testimony of the alleged miraculous facts, have already- been enumerated. He calls in turn upon the witness of the church, of theologians, of missions, of the adversary, of experience, and of the healed. There is an almost too great completeness in this accumulation of sources of testi- mony. There is nevertheless observable a certain eclecti- cism in dealing with it. The testimony of the church, for instance, does not mean the testimony of the church speak- ing as an organized body — whether as a whole or in some one or other of its organized sections. It means the testi- mony of Christians of the past, the record of which is found in what is called "church history." It is a very eclectic "church history," however, which is appealed to. The testimony of the first three centuries is adduced, and partly that of the fourth. Then comes a sharp break, at the age of Constantine, at which time, as we have shown, really explicit evidence only begins. Later, it is true, un- der the caption of "The Testimony of Theologians," Augus- tine's opinion is cited — with what consistency we may judge when we observe that all the miracles of "the Apos- tate Church," which is said to have begun with the age of Constantine,40 are declared to be "the testimony of the Adversary," working counterfeit miracles, and only so bearing witness to the currency of the true. In this chap- ter on "The Testimony of the Church" we are carried over at once to the testimony of the Waldenses, Moravians, Huguenots, Covenanters, Friends, early Baptists and Methodists. With reference to these the remark is made that, in every revival of primitive faith, "we find a pro- fession of chaste and evangelical miracles." How far this description applies to the marvels it has professedly in view we must let the reader of the annals of those troubled movements himself decide. We think ourselves that a remark made by Gordon at an earlier point is far more applicable to them: when he spoke of the likelihood of every true upstirring of genuine emotion being accom-
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parried by more or less fanaticism which ought not to be permitted to cloud our judgment as to the genuineness of the emotion itself. The testimony of theologians is, natu- rally, a matter of opinion, while that of missions, experience, and of the healed themselves is only a further record of facts, artificially divided into these heads, which constitute in their totality the whole evidence before us. It is to the facts thus gathered that we are to give our attention.
What now are these facts? What is their nature? And what are we to think of them ? The first thing which strikes the observer, as he casts his eye over them, is that they stand sadly in need of careful sifting. What we are looking for is such facts as necessitate or at least suggest the assumption, in order to account for them, of the ''im- mediate action of God, as distinguished from His mediate action through natural laws." That is Gordon's own definition of miracle,41 and what is affirmed is that these facts argue miraculous action. The great body of the facts offered to us, however, argue nothing of the kind.
In many of them means are openly used, means which rank among the specifically best means known to medical science. This is the case, for example, with all the instances of cures made in the Faith-Houses. Who doubts that multitudes of the sick would find cure under the skilled and tireless nursing of a Dorothea Triidel, who was known to pass the whole day without food, utterly forgetting the claims of her body in devotion to her work ? 42 Who doubts that great physical benefit could be found by many in " the silence and retirement of the simple cure of Pastor Rein"? Doctor Weir Mitchell won fame as a physician through his "rest-cure." What medical man will not agree that good nursing and a quiet and restful state of body and mind are among the best of curative agents? The very existence of Faith-Houses, indeed, is the sufficient refutation of the doctrine of Faith-Healing which seeks support from them. By hypothesis a miraculous cure
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should be immediate, as in cause so in time — without de- lay as without means — on the exercise of simple faith. The existence of Faith-Hospitals is a standing proof that it is not immediate, either in cause or in time: that a place of retirement is helpful, and that good nursing has its reward. Faith-Houses may raise a protest against the methods of current medical practice, but they do so by setting up a particular method of practice of their own — not by intro- ducing miraculous healing as over against natural.