There is no abuse in the world which cannot be justified, if the example of persons occupying a high station or that of great numbers is sufficient for it. The advocates of the adoration of relics in our own days may defend it by the fact that about half a million of people went in 1845 to worship the holy coat of Treves, and that still more recently great honours were paid to the relics of St Theodosia at Amiens, by a number of distinguished persons,--bishops, archbishops, and even cardinals. The _autos da fé_ of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions could not be wrong, since kings, queens, and the most eminent persons of the state, approved them by their presence. Idolatry cannot be an error, since so many monarchs, statesmen, and learned men, had conformed to its rites; whilst, on the other side, the same reason may be pleaded for the penal laws of Ireland, and other enactments against the Roman Catholics, because they were established and maintained by so many parliaments. Jerome maintained that it was a calumny of Vigilantius to say that the Christians burnt candles in daylight, though he admitted that it was done by some men and women in order to honour the martyrs. He did not approve of it, because their zeal was without knowledge; but he thought that on account of their good intention, they would be rewarded according to their faith, like the woman who had anointed the feet of our Lord. He also tried to justify the use of candles by those passages of the Scriptures where an allusion was made to _lamps and lights_; as, for instance, the parable of the virgins, the expression of the Psalm cxix. 105, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."
The rest of the arguments which St Jerome employs in refuting what he calls the errors and heresies of Vigilantius are of a similar nature to those which have been given above; and it is really astonishing to see that a man like this celebrated father, who is generally considered as one of the great luminaries of the church, not only by Roman Catholics, but also by some Protestants, could descend to such miserable shifts, and indulge in such violent language as he did, in his answer to Vigilantius, which bears a strong mark of having been dictated more by his personal feelings against his former friend and benefactor, than by a conviction of the justice of the cause which he was defending on that occasion. It is, however, evident from the other writings of the same father of the church, that his imagination was much more powerful than his reasoning faculties, and that he had entirely forgotten the precept of St Paul, to "_refuse profane and old wives' fables_"--(1 Timothy iv. 7)--because no one has ever indulged in more absurd fables than this good father did, in his lives of St Hilarion and St Paul, two celebrated monks, and of which the following is a fair specimen:--