807 
wlio untied it, and found it to be the identical ball which he 
had made in his youthful days for the purpose of curing the 
woman^s ague and paying his own bill/^* 
Many things are natural which might not be thought so at 
first sight. I have known a man cured of ague by the usual 
remedies, but, suffering from a relapse into all the symptoms 
brought on by a shock to the nervous system. 
I cannot dwell upon the nature of man, — tripartite, as I 
think it is, — body, soul, and s^nrit ; a view in which Mr. 
Eeynolds appears to agree (see page 154), further than to say 
that this certainly appears to be the doctrine of Scripture, in 
which I am happy to be able to agree, whilst acknowledging 
my dissidence not only from the painful nonsense, — of thought 
being connected with molecular changes in the brain, — but 
also from the notion that the action of the spirit in man is 
necessarily dependent on the bodily organs at all. When 
sight is withdrawn the sense of touch has become so exalted 
that a botanist could still distinguish plants by contact with 
the thin skin of the lip, aided by the tongue ; colours also 
have been in the same manner distinguished j and in a 
recent case which excited much attention in the medical 
world each sense as it was withdrawn seemed supplemented 
by some other.f 
All this is natural, but what are we to say to those cases in 
which the spirit when departing from the body makes itself 
known to those at a distance by impressions on the organs of 
sight or sound. { I should have thought it incredible, or at all 
events superhuman, that I should be able to converse with a 
friend at some miles distance with more ease than across my 
own table (if that friend be a little deaf) ; yet so it is, in 
these days of the telephone, and we all know there is nothing 
supernatural about it. 
From the teaching of Christ we must be led to understand 
that all things are possible to him that believeth,^^ and that 
many things, not only superhuman, but supernatural, may be 
natural to the new man. So St. Peter, that disciple whom we 
all feel so entirely one in nature and in all natural frailty with 
ourselves, walks on the waves, and even raises the dead, — of 
course, not without the special assistance of Divine power. 
* Quoted from the Penny Magazine for 1835. 
t See a paper on the “ Transference of Special Sense ” in the Journal of 
Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, vol. vii., pt. i., p. 37 ; also 
Biography of Mrs. Croad, Bristol. 
X The widely- published event connected with the lamented death of 
George Smith, B. A, Soc., will serve as one instance. 
