The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

panied by more or less fanaticism which ought not to be permitted to cloud our judgment as to the genuineness of the emotion itself. The testimony of theologians is, naturally, a matter of opinion, while that of missions, experience, and of the healed themselves is only a further record of facts, artificially divided into these heads, which constitute in their totality the whole evidence before us. It is to the facts thus gathered that we are to give our attention.

What now are these facts? What is their nature? And what are we to think of them? The first thing which strikes the observer, as he casts his eye over them, is that they stand sadly in need of careful sifting. What we are looldng for is such facts as necessitate or at least suggest the assumption, in order to account for them, of the ''immediate action of God, as distinguished from His mediate action through natural laws." That is Gordon's own definition of miracle,'^ ^ and what is affirmed is that these facts argue miraculous action. The great body of the facts offered to us, however, argue nothing of the kind.

In many of them means are openly used, means which rank among the specifically best means known to medical science. This is the case, for example, with all the instances of cures made in the Faith-Houses. Who doubts that multitudes of the sick would find cure under the skilled and tireless nursing of a Dorothea Triidel, who was known to pass the whole day without food, utterly forgetting the claims of her body in devotion to her work?^^ Who doubts that great physical benefit could be found by many in "the silence and retirement of the simple cure of Pastor Rein"? Doctor Weir Mitchell won fame as a physician through his "rest-cure." What medical man will not agree that good nursing and a quiet and restful state of body and mind are among the best of curative agents? The very existence of Faith-Houses, indeed, is the sufficient refutation of the doctrine of Faith-Healing which seeks support from them. By hypothesis a miraculous cure should be immediate, as in cause so in time — without delay as without means — on the exercise of simple faith. The existence of Faith-Hospitals is a standing proof that it is not immediate, either in cause or in time: that a place of retirement is helpful, and that good nursing has its reward. Faith-Houses may raise a protest against the methods of current medical practice, but they do so by setting up a particular method of practice of their own — not by introducing miraculous healing as over against natural.

It is observable, further, that the cases which are successfully treated in the Faith-Houses have their natural limits. Not every one is cured. The brother of Samuel Zeller, who succeeded Dorothea Triidel in her House in Switzerland, sought cure there for years in vain. Dorothea Triidel's own health remained throughout her Hfe "very feeble"; she suffered from curvature of the spine from an early age and died at forty-eight of typhus fever. Zeller himself "strongly repudiated the whole system of doctrine" of the typical Faith-Healers, especially "the idea that sickness in God's people is the result of unbeHef "; and sharply reprobated the practice of holding public meetings and expecting cures at them, attributing failure to lack of faith. He did not require that medical treatment should be renounced; he merely put his own dependence on rest, quiet, and prayer to God.^^ The failures of cure on this system cannot be accounted for merely by an appeal to the sovereignty of God in answering prayer. They find their account also in the nature of the diseases treated. We quote the following from the pen of one of the most eminent aurists of the last generation. "The avoidance of tangible affections by faith-curers," says Doctor St. John Roosa,^^

"is a circumstance that tells unanswerably against their doctrines. I was once sent for to see a lady who was living in what was called a faith-cure establishment in this city, in order that I might, if possible, relieve her from impairment of hearing. This I found to be chiefly caused by a

collection of wax in the outer canal of the ear, which was easily removed. The removal caused great improvement in the hearing. I had never seen a faith-cure establishment before, and I confess I was somewhat surprised that I was sent for. I asked, 'How is it possible, that, if without the use of any means except prayer to God, internal diseases are cured, affections of the organs that we cannot see, those that we can see, and that are susceptible of relief by the ordinary physician, believing or unbeUeving, cannot be cured by prayer?...' It is a terrible shock to the beHever in this system to think that God can cure a case of disease of the Uver or of the nerves, and will cure it by the use of the prayer of faith alone, but (and I mean to speak reverently) He will have nothing to do with a case of deafness."

We think it fair to urge also that the sifting of cases must exclude all those cures which can be paralleled by cures that have, in similar circumstances, been effected obviously without miracle. If we are seeking instances which demonstrate that a miracle has been wrought, surely we must have cases essentially different from those which are known to be curable without miracle. Obviously, for example, we cannot confidently infer miracle to account for a cure which "the Apostate Church" can perform as well as we; which mind-cure can equally readily work on a pantheistic, the Buddhist on an atheistic, and the mesmerist on a purely materiahstic basis. These cures may seem to us startling, but they cannot be thought by us to be miraculous. It is, however, no exaggeration to say that the great mass of the cures wrought by Faith-Healers are closely paralleled by some or all of these sister practitioners. Your time need not be taken up by descriptions here of the wonders worked by Doctor Perkins's metalHc tractors, by mesmerism, mind-cure, the waters of Lourdes.^^ Let me give you but a single partial illustration of how completely they repeat one another's triumphs.

Stanton rests his case for Faith-Healing on a half-dozen wisely chosen instances. The first one which he gives is that of a young woman with "a withered hand which was bent in upon her wrist as no well hand by any act of the will can be, and presented nothing but a mass of skin and bones, with not a vein visible upon it." This withered hand was cured by prayer. Well, here is first a Roman Catholic parallel among the cures of Prince Hohenlohe: " Captain Ruthlein, an old gentleman of Thundorf, seventy years of age, who had long been pronounced incurable of paralysis which kept his hand clinched, and who had not left his room for many years, was perfectly cured." ^^ And here is a parallel from mesmerism: "Edward Wine, aged seventy-five, who had been paralyzed ten years in an arm and leg. The left arm was spasmodically fixed to the chest, the fingers drawn toward the palm of the hand and wasted, quite incapable of holding anything." Perfectly cured by mesmerism.^'^ And here is a parallel from imagination: Sir Humphrey Davy placed a thermometer under the tongue of a paralyzed patient simply to ascertain the temperature; the patient at once claimed to experience relief, so the same treatment was continued for two weeks, and by that time the patient was well.*^ And, finally, here is a somewhat similar case from pure decep-

tion. "The wife and mother of the house was suffering from inflammatory rheumatism in its worst form. She could not move, was terribly swollen, and could not bear to be touched.... One of the hands of the patient was fearfully swollen, so that the fingers were as large very nearly as the wrist of an ordinary child three years of age.... Nearly all the space between the fingers was occupied and the fist was cHnched. It was plain that to open them voluntarily was impossible, and to move them intensely painful.... The hand had not been opened for several weeks." "I held," says Doctor Buckley, the operator,*^ "two knitting-needles about two inches from the ends of the

woman's fingers, just above the clinched hand, and said, 'Now, Madam, do not think of your fingers, and above all do not try to move them, but fix your eyes on the ends of these needles.' She did so... and the fingers straightened out and became flexible without the least pain. I then moved the needles about, and she declared that all pain left her hand except in one spot about half an inch in length." The fact is that imagination and concentrated

attention are powers which need to be reckoned with in all cures, and only such cures as exclude a possible appeal to them, or to shock, or the like, are available for evidence of the miraculous. The simulation of disease by hysteria is also very remarkable. There was a woman in St. Luke's Hospital, New York City, who had a tumor to all, even the most skilled, diagnosis. But the tumor simply disappeared on the administration of ether and the consequent withdrawal of nervous action.^'' When all these cases are excluded, the list left as available evidence for miraculous action will be short indeed.

Sifting is not even yet, however, at an end. We must exclude also all cures which seem to us, indeed, to have come in answer to prayer, but of which there is no evidence that they have come miraculously, that is, by the immediate action of God, without all means. The famous cure of Canon Basil Wilberforce is a typical instance of what we mean. He declares that he has no shadow of doubt that he "was healed by the Lord's blessing upon His own word, recorded in St. James 5:15, 16." "But," he adds, "as in so many other cases, there was sufficient margin of time, and possibility of change of tissue, between the anointing and the recovery to justify the sceptic in disconnecting the two." ^^ All Christians believe in healing in answer to prayer. Those who assert that this healing is wrought in a specifically miraculous manner, need better evidence for their peculiar view than such as fits in equally well with the general Christian faith.

Finally it must be added with great firmness that sifting is needed by the cases reported by the Faith-Healers to isolate the instances the details of which can be trusted. Of certain obvious facts any honestly disposed person is a competent witness; of certain others few persons are competent witnesses. Among these latter facts may safely be classed the accurate diagnosis of disease. Few physicians, of even lifelong practice, are really good diagnosticians; perhaps there is none of whatever eminence who has not been more than- once wholly deceived in the nature of the disease he has been called upon to treat — as the autopsy has proved,^^ Every one who has sought to trace up alleged cases of Faith-Healing will have felt the grave doubt which frequently rests upon the identification of the disease which is asserted to have been cured. Yet we are asked to believe in multifarious miracles on the faith of the diagnosis of this, that, or the other unknown person. Nothing is more remarkable than the scorn which the average Faith-Healer pours on physicians as healers, and the unbounded confidence which he reposes in them as diagnosticians. It is with him the end of all strife if he can say that the case was hopeless on the testimony of Doctor This or Doctor That.

It is to be feared that it must even be said that Faith- Healers, in their enthusiasm over the wonderful things they are testifying to, are not always as careful as they might be in ascertaining the actual facts of the cases of cure which they report. It may seem to them sometimes almost a sacrilege to make so close an inquisition into the facts, the cold facts, when so much has obviously been done. Gordon records,^^ with apparent approval, the reply of one of a visiting body of German preachers and professors, when inspecting Zeller's Faith-Home in Switzerland. When asked to give his opinion of the work, he responded: "When the Holy Spirit speaks with so much power, we can do no otherwise than listen to His teaching; critical