and if toning them up can possibly reduce the diseased tendency, many of them will get well."
Said I, "Doctor, pardon me, is not that a correct account of the manner in which you perform your wonderful works?"
"Oh, no," said he; "the difference between a genuine healer and a quack like Bryant is as wide as the poles."
To question him further upon this line would have put an end to the conversation sooner than I desired.
But testing fundamentally the same methods before and since that interview on many occasions, always under the great disadvantage of not being able to profess supernatural aid, either of spirits or of God, and thus being shut up to affecting the mind by the laws of suggestion and association, and by the manner assumed, and finding a result similar in kind, and in some cases equal in extent, to any produced by Newton or others, I know that when he was explaining to me the success of Bryant upon the assumption that he had no healing power, he gave inadvertently the whole explanation of the healing as far as it is independent of mere physical manipulation. Dr. Newton had been to Havana with his daughter, very low with consumption. He was taking her North, doubtful if she would reach home alive. On my saying, "Doctor, why could you not heal her!" he mournfully replied, "It seems as if we cannot always affect our own kindred!"
(f) In working miraculous cures, the Mormons are fully equal to Catholics or Protestants. In Europe one of their chief methods of making converts is praying with the sick, who often recover; and similar success has often aided them in making converts in this country. The Rev. Nathaniel Mead, a highly respected clergyman, to whom Dr. Baird refers
