A Last Word About Christian Science. 



17? 



teenth and seventeenth centuries. I refer to the "weapon-ointment " 

 and the "sympathetic powder " cures. The " weapon ointment " was 

 nsed in healing wounds, but instead of being applied to the wound 

 itself, was applied to the weapon which caused it. The ingredients 

 were various — human fat and blood, moss from dead men's skulls, 

 bull's blood and fat, etc. The wound was washed and bound up, and 

 the weapon was then smeared with the ointment, bound up and laid 

 away. The ointment would "cure at a distance." The " sympathetic 

 powder " was a similar sort of remedy. A solution of the powder was 

 made, into which the wounded man's blood-st;ai;od garments were 

 immersed, the wound itself being then washed, bandaged, laid at rest, 

 and abstinence enjoined on the patient. The powder, like the oint- 

 ment, cured at a distance. 



St. Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland, healed the sick, the lame, 

 the blind, and in thirty-three instances, it is said, raised the dead. 

 Other saints in the Church of Rome have similar records. (See Dub- 

 lin Review, October, 1880.) 



"King's Evil," a scrofulous disease, was for many centuries pro- 

 fessedly cured by the touch of the Kings of England and France. 

 The practice began in the time of King Edward the Confessor 

 (1043-66). Charles II. of England (1660-84) carried the practice to the 

 greatest extreme of any English monarch, having "touched" nearly 

 100,000 patients during his twenty-five years' reign. It was last em- 

 ployed in England by Queen Anne (1703-15), Dr. Samuel Johnson 

 having been when a boy one of her patients. Louis XVI. of France 

 performed the ceremony as late as 1775. The efficacy of the remedy 

 was such that Dr. Carr mentions as having been healed the full num- 

 ber touched by Charles II. It will probably be admit tod by all that 

 Charles II., one of England's most profligate kings, was not a very 

 likely person to have been made the chosen vessel for any supposed 

 spiritual powers. 



At Lourdes, France, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was seen at 

 a certain grotto, in the year 1858, and since then Lourdes has been a 

 sacred place to a large portion of the Christian church. Thousands 

 have gone thither to bathe in its waters and receive miraculous heal- 

 ln g- The recorded cases of well-authenticated cures are almost num- 

 berless. 



At Knock, in the west of Ireland, in the summer of 1879, there 

 *as seen another apparition of the Virgin, and this place subse- 

 quently became the resort of great numbers of pilgrims in quest of 

 he alth, and the scene of numerous cures, caused by using the white- 

 wash or cement from the walls of the chapel where the vision was seen. 



