at he may be healed by the
royal touch.

The change in the royal succession does not seem to have interfered with
the miracle; for, though William III evidently regarded the whole
thing as a superstition, and on one occasion is said to have touched
a patient, saying to him, "God give you better health and more sense,"
Whiston assures us that this person was healed, notwithstanding
William's incredulity.

As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his Art of Surgery, relates
that several cases of scrofula which had been unsuccessfully treated
by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard, sergeant-surgeon to her Majesty,
yielded afterward to the efficacy of the Queen's touch. Naturally does
Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History, say regarding these cases that
to dispute them "is to come to the extreme of scepticism, to deny our
senses and be incredulous even to ridiculousness." Testimony to the
reality of these cures is indeed overwhelming, and a multitude of most
sober scholars, divines, and doctors of medicine declared the evidence
absolutely convincing. That the Church of England accepted the doctrine
of the royal touch is witnessed by the special service provided in the
Prayer-Book of that period for occasions when the King exercised this
gift. The ceremony was conducted with great solemnity and pomp: during
the reading of the service and the laying on of the King's hands, the
attendant bishop or priest recited the words, "They shall lay their
hands on the sick, and they shall recover"; afterward came special
prayers, the Epistle and Gospel, with the blessing, and finally his
Majesty washed his royal hands in golden vessels which high noblemen
held for him.

In France, too, the royal touch continued, with similar testimony to
its efficacy. On a certain Easter Sunday, that pious king, Louis XIV,
touched about sixteen hundred persons at Versailles.

This curative power was, then, acknowledged far and wide, by Catholics
and Protestants alike, upon the Continent, in Great Britain, and in
America; and it descended not only in spite of the transition of the
English kings from Catholicism to Protestantism, but in spite of
the transition from the legitimate sovereignty of the Stuarts to the
illegitimate succession of the House of Orange. And yet, within a
few years after the whole world held this belief, it was dead; it had
shrivelled away in the growing scientific light at the dawn of the
eighteenth century.(318)

(318) Fo