his tombstone records his extraordinary powers. (Cath. Encycl., Suppl. I. 1320.) Even the Jansenists, with all their hostility to certain usages of the Church, had their famous Abbé Paris, whose grave in the Cemetery of St. Médard became in 1727 the scene of a number of miraculous cures, fully attested by legal evidence and amply described by Montgéron, a man whom the Abbé had in his lifetime changed from a reckless profligate into a truly pious Christian. (_La vérité des miracles_, etc., Paris, 1737.) The magic phenomena exhibited on this occasion were widely discussed and great numbers of books and pamphlets written for and against their genuineness, until the subject became so obscured by party spirit that it is extremely difficult, in our day, to separate the truth from its large admixture of unreliable statements. A peculiar feature of these scenes--admitted in its full extent by adversaries even--was the perfect insensibility of most of the enthusiasts, the so-called _Convulsionnaires_. Jansenists by conviction, these men, calm and cool in their ordinary pursuits, had been so wrought up by religious excitement that they fell, twenty or more at a time, into violent convulsions and demanded to be beaten with huge iron-shod clubs in order to be relieved of an unbearable pressure upon the abdomen. They endured, in this manner, blows inflicted upon the pit of the stomach which under ordinary circumstances would have caused grievous if not fatal consequences.