ality by Parliament. In one case the King saw a patient in the crowd,
too far off to be touched, and simply said, "God bless thee and grant
thee thy desire"; whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours
disappeared from the patient's body and appeared in the bottle of
medicine which he held in his hand; at least so says Dr. John Nicholas,
Warden of Winchester College, who declares this of his own knowledge to
be every word of it true.

But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous gift is found
in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly cynical debauchee who
ever sat on the English throne before the advent of George IV. He
touched nearly one hundred thousand persons, and the outlay for gold
medals issued to the afflicted on these occasions rose in some years
as high as ten thousand pounds. John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his
Majesty and to St. Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works
on surgery and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the
touch of this monarch; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an entire
book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, "I myself have been
frequent witness to many hundreds of cures performed by his Majesty's
touch alone without any assistance of chirurgery, and these many of
them had tyred out the endeavours of able chirurgeons before they came
thither." Yet it is especially instructive to note that, while in no
other reign were so many people touched for scrofula, and in none were
so many cures vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of
that disease: the bills of mortality show this clearly, and the reason
doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural for scientific
means of cure. This is but one out of many examples showing the havoc
which a scientific test always makes among miracles if men allow it to
be applied.

To James II the same power continued; and if it be said, in the words
of Lord Bacon, that "imagination is next of kin to miracle--a working
faith," something else seems required to account for the testimony
of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the royal touch upon babes in their
mothers' arms. Myth-making and marvel-mongering were evidently at work
here as in so many other places, and so great was the fame of these
cures that we find, in the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to enable
him to make the voyage to England in order th