By leading the laity, in numerous cases and against their better knowledge and conscience, to believe that the aid of the saints, and of the relics originating from them, was far superior to medical services, the Christian priests of the middle ages have on their part contributed quite a considerable share to the horrors of medical superstition. It is true, we must not overlook the fact that monks and priests of the middle ages were the product of their time, in the same manner as we of modern times are the product of our period. And as the middle ages formed an era of miracles, of demons, devils, and witches, numerous members of the clergy, as children of their time, surely had an essentially different opinion of the belief in miracles and demons from that which we have. The conception of miracles was entirely different during the middle ages from what it is in modern times; for the sincere and firm belief in the omnipotence of the one God, which with Christianity had taken possession of the world, had firmly fixed in the Christian mind of that period the idea that God was able at any moment to manifest his omnipotence by changing the course of terrestrial phenomena, and actually did manifest it. Thus to a Christian of the middle ages it did not appear miraculous that an alteration in the course of natural law should occur. It was considered quite conceivable that the same natural phenomena should spring from one cause to-day and from a different one to-morrow, according to the pleasure of God; it would have been just as inconceivable to the early Christians, and to their later coreligionists of the middle ages, that all natural processes are carried into effect according to eternally unalterable laws, beyond the interference of divinity, as it is incomprehensible to us to conceive that God would at any time change a law of nature in favor of one or the other mortal being. The conception of miracle during the first sixteen centuries of the Christian era was entirely different from that of the subsequent era. We must not, therefore, gauge the ideas of priests and laymen of those centuries who believed in medical miracles by the same standard as that by which we judge those who to-day still persist in admitting the existence of medico-physical wonder or miracle. It is highly probable that, under conditions as described above, many Christian monks and priests vacillated between the requirements of faith and the results of their own medical knowledge. The medieval scholar’s feeling drew him to one side, his intelligence to the other, and thus he became destitute of a firm hold—the intellectual sport of his period and of his environment. That prominent lights of the Church could become subject to such vacillations we learn from Gregory of Tours, who attempted to cure bodily ailments at one time with the medicaments of professional medicine, at other times with the saving means of the celestial