superstitious it is the devil. As many of the most remarkable phenomena connected with Roman Catholicism have occurred where the Virgin is most prominent, as at the Grotto of Lourdes, and at Knock Chapel (a girl having been cured recently by drinking water with which some of the mortar of the chapel had been mingled), it is pertinent to ask, if supernatural operations are involved in both, whether the works of God might not be expected to be superior to those of the devil?
Mr. Simpson goes so far as to say that what he calls "divine healing" is "a great practical. Scriptural, and uniform principle, which does not content itself with a few incidental cases for psychological diversion or illustration, but meets the tens of thousands of God's suffering children with a simple practical remedy which all may take and claim if they will." Such propositions as this are as wild as the weather predictions that terrify the ignorant and superstitious, but are the amusement and scorn of all rational and educated persons; as the following, from the "Congregationalist" of Boston, shows:
We have taken pains, before publishing it, to confirm, by correspondence, the singular case of a woman's death in a religious meeting at Peekskill, N. Y. Rev. Mr. Simpson, formerly a Presbyterian preacher, was holding a Holiness Convention, Major Cole, the "Michigan Evangelist," being a helper. In an "anointing service" an elderly lady, long afflicted with heart-disease, who had walked a long way after a hard day's work, presented herself for "divine healing," and was anointed by Mr. Simpson. A few minutes after she fainted and died, the finding of the jury of inquest being that her death was from heart-disease, but hastened by the excitement of the service. One would suppose that the case would be a warning against the danger of such experiments, if not a rebuke of the almost blasphemous assumption of miraculous power.
