was found who understanding the circumstances pronounced the necessary absolutions, when the corpse crumbled to dust. One account states that this prelate was Alured of Winchester, although it seems difficult to suppose that this is correct. It is related that the bodies of those who have been struck by lightning are very often found intact, an opinion maintained by the medical writer Zachias, but Ambroise Paré explained this since he says that such persons are as it were embalmed with the sulphur, which is a preventative of corruption acting in the same way as salt. During a terrible fire at Quebec in 1705, the Ursuline Convent was destroyed and unhappily five nuns perished. More than twenty years later their bodies which had been buried in a layer of hot ashes were not merely found intact but even bled copiously in a thick stream.
Malva relates in his Turco-græcia[52] that at the time of a certain Patriarch of Constantinople, who he names Maximus or Emanuel, and whom he places towards the end of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan was desirous of inquiring into the truth of this belief which was so universally held by the Greeks, namely that the body of a person who had died excommunicate remained whole. The Patriarch caused to be opened, the tomb of a woman, who was notorious as having been the mistress of an Archbishop of Constantinople, and the body was found entire. The Turkish officials then enclosed it in a coffin which was bound round and hermetically sealed with the Emperor’s own signet. The Patriarch after having said the appointed prayers, pronounced a solemn absolution over the dead woman, and three days afterwards when the coffin was opened there was only to be seen a handful of dust. Upon this Calmet aptly remarks: “I do not see any miracle here, since everybody knows that sometimes bodies are found entire and complete in a monument or sarcophagus, and that they crumble to dust immediately they are exposed to the air,” and the learned Abbot very pertinently adds: “I do not see how the Archbishop of Constantinople could after death validly absolve a person who was presumably impenitent and who had died excommunicate.”[53] It will readily be remembered in this connexion that the famous vaults of S. Michan’s church in Dublin, for some reason possess the horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries. As Mr. H. F.
