THE HEALING OF MARY THEOBALD.

The following incident is related by her pastor, at Woburn, Mass., who, for three and a half years, was well acquainted with her physical condition, and who testified, in The Congregationalist, that no medicine, or physician’s aid or advice, was of any avail: 

“From the first of my acquaintance to the last, she had an unswerving confidence in her recovery.  Many times has she said to me:  ’I believe that I shall be well.  Jesus will raise me up.  I shall hear you preach some day.’

“But, in common with the friends who were watching her case, and with the physicians who had exhausted their skill upon her in vain, I had little or no hope for her.  It seemed to me that her life was to be one of suffering; that God was keeping her with us that we might have a heroic example of what His grace could enable one to bear and to become.

“A few days ago, I received from her lips the following statement of the origin and progress of her sickness:  ’My first sickness occurred when I was about sixteen years old.  This illness lasted for a year.  Indeed, I was never well again.  That sickness left me with a bad humor, which, for two years, kept me covered with boils.  When the boils disappeared, the trouble was internal.  Physicians feared a cancer.  For ten years, I was sick, more or less—­sometimes able to work, sometimes utterly prostrate.

“’My second severe illness began in the Autumn of 1871.  I had been failing for two years.  Then I was obliged to give up.  I was on the bed five months.  From this illness I never recovered so as to labor or walk abroad.  When not confined to my bed, I have been on the lounge, as you have known me.  No one can ever know the suffering which these years have brought me.’

“My acquaintance with her began in the Spring of 1873.  Several times since I have known her, she has been carried so low that we have thought her release near at hand; and, indeed, the general tendency has been downwards.  I recently asked an intelligent physician, who had attended her for a year or more, to give me the facts in her case.  He replied:  ’She is diseased throughout.  Her system is thoroughly soured.  It responds to nothing.  Almost every function is abnormal.  There is no help for her in medicine.’  Other physicians had tried their skill with the same result.  It was generally admitted by doctors, friends and family, that nothing more could be done for her.  While all saw only suffering and an early death in store for her, yet she confidently expected to be well, and her faith never waned.