The difficulty is obvious. If our Lord was merely a faith healer, the results of long and laborious investigations into many faith-healing systems, all presenting very much the same features both in methods of treatment and effects, justify us in assuming that the number of cures would have been strictly limited. ‘But then, quickly enough, would follow the discovery that the powers of healing were available not for all, but only for a small and limited group of disorders; for in any casual collection of sick people, though there might be perhaps here one and here another suitable patient for a faith-healing exhibition, the majority would be unsuitable. What, then, of the failures? ‘The difficulty here referred to has not been wholly overlooked, and it is worth while to notice how the attempt has been made to meet it. “Did a kind of instinct (asks Dr. Abbott) tell Him that the restoration of a lost limb was not like the cure of a paralytic, not one of the works prepared for Him by His Father?” and again, “Experience and some kind of intuition may have enabled Him to distinguish those cases which He could heal from those (a far more numerous class) which He could not.” ‘The suggestion would not commend itself to a medical reader as a very happy way out of the difficulty. The naïve supposition that in cases of disease which require unusually minute and scientific investigation diagnosis was made “by a kind of instinct” or “some kind of intuition” is quite on a par with the innocent conception of the nature of diseases of the nervous system which Dr. Abbott shows elsewhere. Dr. Abbott would hesitate to allow that Jesus had a kind of instinct to guide Him safely concerning the Davidic origin of a psalm or the date of the taking of Jerusalem. Why should he imagine that he was less likely to be at fault in the presence of equally difficult problems of another kind? The assumption of an infallible capacity for discrimination, which could arrive at correct conclusions without the use of any of the methods and appliances of scientific medicine, is merely to substitute one kind of “supernaturalism” for another. A miraculous faculty of diagnosis is no easier of acceptance than a miraculous cure. A “kind of instinct” is an absurd supposition.’ Dr. Ryle then examines in detail certain of the healing miracles as related by the Evangelists. The result is to leave the intelligent reader in no doubt that in nine out of ten of the cases of ‘paralysis’ brought to Him, our Lord would have been, on the ‘neurotic’ hypothesis, no more likely to effect a cure than (to take Dr. Abbott’s example) in ‘the restoration of a lost limb.’ His clear account of the case of the man with the withered hand, which the non-medical reader will be able to follow without difficulty, is worth quoting in full.