Or, take again any of our Lord’s miracles of healing.  There is no question at all that the power of mind over body is exceedingly great, and has never yet been thoroughly examined.  We know almost nothing of the extent of this power, of its laws, of its limits.  Marvellous recoveries often astonish the physician, and he cannot account for them except by supposing that in some way the powers of the mind have been roused to interfere with the working of the nervous system.  And some men, on the other hand, have died or their health has been shattered by mere imaginations.  Some men of note have attributed the recoveries claimed for homoeopathy to this cause.  Some have assigned to this cause the extraordinary cures that have been undeniably wrought at the shrines, or on sight or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints.  The different impostures that have on many occasions prevailed for a time and then lost their reputation and passed out of fashion, are generally supposed to have owed their short-lived success to the same obscure working of unknown natural laws.  They have been tested by their successes and their failures.  They have succeeded, and for a time continued to succeed; but at last they have ceased to work because faith in them for some reason or other has been shaken down.  Their falsehood has thus been detected; but nevertheless their genuine success for a time has been enough to show that they rested on a reality, and that reality seems to have consisted in the strange power of mind over body.  In this region all is at present unexamined; and all operations are tentative, and for that reason most are only successful for a time.  Now our Lord’s miracles are never tentative; that is not the character given to them either by friend or by foe.  Nor is there any instance recorded either by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not accomplished.  Nowhere is there any record given us by the assailants of the Gospel of any instance of His action parallel to the record given in the Acts of the Apostles of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew.  The accounts of his enemies charge Him with deceit, which is identical with saying that they did not believe Him.  But they do not ever charge Him with failure.  Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of His miracles of healing may have been the result of this power of mind over body which we are now considering.  It is possible that they may be due not to an interference with the uniformity of nature, but to a superiority in His mental power to the similar power possessed by other men.  Men seem to possess this power both over their own bodies and over the bodies of others in different degrees.  Some can influence other men’s bodies through their minds more; some less.  Possibly He may have possessed this power absolutely where others possessed it conditionally.  He may have possessed it without limit; others within limits.  If this were so, these acts of healing would not be miracles in the strictly scientific sense.