(iv) The healing of the nobleman’s son, of the centurion’s slave, and that of the Syrophœnician woman’s daughter stand by themselves as instances of ‘absent treatment.’ The strong impression wrought in the mind of the father, the master, the mother, respectively, is conveyed by a sort of telepathy to the mind of the patient. ‘Why herein,’ surely, is a marvellous thing for those who cannot accept our Lord’s claim to be the Son of Man in a unique sense--that He should thus have possessed, 2000 years ago, a knowledge of the mysterious processes of human nature which modern science is only now beginning to divine. It is in that fact that the ‘glory’ (Luke xiii. 17; John xi. 40), the ‘wonder’ (Matt. xxi. 15), the ‘strangeness’ (Luke v. 26) of the miracles of Christ consist. They are ‘works of power,’[68] ‘outcomings of that mighty power of God which was inherent in Christ,’[69] and which He exerted within a region of human nature then unexplored. We cannot ponder too deeply on that great saying of St. Augustine, ‘Portentum fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.’[70] Who shall attempt to lay down the laws which govern the operation of the spiritual upon the material? and still more to delimit the powers of the Personality and Will of Him, in whose name Apostles, Saints of the Church, and humble Christians unrecorded in history have wrought cures, which only a purblind scepticism can gainsay? [68] Matt. xi. 20; Luke xxiv. 19; Acts ii. 22, &c. [69] Abp. Trench, _Synonyms of New Testament_ (Art. xci.). [70] _De Civitate Dei_, xxi. 8; quoted by Dr. Sanday, _Life of Christ, &c._, viii., adding, ‘miracle is not really a breach of the order of nature; it is only an apparent breach of laws that we know, in obedience to other and higher laws that we do not know.’ THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING BY W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A. VICAR OF CHEDDAR AND PREBENDARY OF WELLS THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING BY W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A. The psychologists teach us that a man’s ‘self’ is a larger thing than the ‘me’ which, we might say, a child has in view when it puts out a hand to get a sweetmeat for itself. As Professor W. James says, ‘The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts--soul, body, and clothes--is more than a joke’; and he goes on to include in that self the man’s immediate family, his home, the property he has collected.[71] And then we think of Aristotle’s definition of man as a ‘political’ or social animal--the social self with its wider or narrower reach--for ‘properly speaking a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.’ [71] _Text Book of Psychology_, pp. 177, 178.