The value of this circumstance is shown to have been accurately
exemplified in the history of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order of
Jesuits. (Douglas's Criterion of Miracles, p. 74.) His life, written by a
companion of his, and by one of the order, was published about fifteen
years after his death. In which life, the author, so far from ascribing
any miracles to Ignatius, industriously states the reasons why he was
not invested with any such power. The life was republished fifteen years
afterwards, with the addition of many circumstances which were the
fruit, the author says, of further inquiry, and of diligent examination;
but still with a total silence about miracles. When Ignatius had been
dead nearly sixty years, the Jesuits, conceiving a wish to have the
founder of their order placed in the Roman calendar, began, as it should
seem, for the first time, to attribute to him a catalogue of miracles
which could not then be distinctly disproved; and which there was, in
those who governed the church, a strong disposition to admit upon the
slenderest proofs.
II. We may lay out of the case accounts published in one country, of
what passed in a distant country, without any proof that such accounts
were known or received at home.
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