More Miracles

image 1image 2image 3image 4cropped image 1

MORE MIRACLES.

Who will rashly assert that the age of miracles is past? Who will venture to say that these practical times will not furnish stories as marvellous as can be found in the annals of any preceeding age. The idea that the spread of education and enlightenment would tend to make unbelievers and increase or create a sceptical turn of mind is or ought to be, completely exploded. There never was more evidence of the existence of the marvellous and spiritual element among the people than in this so-called "age of material progress."

Brooklyn seems to be particularly blest with these evidences. Not long ago the community was all agog with the wonderful "Catholic Miracles" and the marvellous cures effected thereby. The Fathers, however, have gone, but their mantle has fallen on a layman, a Prussian named Lœwendahl, who has been curing people of divers desperate diseases by the laying on of hands, after the manner of Valentine Greatrakes and other individuals of similar pretensions.¹ Respectable people say they have been cured by the magnetic Prussian and no doubt they imagine so. It appears that he is most successful in curing nervous diseases. We should rather think so. Diseases that are seated in the mind always yield most readily to these quasi miraculous means. Pills and draughts are found more efficacious where the patient is seriously ill.

As long as the world lasts and human nature continues what it is, this element of credulity—always in readiness to swallow anything marvellous, the more incredible the better—will exert its influence over the masses, and impostors grow fat upon it.

---