But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart of the
Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after century,
inspiring every development of mercy, there came from those who
organized the Church which bears his name, and from those who afterward
developed and directed it, another stream of influence--a theology drawn
partly from prehistoric conceptions of unseen powers, partly from ideas
developed in the earliest historic nations, but especially from the
letter of the Hebrew and Christian sacred books.

The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in relation to the
cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there was a new and strong
evolution of the old idea that physical disease is produced by the
wrath of God or the malice of Satan, or by a combination of both, which
theology was especially called in to explain; secondly, there were
evolved theories of miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of
appeasing the Divine anger, or of thwarting Satanic malice.

Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the life of Jesus,
and the other in the reasonings of theologians, legends of miracles grew
luxuriantly. It would be utterly unphilosophical to attribute these as
a whole to conscious fraud. Whatever part priestcraft may have taken
afterward in sundry discreditable developments of them, the mass of
miraculous legends, Century after century, grew up mainly in good
faith, and as naturally as elms along water-courses or flowers upon the
prairie.

II. GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.

--THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.

Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all great
benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and devotees.
Throughout human history the lives of such personages, almost without
exception, have been accompanied or followed by a literature in
which legends of miraculous powers form a very important part--a part
constantly increasing until a different mode of looking at nature and
of weighing testimony causes miracles to disappear. While modern thought
holds the testimony to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as
worthless, it is very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings
who endow the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest
hold upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise such
influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or body are helped
or healed.

We have w