after they had been cured." That the proportion of relapses among persons who have attested cures under the Spiritualists, Magnetizers, Roman Catholics, and Protestants is as great as this, I do not affirm; but I have no doubt that it is greater than among those who have supposed themselves to be cured either by hygienic means without medicine, or under the best attainable medical treatment, which always attends to hygiene in proportion to the intellectual and moral elevation of the physician above the sphere of quackery.
Some years since a member of the Christian church in the city of Boston solemnly testified that he had been entirely cured of pulmonary consumption through the anointing and prayer of Dr. Cullis. In less than six months afterward he died of consumption. "Zion's Herald," a paper published in the same city, in an editorial upon the results of a faith-healing convention at Old Orchard, says: "We are not surprised to learn that some who esteemed themselves healed are suffering again from their old infirmities, in some instances more severely than before." Such relapses are exceedingly numerous, but they are not published; the jubilant testimonies are telegraphed throughout the land and dilated upon in books; the subsequent relapses are not spoken of in religious meetings nor published anywhere, but a little pains enabled me in a single year to collect a large number.
If we are not able to conclude a common cause from these concurrences in effects, limitations, and relapses, neither the deductive nor the inductive process is of value, and all modes of acquiring knowledge or tracing causes would seem to be useless.
But what is that common cause? Can these effects be proved to be natural by constructing a formula by
