The Wafer in the Passau Soldier's Arm

Let there stand here a picture from the year 1611, when the men of Passau were masters of the Lesser Town. The historian Pavel Skála of Zhoř relates that a full account of it was given him by his own brother Jan Skála, who in those days was a lad learning the painter's art under Jan of Feld; the latter lived in the house right beside the little church of Saint John, and being a court painter he fled with his wife to the castle and left the boy in the dwelling to entertain any guests as best he could. When a good many of that Passau rabble got into the house, they took their ease and poured out onto the table from their bosoms a quantity of bullets which had done their bodies no harm at all; they showed them to him and told him that if he had a mind to join them they would teach him that art too. Then, seeing that he served them well from the food the mistress had left for him and the cook, they told him plainly by what means they were safe from shot and from wounds of every kind: each of them, they said, had a consecrated wafer conjured and healed into the fleshy part of the arm above the elbow, and if, immediately on rising in the morning, he recited a certain formula instead of the Lord's Prayer, he need fear no harm to his body from any weapon for four and twenty hours.