Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/781

Rh between cause and effect, would discover in this marvelous phenomenon only the natural result of the kind of religious instruction that has been systematically imparted by the Catholic clergy to the souls intrusted to their special care and spiritual cure during the last fifty years, and against which Prof. Reusch deemed it necessary to utter his solemn words of protest and of warning.

Dr. Korum seeks to give his brochure a quasi-scientific character by a so-called "documentary representation" of the miracles wrought by the "holy coat," consisting of certificates issued by obscure curates and country doctors and indorsed by an episcopal commission of theologians and physicians, who have very discreetly forgotten to sign their names to their reports and thus relieved themselves of all personal responsibility for their opinions. The Council of Trent decreed that no new miracles are to be accepted as authentic unless allowed and approved by the diocesan bishop, who, after taking the advice of theologians and other pious men, is to come to a decision which shall be consentaneous to truth and piety (veritati et pietati consentanea). Unfortunately, the interests of truth and piety are not always identical, and the demands of the former are apt to prove fatal to the claims of the latter. The diseases reported by our author as having been healed were nervous and hysterical affections, chorea or St. Vitus's dance, and a few cases of certain milder forms of lupus and tabes, which, as is well known, often disappear for months and even for years without the aid of medicine or miracles. It is also essential to a miracle that the afflicted person should be instantaneously relieved, or "cured from that very hour." The bishop, however, records no instance of this kind; as a rule, a very conconsiderable time elapsed, often weeks and months, before the contact with the "holy coat" began to produce any perceptible effects; meanwhile the patient had been subject to a variety of sanitary influences, such as change of scene and other diversions, any one of which might have brought about the desired result, and in some cases also underwent medical treatment. Under such circumstances it would be the height of absurdity even for those who admit the possibility of the miraculous healing of disease to claim that the recovery was due to supernatural causes. Indeed, of the thirty-eight cures said to have taken place during the exhibition of the "holy coat," Dr. Korum owns that twentyseven may have been 'effected by natural means, thus leaving only eleven in which he would fain discover the working of divine agencies.

One of the most eminent of modern neuropathologists, the late Prof. Charcot, published shortly before his death an interesting paper on faith-healing, in which he acknowledges the reality of