cures which
Christ effected through others without being present himself. Here
belongs perhaps the cure of the servant of the centurion in Capernaum or
the cure of the daughter of the woman of Canaan. "And when he had called
unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean
spirits to cast them out and to heal all manner of sickness and all
manner of disease." The Acts give us the full details of how Peter and
Paul cured the lame and how special miracles were performed by their
hands. No doubt this belief in the curative effect of the disciples and
their successors fills the first centuries after Christ. Eusebius tells
us how they healed the sick by laying on of hands. The forms were
frequently changing through the history of Christianity but the essence
remains the same. Sometimes more emphasis is laid on the personal factor
of the priest, sometimes more on the sacred origin of the symbol as in
the case of the relics, sometimes more on prayer and godly works, but it
is always the religious belief which cures. Typical are the therapeutic
wonders of Francis de Assisi. He banishes devils, cures gout, lameness,
and blindness. The traditional means of suggestion, prayer and the
laying on of hands, had in the meantime been supplemented by the sign of
the cross which the church had added. Moreover whatever he had only
touched became a remedy for the sick. Protestantism brought no change in
this respect. Martin Luther writes: "The physicians consider in the
diseases only the natural causes from which a disease results and want
to remove them by their medicines, and they are quite right in it. But
they do not see that the devil often sends to one a disease which has no
natural causes. Therefore there must exist a higher medicine, namely,
the religious belief and the prayer through which the spiritual medicine
can be found in the word of God."

The broad undercurrent of religious cures, especially in the Catholic
Church and in the Greek Church, but with fewer symbols also outside of
them, has up to the present time never ceased to flow. But independent
of it the therapeutic belief has again and again been focused on certain
individuals or certain sects or certain schools, in the midst of the
steady progress of scientific medicine and sometimes synthesizing the
religious claims with new-fashioned scholarly ideas. In the seventeenth
century, for instance, the Irish nobleman Greatrakes became a famous
center of attr