s of this remedy, none ever failed of receiving benefit
unless their little faith and credulity starved their merits. Some are
said to have been cured immediately on the very touch, others did not
so easily get rid of their swellings, until they were touched a second
time. Several cases are related, of persons who had been blind for
several weeks, and months, and obliged even to be led to Whitehall, yet
recovered their sight immediately upon being touched, so as to walk away
without any guide." So widely, at one period, was the belief diffused,
that, in the course of twelve years, nearly a hundred thousand persons
were touched by Charles the Second. Catholic divines; in disputes upon
the orthodoxy of their church, did not deny that the power had descended
to protestant princes;--Dr. Harpsfield, in his "Ecclesiastical History
of England," admitted it, and in Wiseman's words, "when Bishop Tooker
would make use of this Argument to prove the Truth of our Church,
Smitheus doth not thereupon go about to deny the Matter of fact; nay,
both he and Cope acknowledge it." "I myself," says Wiseman, the best
English surgical writer of his day,[Edinburgh Medical and Surgical
Journal, vol. iii. p. 103.]--"I my self have been a frequent Eye-witness
of many hundred of Cures performed by his Majesties Touch alone, without
any assistance of Chirurgery; and those, many of them such as had tired
out the endeavours of able Chirurgeons before they came hither. It were
endless to recite what I myself have seen, and what I have received
acknowledgments of by Letter, not only from the severall parts of this
Nation, but also from Ireland, Scotland, Jersey, Garnsey. It is needless
also to remember what Miracles of this nature were performed by the very
Bloud of his late Majesty of Blessed memory, after whose decollation
by the inhuman Barbarity of the Regicides, the reliques of that were
gathered on Chips and in Handkerchieffs by the pious Devotes, who could
not but think so great a suffering in so honourable and pious a Cause,
would be attended by an extraordinary assistance of God, and some more
then ordinary a miracle: nor did their Faith deceive them in this there
point, being so many hundred that found the benefit of it." [Severall
Chirurgicall Treatises. London.1676. p. 246.]

Obstinate and incredulous men, as he tells us, accounted for these cures
in three ways: by the journey and change of air the patients obtained
in coming to London; by th