Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/321

 He began by setting down the elements which appeared to him to be subject to a reasonable explanation. He wrote:

1. The Church appears to have been entirely right in quietly discrediting the so-called miracle. The scars on the body of Miss Annie Spragg appear neither to have been of miraculous origin nor to have appeared at the moment of her death, but clearly were the scars of wounds inflicted upon her at some time before the brutal murder of her brother at Winnebago Falls. It is on record that they were seen at the time of her examination in connection with the murder. The agency which inflicted the wounds will probably never be known, although it seems likely that they were inflicted by her brother, Reverend Uriah Spragg, a religious fanatic, as a punishment for some sin she had committed and in the hope of redeeming her soul. (See old Puritan law for the branding of women caught in adultery.)

2. The Church also appears to have been right in its quiet assumption that the visitation of Saint Francis to Sister Annunziata was not of a miraculous character but only an hallucination due to her period of life and to definite physical causes together with the discovery of what to her poor weak mind appeared to be evidence of the miraculous and authentic Stigmata.

3. On the surface there appears to be nothing which might indicate that Miss Annie Spragg was anything but an eccentric old maid of the