It would be utterly unphilosophical to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud.

Whatever part priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry discreditable developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends, Century after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as naturally as elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie.
II.

GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.
-- THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.
Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all great benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and devotees.
Throughout human history the lives of such personages, almost without exception, have been accompanied or followed by a literature in which legends of miraculous powers form a very important part--a part constantly increasing until a different mode of looking at nature and of weighing testimony causes miracles to disappear.

While modern thought holds the testimony to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as worthless, it is very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings who endow the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest hold upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise such influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or body are helped or healed.
We have within the modern period very many examples which enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles.

Out of these I will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity, one whose biography is before the world with its most minute details--in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies: this man is St.Francis Xavier.