found and broad-minded writers of that period. In the following extracts he combines, as they should be combined, the principles underlying the works of Our Lord with those of the servants who have trodden in his footsteps

66

Again, even as to the doctrine of miracles, in which it is generally assumed that Christ taught what science has exploded, I think it will be found that just the reverse is true-Christ certainly taught, and taught most repeatedly, that there was no such thing in the moral world as magical transformations without previous preparation of the spirit. No wonder, he said, would transform a man who had not used the ordinary means at his disposal for the same end. . All Christ's teaching

was

that the divine grace in man has as much its regular and orderly methods as the divine life in physical nature. But then, in spite of all this, Christ claimed to give sudden succour both to the physical and moral life of men- to heal the sick without visible or gradual remedies, and to pardon sin and renew the divine life in the soul-without any necessary interval of external discipline or visible expiation. No doubt he did. But it would be a great mistake, I think, to suppose that in so doing he "suspended" any natural law. On the contrary, he was but infusing in a higher degree into the order of nature that predominating influence of a commanding personality which, in a much lower degree, we have plenty of evidence that other human beings, by virtue of their spiritual union with God, or of some high natural gift, have infused into it in other countries and ages of the world. I do not believe that 'miracles' are, or could be, suspensions' of natural laws. They are but the modifications of the results of those laws caused by the introduction into the agencies at work of the influence of controlling spirits of unusual power.

"But whatever miracles be, I think history shows a great amount of evidence that such events have Enthusiasm and fraud can

happened in all ages..

not reasonably be asked to account for so much evidence on this subject as really exists.

"I quite agree with those men of science who say that there is no difference in kind between any real divine answer to prayer and miracles. All divine answer to prayer must involve the infusion of some new influence into that chain of antecedents and consequents which would otherwise constitute human life. It seems to me, therefore, that all who really believe in the answer to prayer - should be quite ready to accept, or refuse to accept, an alleged miracle, according as the evidence for it is strong or weak." 1

1 R. H. Hutton, Essays Theological and Literary. I. Preface to 2nd ed., 1877.

CHAPTER XXVIII

TOUCHING FOR THE KING'S EVIL

THE atmosphere of the last three centuries has not been favourable to faith-healing; and we shall find it no longer as a general and accepted practice, but as a phenomenon which persisted here and there in the face of a growing scepticism. No doubt it was more general in the Eastern Church than in the Roman, and more general in the Roman Church than with us; but in so far as the modern spirit spread, faith-healing was relegated to the superstitious. Christianity itself was everywhere passing through a hard stage; men who no longer believed in the saints believed terribly in witches; hell was more thought of than heaven, and the salvation of the soul from the unspeakable torments was too urgent for much thought to be given to the salvation of the body. To our forefathers the typical Christian was he of the immortal Allegory, in flight from the City of Destruction, preoccupied with the one thought of how to save at any cost his own soul. Nor was the French Pascal less stern than the English Bunyan, though indeed he did believe in faith-healing.1

On the other hand the "broad-church" influences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 1 See Appendix I, p. 374.

were not, as they now are, in the direction of the divine-immanence, but in the precisely opposite direction: Deism was the creed of advanced men

the belief in a Deity remote, and cold, a Sultan in the sky, who, having once made this wretched world, watched it complacently from afar. And Deism easily toppled over into Atheism. The great achievement of the nineteenth century was that it rescued mankind from these two conceptions-the orthodox religion of fear and the latitudinarian religion of vacancy-which were mingled together in the creed of average conventional men, and still form the background of many minds.

Looking back, therefore, to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we should naturally expect to find faith-healing only in customs which carried on the older ideas through sheer conservatism, and in a few holy persons here and there who lived near enough to God for their originality to survive the spirit of their age.

And so it is. In England faith-healing continued through one custom which is supposed to have begun with Edward the Confessor - Touching for the King's Evil. James I wished to drop it as an outworn superstition, but was warned by his ministers that to do so would be to abate a prerogative of the Crown: so the rite continued as long as the Stuarts remained on the throne, and was still printed in the early part of George I's reign, copies of it being published in some Prayer Books between Charles I and the year 1719.2 All

1 The earliest known form is that used by Henry VII. 2 Pepys' Diary, ed. H. B. Wheatley, 1904, I, p. 182, n.

this was characteristic enough. Englishmen no longer believed in the efficacy of the saints, but they had a redoubled faith in that of the monarch; and the Church of England in the age of the Stuarts spent herself over the Divine right of kings.

We are not concerned to defend the belief that supernatural power emanated from royal hands, any more than it emanated from canonised bones; but those who held that belief no doubt were able to obtain spiritual help even through so grotesque a medium as James I. Like Moses in the old legend, they struck the rock and water gushed forth. It is strange that scientific men should have rested content with the superficial view that those who sought the King's touch were merely the victims of a superstition, while all the time they had in the Gospels the true explanation of all such phenomena the explanation which our Lord gave when he taught that it was men's faith that made them whole.

Certainly people went in great numbers to be touched for scrofula by the King; and they went because cures occurred. Burn says that no less than 92,107 persons received this imposition of hands between 1660 and 1682;1 and already, before the Restoration, Charles II had in one month touched 260 people at Breda, as well as others at other times and places abroad, and "it was not without success, since it was the experience that drew thither every day a great number of those diseased even from the most remote provinces of Germany."2 Nor was it

1 Burn, History of Parish Registers, 1862, p. 179. 2 Sir William Lower, Relation of the Voyage and Residence