edition has been long since placed in the hands of the faithful, which
only contains the well-authenticated and certain miracles.

A learned man has demonstrated that the rules of these critics for the
elucidation of these miracles are not judicious; that they are
extravagant, and that it would be risking too much to follow them;
that they are contradictory, and not in unison with each other; that
it often happens that they reject or admit miracles against their own
principles. If they find splendid ones, and many of them in the same
legend, they hold them to be suppositions or altered, although, the
oldest and most authentic documents contain similar ones; they reject
them as false, without assigning any reason in proof of their having
been falsified; they pretend that the authors who have recorded them
were too credulous, though they received other articles on the testimony
of these same authors. In order to believe them, they require perfect
certainty, although they give credit to many circumstances in
ecclesiastical and profane history on mere probabilities. One of them
professes not to omit a single miracle which is vouched for by good
authority, nevertheless, he suppresses many of the most considerable;
and many of those which he feels compelled to bring forward, he does
so in terms which mark doubtfulness, to say nothing more.

Thus, the ultra-critics while admitting the wonders of the Lives of
the Saints, reduce them to nothing by rules, which they invent for
separating truth from falsehood, as those who profess to believe an
infallible authority in the Church make that infallibility to depend
on so many conditions, that they may always maintain that the Church,
dispersed or assembled, has never come to any decision in opposition
to their errors.