A Modern Healer.--A typical instance of the really marvelous power of mental influence over the minds of sufferers from many kinds of ills, is found in the career of the well-known Father Kneipp. For more than twenty-five years he had attracted the attention of Europe, and had made the little town of Woerishofen well known all over the world because of the cures effected there by him. The exactly proper phrase is effected _by him_ because it is clear to anyone who has studied the therapeutic methods he employed, that it was not these, or at least not these alone, that enabled him to cure so many ailments which had resisted the efforts of some of the best physicians in Europe. It was his magnetic personality which won patients to the persuasion that they must get better because he said so, and then to the following out of certain very simple natural rules of life, and certain quite as simple remedial measures, which acted as alteratives and enabled patients to tap reservoirs of vitality, of which they themselves were unconscious, but which, supplying energies to overcome tendencies to various symptomatic conditions, brought about cures. {73} Pfarrer Kneipp had himself suffered from consumption, had been practically given up and then, as is the case of many another, had taken himself in hand, had secured much more outdoor air than before, and more abundant nutrition, until gradually his ailment was overcome. It is true that he used various hydrotherapeutic measures, some of them, as he confessed afterwards, to an excess, both as regards the temperature of water and the length of the application of it, that might have seriously hurt him if he had been less robust, but it was not so much his hydrotherapy as his own determination to get better and to live a little closer to nature that led to his cure. Then he became the apostle of cold water and of many natural remedial measures, and as a consequence, healer of all forms of ills in the many thousands who flocked to consult him in the little South German town. He made his patients get up early in the morning, get out in the air shortly after rising, the excuse, or, as he declared it, the reason being that they were to walk with bare feet in the dewy grass. After this he had them eat heartily of simple food, of such variety and in such quantity as relieved them of constipation, made them use water, internally and externally, in abundance, and after a time, sent most of them on their way rejoicing that they had been cured from chronic ills.