cures and faith-healers. A month before her death she was in correspondence with one of these persons. This lady appointed an hour in which to pray, and directed that friends in the place where she resided should meet and pray at that time. Her pastor went and prayed. At the close of this interview the patient told him she had received just then a great blessing, so that now she felt reconciled to die, and subsequently said nothing about healing, but much about the heavenly rest which she expected soon to enter. For a long time her nourishment had been, and then was, taken entirely in the form of injections of beef tea. On a certain day a layman who had been healed, and was himself a healer and a prime mover in faith-healing conventions, visited her about noon and stayed until near evening. He told the lady and her children that the Lord had sent him there that she might be instantly healed, read and expounded the book of James, brought out his phial of oil, anointed her forehead, knelt by her bedside, holding her hand in his, and prayed very earnestly for her immediate cure, claiming present conscious testimony by the Holy Spirit that the cure was wrought. On rising from his knees, still holding her hand, he lifted the lady in bed to a sitting posture, and pronounced her cured in the name of the Holy Trinity. A member of the family protested that it was hazardous for her to sit up in that way, as she had not been able to sit up for many weeks. Finally the patient laid down exhausted, and the visitor left, assuring the family that "in four days mother would be up and about." Shortly after this (perhaps an hour) intense pain in the stomach began and kept increasing until the agony became unendurable, so that groans and screams of distress were wrung from her. This continued for twelve hours, when exhaustion and stupor ensued, which lasted until her death, the next day. An autopsy was held by physicians who had been in attendance, and they reported a lesion of the stomach, caused, in their opinion, by the exertion of the patient in arising and sitting up in bed. When our informant met the visiting brother who had had a revelation of the Spirit that the patient was to recover, he inquired after the case, and on being told that our informant was about to go to the funeral, he expressed great surprise and said, "It sometimes happens that way."
Can anything more blasphemous be imagined than the presumptuous claim of a revelation through the
