The criterion or proof of the authenticity of many of these objects is, not an unchallengeable record of their origin and history, but an exhibition of their miracle-working powers.
Is not that a strange logic which finds proof of an asserted fact in an inexplicable illustration of something else?
Even in the darkest ages intelligent Christian men must have had misgivings as to these alleged providential or miraculous interventions.
There is a solemn grandeur in the orderly progress of Nature which profoundly impresses us; and such is the character of continuity in the events of our individual life that we instinctively doubt the occurrence of the supernatural in that of our neighbor.

The intelligent man knows well that, for his personal behoof, the course of Nature has never been checked; for him no miracle has ever been worked; he attributes justly every event of his life to some antecedent event; this he looks upon as the cause, that as the consequence.

When it is affirmed that, in his neighbor's behalf, such grand interventions have been vouchsafed, he cannot do otherwise than believe that his neighbor is either deceived, or practising deception.
As might, then, have been anticipated, the Catholic doctrine of miraculous intervention received a rude shock at the time of the Reformation, when predestination and election were upheld by some of the greatest theologians, and accepted by some of the greatest Protestant Churches.

With stoical austerity Calvin declares: "We were elected from eternity, before the foundation of the world, from no merit of our own, but according to the purpose of the divine pleasure." In affirming this, Calvin was resting on the belief that God has from all eternity decreed whatever comes to pass.

Thus, after the lapse of many ages, were again emerging into prominence the ideas of the Basilidians wad Valentinians, Christian sects of the second century, whose Gnostical views led to the engraftment of the great doctrine of the Trinity upon Christianity.