curative hands upon me, I felt a quiet within and was conscious I was cured." The Rev. W. B. Shorthouse tendered some wonderful testimony; he described his own career of weakness which interfered with his ministerial duties, but now he was completely restored to health. Only two weeks previous, he said, some of his congregation told him that he looked like death. As he grew warm in his testimony, he described several marvelous cases, one of a man brought in dead who walked away without assistance. He had seen hundreds "touch the border of Mr. Wood's garment," and finally concluded by saying he was himself "a living example of miracles greater than those performed by the disciples of Christ."
After seeing this in "Galignani's Messenger" in Paris, I ascertained from high authority in Australia that these narratives were greatly exaggerated, and that many relapses had occurred.
If such dangers exist in connection with the testimony of witnesses in religious meetings to physical facts, it may be thought that accounts of cases carefully written by honest men might be taken without so many grains of allowance. Having inquired into several of the most conspicuous with whose subjects I am acquainted, I have found that the condition of the patient prior to the alleged cure has been magnified in the description. This has not always been so, but in most of the celebrated cases which I have personally investigated.
Many important facts have been omitted, sometimes because the witness did not regard them as of consequence; in other cases, it must be confessed, because the luster of the cure would be dimmed by their recital. A female evangelist, whose astonishing cure has been told to thousands, never mentions a surgical operation from which her friends know that she de-
