Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/181

 same features both in methods of treatment and effects, justify us in assuming that the number of cures would have been strictly limited.

'But then, quickly enough, would follow the discovery that the powers of healing were available not for all, but only for a small and limited group of disorders; for in any casual collection of sick people, though there might be perhaps here one and here another suitable patient for a faith-healing exhibition, the majority would be unsuitable. What, then, of the failures?

'The difficulty here referred to has not been wholly overlooked, and it is worth while to notice how the attempt has been made to meet it. "Did a kind of instinct (asks Dr. Abbott) tell Him that the restoration of a lost limb was not like the cure of a paralytic, not one of the works prepared for Him by His Father?" and again, "Experience and some kind of intuition may have enabled Him to distinguish those cases which He could heal from those (a far more numerous class) which He could not."

'The suggestion would not commend itself to a medical reader as a very happy way out of the difficulty. The naïve supposition that in cases of disease which require unusually