Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM. 47
by the Queen's touch and converted to Protestantism. Similar
testimony exists as to cures wrought by James I. Charles
I also enjoyed the same power, in spite of the public declara-
tion against its reality by Parliament. In one case the King
saw a patient in the crowd, too far off to be touched, and
simply said, " God bless thee and grant thee thy desire " ;
whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours disap-
in the bottle
peared from the patient's body and appeared
of medicine which he held in his hand ; at least so says Dr.
John Nicholas, Warden of Winchester College, who declares
this of his own knowledge to be every word of it true.
But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miracu-
lous gift is found in the case of Charles II, the most thor-
oughly cynical debauchee who ever sat on the English
throne before the advent of George IV. He touched nearly
one hundred thousand persons, and the outlay for gold
medals issued to the afflicted on these occasions rose in
some years as high as ten thousand pounds. John Brown,
.surgeon in ordinary to his Majesty and to St. Thomas's Hospital,
and author of many learned works on surgery and
anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the touch
of this monarch and ; Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an
entire book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, " I
myself have been frequent witness to many hundreds of
cures performed by his Majesty's touch alone without any
assistance of chirurgery, and these many of them had tyred
out the endeavours of able chirurgeons before they came
thither." Yet it is especially instructive to note that, while
in no other reign were so many people touched for scrofula,
[and in none were so many cures vouched for, in no other
reign did so many people
mortality show this clearly,
die of that disease : the bills of
and the reason doubtless is the
(general substitution of supernatural for scientific means of
cure. This is but one out of many examples showing the
havoc which a scientific test always makes among miracles
if men allow it to be applied.
To James II the same power continued and if it be ;
said,
I
'in the words of Lord Bacon, that " imagination is next of kin
to miracle a working faith," something else seems required
to account for the testimony of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought