But, it may be said, strange healings do take place under religious influences; and this is true. And at no time in history were such miraculous cures more frequent and wonderful than in the temples of Aesculapius or of Serapis. Modern cures, whether of the Eddyites or at Lourdes, or the like elsewhere, when compared with those of the Roman Empire fall into insignificance. Now a careful study of all reported cures of this miraculous or miraculoid kind, a study illustrated for us many years ago by Charcot, proved to him, and proves to the expert observers of to-day, that they all--palsies, convulsions and the rest, often inveterate cases--are and have been cures of one disease, and of one only, namely hysteria; a malady which in its protean manifestations mocks all and any particular diseases. I say this of the genuine cases; but the majority of such wonders recorded turn out on inquiry (like the ‘Grimsby’ case) to be grossly exaggerated or wholly false. The ‘miraculous cures’ then, so far as they are genuine, are cures by suggestion: they take their place with cures of the same kind of disorder by panic, such as an alarm of fire; by ‘hypnotism,’ or by any other over-mastering impression which startles or transports the balance of the bodily functions from one centre of equilibrium to another higher and more stable one. So much for the ‘miracles’; which owe nothing to any sacerdotal magic, and to the physician are part of a familiar experience, and of a familiar interpretation. But giving up the hysterical cases--which, by the way, is to give up a good deal--and admitting that disease is in the body a material thing, and one not properly matter for the pleading of prayer, except in the spiritual sense of submission to the Divine order, between these positions is there a sphere in which spiritual influences--whether by a clergyman or a Biblewoman or a gentle friend--may so infuse peace and confidence into a sick man as to promote even in the body a renewal, a conversion, or an economy of energy which should make for recovery? Certainly; and here, I think, is the restricted, if still important, sphere of religion as medical. To consider this aspect of the matter we must go back for a moment to certain principles. From the letters of Teresa--that noble saint--we may learn much of the greatest value to us in the present inquiry. We may learn from her to distrust the ‘ecstasies and melancholies’ which--as she said--were ‘the perils of conventual life’; she roundly denounced all that ‘letting one’s self go, outside the control of reason,’ which has its origin in ‘sick brains.’