Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/221

 lifeless until the Finger of God quickens it with a touch. And, after all, a universal instinct associates ideas of sympathy and positive relief with the movement of the hand. Thus in the Greek myth, the distracted Io is comforted by the prophecy of Prometheus that the God would restore her by his touch.

(iv) The healing of the nobleman's son, of the centurion's slave, and that of the Syro-*phœnician woman's daughter stand by themselves as instances of 'absent treatment.' The strong impression wrought in the mind of the father, the master, the mother, respectively, is conveyed by a sort of telepathy to the mind of the patient. 'Why herein,' surely, is a marvellous thing for those who cannot accept our Lord's claim to be the Son of Man in a unique sense—that He should thus have possessed, 2000 years ago, a knowledge of the mysterious processes of human nature which modern science is only now beginning to divine. It is in that fact that the 'glory' (Luke xiii. 17; John xi. 40), the 'wonder' (Matt. xxi. 15), the 'strangeness' (Luke v. 26) of the miracles of Christ consist. They are 'works of power,' 'outcomings of that mighty