them:  his authority is not sufficient to deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him; but generally and offhand to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular impudence.  That great St. Augustin’ testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight upon the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at Milan; a woman at Carthage cured of a cancer, by the sign of the cross made upon her by a woman newly baptized; Hesperius, a familiar friend of his, to have driven away the spirits that haunted his house, with a little earth of the sepulchre of our Lord; which earth, being also transported thence into the church, a paralytic to have there been suddenly cured by it; a woman in a procession, having touched St. Stephen’s shrine with a nosegay, and rubbing her eyes with it, to have recovered her sight, lost many years before; with several other miracles of which he professes himself to have been an eyewitness:  of what shall we excuse him and the two holy bishops, Aurelius and Maximinus, both of whom he attests to the truth of these things?  Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and facility; or of malice and imposture?  Is any man now living so impudent as to think himself comparable to them in virtue, piety, learning, judgment, or any kind of perfection?

              “Qui, ut rationem nullam afferrent,
               ipsa auctoritate me frangerent.”

["Who, though they should adduce no reason, would convince me with
their authority alone.”—­Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes, i. 21.]

’Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd temerity it draws after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend.  For after, according to your fine understanding, you have established the limits of truth and error, and that, afterwards, there appears a necessity upon you of believing stranger things than those you have contradicted, you are already obliged to quit your limits.  Now, that which seems to me so much to disorder our consciences in the commotions we are now in concerning religion, is the Catholics dispensing so much with their belief.  They fancy they appear moderate, and wise, when they grant to their opponents some of the articles in question; but, besides that they do not discern what advantage it is to those with whom we contend, to begin to give ground and to retire, and how much this animates our enemy to follow his blow:  these articles which they select as things indifferent, are sometimes of very great importance.  We are either wholly and absolutely to submit ourselves to the authority of our ecclesiastical polity, or totally throw off all obedience to it:  ’tis not for us to determine what and how much obedience we owe to it.  And this I can say, as having myself made trial of it, that having formerly taken the liberty of my own swing and fancy, and omitted or neglected certain rules of the discipline of our Church, which seemed to me vain and strange coming afterwards to discourse