Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/182

 minute and scientific investigation diagnosis was made "by a kind of instinct" or "some kind of intuition" is quite on a par with the innocent conception of the nature of diseases of the nervous system which Dr. Abbott shows elsewhere. Dr. Abbott would hesitate to allow that Jesus had a kind of instinct to guide Him safely concerning the Davidic origin of a psalm or the date of the taking of Jerusalem. Why should he imagine that he was less likely to be at fault in the presence of equally difficult problems of another kind? The assumption of an infallible capacity for discrimination, which could arrive at correct conclusions without the use of any of the methods and appliances of scientific medicine, is merely to substitute one kind of "super-*naturalism" for another. A miraculous faculty of diagnosis is no easier of acceptance than a miraculous cure. A "kind of instinct" is an absurd supposition.'

Dr. Ryle then examines in detail certain of the healing miracles as related by the Evangelists. The result is to leave the intelligent reader in no doubt that in nine out of ten of the cases of 'paralysis' brought to Him, our Lord would have been, on the 'neurotic' hypothesis, no more likely to effect a cure than (to take Dr. Abbott's example) in 'the restoration of