Dr. Charcot adds:  ’In every case, science is a foe to systematic negation, which the morrow may cause to melt away in the light of its new triumphs.’  The present ‘new triumph’ is a mere coincidence with the dicta of our Lord, ’Thy faith hath made thee whole....  I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.’  There are cures, as there are maladies, caused ’by idea.’  So, in fact, we had always understood.  But the point is that science, wherever it agrees with David Hume, is not a foe, but a friend to ‘systematic negation.’

A parallel case of a ‘miracle,’ the stigmata of St. Francis, was, of course, regarded by science as a fable or a fraud.  But, now that blisters and other lesions can be produced by suggestion, the fable has become a probable fact, and, therefore, not a miracle at all.[8] Mr. James remarks:  ’As so often happens, a fact is denied till a welcome interpretation comes with it.  Then it is admitted readily enough, and evidence quite insufficient to back a claim, so long as the Church had an interest in making it, proves to be quite sufficient for modern scientific enlightenment the moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby be claimed as a case of “hystero-epilepsy."’[9]

But the Church continues to have an interest in the matter.  As the class of facts which Hume declined to examine begins to be gradually admitted by science, the thing becomes clear.  The evidence which could safely convey these now admittedly possible facts, say from the time of Christ, is so far proved to be not necessarily mythical—­proved to be not incapable of carrying statements probably correct, which once seemed absolutely false.  If so, where, precisely, ends its power of carrying facts?  Thus considered, the kinds of marvellous events recorded in the Gospels, for example, are no longer to be dismissed on a priori grounds as ‘mythical.’  We cannot now discard evidence as necessarily false because it clashes with our present ideas of the possible, when we have to acknowledge that the very same evidence may safely convey to us facts which clashed with our fathers’ notions of what is possible, but which are now accepted.  Our notions of the possible cease to be a criterion of truth or falsehood, and our contempt for the Gospels as myths must slowly die, as ‘miracle’ after ‘miracle’ is brought within the realm of acknowledged law.  With each such admission the hypothesis that the Gospel evidence is mythical must grow weaker, and weaker must grow the negative certainty of popular science.

The occurrences which took place at and near the tomb of Paris were attested, as Hume truly avers, by a great body of excellent evidence.  But the wisdom which declined to make a judicial examination has deprived us of the best kind of record.  Analogous if not exactly similar events now confessedly take place, and are no longer looked upon as miraculous.  But as long as they were held to be miraculous, not to examine the evidence, said Hume, was the policy of