Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/129

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actual exercise of such supernatural gifts within their own society. Thus, one person is cured of blindness; another of dislocation of the thigh; another has his fractured backbone restored; in the fourth case it is a rupture that is healed; in the fifth convulsive fits that are stopped.[1] I have myself been present at a Mormon meeting for public worship, and have heard the saints who were gathered together narrate, with perfect solemnity and apparent good faith, the miraculous cures which they themselves experienced, or which they had personally witnessed. One after another rose to bear his testimony to some case of the kind which had fallen within his immediate knowledge. To these uncultivated and fanatical people, holy events still were what they have long ceased to be to the ordinary Christian world—living realities; and we may still study in them the mental condition of those who could accept as phenomena occurring in their own day the restoration of sight, hearing, or speech; the expulsion of devils; and the resurrection of the dead.

  1. For the evidence of these miracles, see a paper by the author on "The Latter-day Saints," in the Fortnightly Review for December, 1869.