8 1 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



doubt, and the very existence of the controversy shows that nothing 

 of the sort exists." 



Hereupon the Archbishop of Westminster, looking at Mr. Stephen 

 with a benign smile, said : Mr. Stephen's investigations into the evi- 

 dence of the interference of unseen agents in human affairs are hardly 

 on a par with some of those undertaken by the Church to which I be- 

 long. In canonizing, or even beatifying those who are lost to us, the 

 Holy See has long been accustomed to go into the evidence of such 

 events as those to which Mr. Stephen has just referred, and that with 

 a disposition to pick holes in the evidence, which, if he will allow me 

 to say so, could hardly be surpassed even by so able a sifter of evi- 

 dence as Mr. Stephen himself. Nor is it indeed necessary to go into 

 the archives of these laborious and most skeptically conducted investi- 

 gations. If there were but that predisposition among Protestants to 

 believe in the evidence of the unseen which Dr. "Ward desired to see, 

 there would, I am convinced, be many believers in miracles of the 

 most astounding kind, and of miracles that have happened in our own 

 time, many within the last year. Let those who choose, for instance, 

 look into the evidence of the most astonishing cure of varicose veins 

 which took place only last year in the south of France a malady of 

 thirty years' standing, and of steady progress throughout that time, 

 attested on the positive evidence of French physicians, who had them- 

 selves repeatedly seen and prescribed for the patient. Yet they ad- 

 mitted that all they could do would be at most to alleviate his suffer- 

 ings by the application of mechanical pressure and they nevertheless 

 declared the cure to have been effected in a single night, the only new 

 condition having been the believing application of the Lourdes water 

 to the body of the sufferer. Here is a case where all Mr. Fitzjames 

 Stephen's conditions are satisfied to the full. I do not, however, ap- 

 prehend that Mr. Stephen will sift the evidence, or even regard it as 

 worth his serious attention. He has hardly assigned sufficient force to 

 that strong predisposition to incredulity which is so widely spread at 

 this moment in the Protestant world, a predisposition which I can not 

 entirely reconcile with Mr. Bagehot's very striking remarks on the 

 universal credulousness of the natural man. Perhaps, however, there 

 may be such credulousness where there is no prejudice, and yet in- 

 credulity still more marked where there is. I have been a careful ob- 

 server of the attitude of Protestants in relation to the controversy 

 between the natural and supernatural. I have seen its growth. I 

 have watched its development. I am persuaded that Mr. Stephen is 

 quite wrong in supposing that the matter can be settled as one of evi- 

 dence alone. You must first overcome that violent prejudice in your 

 minds which prevents you from vouchsafing even a glance at the evi- 

 dence we should have to offer you. But I will, if the society permits 

 me, leave that part of the subject, and return to the principal question 

 before us the impossibility of proving the uniformity of Nature from 



