But mental states may help as well as harm the body. Mental expectancy facilitates cure in cases of sickness. The physician helps the patient by inspiring hope and courage. Imagination works wonders, especially in the case of nervous disorders. The diseases said to be cured by Christian Science are commonly of this sort. In every age fakirs, mesmerists, and quacks have availed themselves of these underlying mental forces. By inducing expectancy, imparting courage, rousing the paralyzed will, they have indirectly caused bodily changes which have been mistaken for miracle. Tacitus tells us of the healing of a blind man by the Emperor Vespasian. Undoubted cures have been wrought by the royal touch in England. Since such wonders have been performed by Indian medicine-men, we cannot regard them as having any specific Christian character, and when, as in the present case, we find them used to aid in the spread of false doctrine with regard to sin, Christ, atonement, and the church, we must class them with the “lying wonders” of which we are warned in _2 Thess. 2:9_. See Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 381-386; Buckley, Faith-Healing, and in Century Magazine, June, 1886:221-236; Bruce, Miraculous Element in Gospels, lecture 8; Andover Review, 1887:249-264. IV. Prophecy as Attesting a Divine Revelation. We here consider prophecy in its narrow sense of mere prediction, reserving to a subsequent chapter the consideration of prophecy as interpretation of the divine will in general. 1. _Definition._ Prophecy is the foretelling of future events by virtue of direct communication from God—a foretelling, therefore, which, though not contravening any laws of the human mind, those laws, if fully known, would not, without this agency of God, be sufficient to explain.