magnetism: and the report of the French physicians upon that mysterious
remedy is very applicable to the present consideration, viz. that the
pretenders to the art, by working upon the imaginations of their
patients, were frequently able to produce convulsions; that convulsions
so produced are amongst the most powerful, but, at the same time, most
uncertain and unmanageable applications to the human frame which can be
employed.

Circumstances which indicate this explication, in the case of the
Parisian miracles, are the following:

1. They were tentative. Out of many thousand sick, infirm, and diseased
persons who resorted to the tomb, the professed history of the miracles
contains only nine cures.

2. The convulsions at the tomb are admitted.

3. The diseases were, for the most part, of that sort which depends upon
inaction and obstruction, as dropsies, palsies, and some tumours.

4. The cures were gradual; some patients attending many days, some several
weeks, and some several months.

5. The cures were many of them incomplete.

6. Others were temporary. (The reader will find these particulars
verified in the detail, by the accurate inquiries of the present bishop
of Sarum, in his Criterion of Miracles, p. 132, et seq.)

So that all the wonder we are called upon to account for is, that out of
an almost innumerable multitude which resorted to the tomb for the cure
of their complaints, and many of whom were there agitated by strong
convulsions, a very small proportion experienced a beneficial change in
their constitution, especially in the action of the nerves and glands.

Some of the cases alleged do not require that we should have recourse to
this solution. The first case in the catalogue is scarcely
distinguishable from the progress of a natural recovery. It was that of
a young man who laboured under an inflammation of one eye, and had lost
the sight of the other. The inflamed eye was relieved, but the blindness
of the other remained. The inflammation had before been abated by
medicine; and the young man, at the time of his attendance at the tomb,
was using a lotion of laudanum. And, what is a still more material part
of the case, the inflammation, after some interval, returned. Another
case was that of a young man who had lost his sight by the puncture of
an awl, and the discharge of the aqueous humour through the wound. The
sight, which had been gradually returning, was much improved during his
visit to