For patients too sick to move or be moved, there were no remedies except those of a ghostly kind—­the Pater-noster or the Ave.  For the prevention of diseases, prayers were put up in the churches, but no sanitary measures were resorted to.  From cities reeking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be stayed by the prayers of the priests, by them rain and dry weather might be secured, and deliverance obtained from the baleful influences of eclipses and comets.  But when Halley’s comet came, in 1456, so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the pope himself to interfere.  He exorcised and expelled it from the skies.  It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus iii., and did not venture back for seventy-five years!

The physical value of shrine-cures and ghostly remedies is measured by the death-rate.  In those days it was, probably, about one in twenty-three, under the present more material practice it is about one in forty.

The moral condition of Europe was signally illustrated when syphilis was introduced from the West Indies by the companions of Columbus.  It spread with wonderful rapidity; all ranks of persons, from the Holy Father Leo X. to the beggar by the wayside, contracting the shameful disease.  Many excused their misfortune by declaring that it was an epidemic proceeding from a certain malignity in the constitution of the air, but in truth its spread was due to a certain infirmity in the constitution of man—­an infirmity which had not been removed by the spiritual guidance under which he had been living.

To the medical efficacy of shrines must be added that of special relics.  These were sometimes of the most extraordinary kind.  There were several abbeys that possessed our Savior’s crown of thorns.  Eleven had the lance that had pierced his side.  If any person was adventurous enough to suggest that these could not all be authentic, he would have been denounced as an atheist.  During the holy wars the Templar-Knights had driven a profitable commerce by bringing from Jerusalem to the Crusading armies bottles of the milk of the Blessed Virgin, which they sold for enormous sums; these bottles were preserved with pious care in many of the great religious establishments.  But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem, which presented to the beholder one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost!  Modern society has silently rendered its verdict on these scandalous objects.  Though they once nourished the piety of thousands of earnest people, they are now considered too vile to have a place in any public museum.

How shall we account for the great failure we thus detect in the guardianship of the Church over Europe?  This is not the result that must have occurred had there been in Rome an unremitting care for the spiritual and material prosperity of the continent, had the universal pastor, the successor of Peter, occupied himself with singleness of purpose for the holiness and happiness of his flock.