the learned doctors of the Jewish law considered a sinner, and, as
such, very unlikely to have been endowed with a divine gift of healing.
They visited the patient repeatedly, and evidently teased him with their
questions about the treatment, and their insinuations about the young
man, until he lost his temper. At last he turned sharply upon them:
"Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that,
whereas I was blind, now I see."

This is the answer that always has been and always will be given by most
persons when they find themselves getting well after doing anything, no
matter what,--recommended by anybody, no matter whom. Lord Bacon, Robert
Boyle, Bishop Berkeley, all put their faith in panaceas which we should
laugh to scorn. They had seen people get well after using them. Are we
any wiser than those great men? Two years ago, in a lecture before the
Massachusetts Historical Society, I mentioned this recipe of Sir Kenelm
Digby for fever and ague: Pare the patient's nails; put the parings in a
little bag, and hang the bag round the neck of a live eel, and place him
in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will recover.

Referring to this prescription in the course of the same lecture, I
said: "You smiled when I related Sir Kenehn Digby's prescription, with
the live eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets,
would there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut,
carried about as a cure for rheumatism?" Nobody saw fit to empty his or
her pockets, and my question brought no response. But two months ago
I was in a company of educated persons, college graduates every one of
them, when a gentleman, well known in our community, a man of superior
ability and strong common-sense, on the occasion of some talk arising
about rheumatism, took a couple of very shiny horse-chestnuts from his
breeches-pocket, and laid them on the table, telling us how, having
suffered from the complaint in question, he had, by the advice of a
friend, procured these two horse-chestnuts on a certain time a year or
more ago, and carried them about him ever since; from which very day he
had been entirely free from rheumatism.

This argument, from what looks like cause and effect, whether it be so
or not, is what you will have to meet wherever you go, and you need not
think you can answer it. In the natural course of things some thousands
of persons must be getting well or better of slig