imposition of hands, the silent sphere of his mind, the going forth of his love for them in prayer, and he used the spiritual power of words. There have been those, in every age of the world, who have, to a more limited extent done the same. His cures were none of them miracles, in the theological sense, but were effected in harmony with laws that are operative today. The word miracle signifies what excites wonder, from the Latin verb miror, to be astonished. And wonder is the child of ignorance. As soon as any phenomenon is understood, and we come to an apprehension of the laws that govern it, it ceases to be a wonder. Miracles belong only to a dark age,—to a wicked and adulterous generation. They disappear before the light of science, like birds of night at the approach of day.
The Kings of England, for many centuries employed the vital magnetism of the hand for the cure of scrofula, and with a success that seemed to an ignorant age miraculous. No one would now suppose that the power to cure a person of a scrofulous diathesis by imparting vital force to the action of the excreting organs through the magnetism of the hands, was a prerogative confined to royalty. Hundreds of others, both in civilised and savage nations, have effected the cure of disease in the same way. Love is the life of man—the inmost vital force of his organism. To apply the hands to a diseased part, or to the nerve-conductor leading to it, or to the point of the brain with which it is in sympathetic
