Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/836

 doubt, and the very existence of the controversy shows that nothing of the sort exists."

Hereupon the Archbishop of Westminster, looking at Mr. Stephen with a benign smile, said: Mr. Stephen's investigations into the evidence of the interference of unseen agents in human affairs are hardly on a par with some of those undertaken by the Church to which I belong. In canonizing, or even beatifying those who are lost to us, the Holy See has long been accustomed to go into the evidence of such events as those to which Mr. Stephen has just referred, and that with a disposition to pick holes in the evidence, which, if he will allow me to say so, could hardly be surpassed even by so able a sifter of evidence as Mr. Stephen himself. Nor is it indeed necessary to go into the archives of these laborious and most skeptically conducted investigations. If there were but that predisposition among Protestants to believe in the evidence of the unseen which Dr. Ward desired to see, there would, I am convinced, be many believers in miracles of the most astounding kind, and of miracles that have happened in our own time, many within the last year. Let those who choose, for instance, look into the evidence of the most astonishing cure of varicose veins which took place only last year in the south of France—a malady of thirty years' standing, and of steady progress throughout that time, attested on the positive evidence of French physicians, who had themselves repeatedly seen and prescribed for the patient. Yet they admitted that all they could do would be at most to alleviate his sufferings by the application of mechanical pressure—and they nevertheless declared the cure to have been effected in a single night, the only new condition having been the believing application of the Lourdes water to the body of the sufferer. Here is a case where all Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's conditions are satisfied to the full. I do not, however, apprehend that Mr. Stephen will sift the evidence, or even regard it as worth his serious attention. He has hardly assigned sufficient force to that strong predisposition to incredulity which is so widely spread at this moment in the Protestant world, a predisposition which I can not entirely reconcile with Mr. Bagehot's very striking remarks on the universal credulousness of the natural man. Perhaps, however, there may be such credulousness where there is no prejudice, and yet incredulity still more marked where there is. I have been a careful observer of the attitude of Protestants in relation to the controversy between the natural and supernatural. I have seen its growth. I have watched its development. I am persuaded that Mr. Stephen is quite wrong in supposing that the matter can be settled as one of evidence alone. You must first overcome that violent prejudice in your minds which prevents you from vouchsafing even a glance at the evidence we should have to offer you. But I will, if the society permits me, leave that part of the subject, and return to the principal question before us—the impossibility of proving the uniformity of Nature from