The love for ecclesiastical pomp and display
helped to confirm it, and now and then there came one of those
epidemics of revivalism, which few even among the scoffers and the
sceptics were able to withstand.
But in questions of this kind it is perilous to grasp too hastily at
absolute results. We might fancy, for example, that the feeling of
educated men towards the relics of the saints would be a key by which
some chambers of their religious consciousness might be opened. And in
fact, some difference of degree may be demonstrable, though by no means
as clearly as might be wished. The Government of Venice in the
fifteenth century seems to have fully shared in the reverence felt
throughout the rest of Europe for the remains of the bodies of the
saints. Even strangers who lived in Venice found it well to adapt
themselves to this superstition. If we can judge of scholarly Padua
from the testimony of its topographer Michele Savonarola, things must
have been much the same there. With a mixture of pride and pious awe,
Michele tells us how in times of great danger the saints were heard to
sigh at night along the streets of the city, how the hair and nails on
the corpse of a holy nun in Santa Chiara kept continually growing, and
how the same corpse. when any disaster was impending, used to make a
noise and lift up the arms.
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