That these four witnesses really were present at the time these operations were performed, we have no proof. Luke says Christ cures blindness by touch; John makes him use spit and clay. We are not told that he was trying experiments. Anyway, every operation was successful. Raising people from the dead was equally successful. Why should we wonder that such miracles could be performed among the lower classes, rude, uneducated, and poor? They were ready to believe any kind of plausible deception; and it was among this class that he found his adherents. These performances called miracles are supposed to have happened nearly two thousand years ago. At that time the masses were not to be compared to the masses of to-day in education, understanding, or in the progress made in every branch of art, science, literature, mechanics, etc. The church Christianity has also progressed somewhat, and there can be no possible excuse for the priests of to-day affirming these pretended cures of Christ. They ought to know that the notions of these things are due to feebleness of intellect in the uncultured brain, to the lack of understanding and the gullibility of the masses. Christ and his disciples were as ignorant as the masses concerning medicine or the healing art. They knew absolutely nothing about it. At 325 A.D., later 318, fathers of the then existing Christian organizations approved of the entire contents. Nay, a large part of it may have been manufactured by them. At this day there is no reason that men should not know better. Every man, whether priest or layman, ought to understand that so-called miraculous cures can be performed only by men, priests or others, that premeditatedly, with intent, cheat, swindle, and defraud some portion of the public, in consequence of the ignorance of the one, and the superior knowledge, shrewdness, and cunning of the other. It is a flagrant abuse of authority, a miserable condition of our laws, a stupendous piece of bigotry, an outrage, that a man can be punished for speaking the truth, and it is an actual miracle that people are still so wonderfully stupid as to believe in the scandalous deception of the healing qualities of an old rag, a coat, pretended to have belonged to Christ or some one else. Recently we read in the daily paper, the Sun: "Berlin, Sept. 26.--In Treves, Herr Reichar has been sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment for ridiculing the holy coat and for attacking the Roman Catholic prelates because they encouraged the people to believe that it had healing qualities. His publisher, Herr Sonnenburg, was sentenced to three weeks' imprisonment. The chief charge against them was blasphemy." Even in this city, some miserable cheat or cheats attempted to perpetrate the same sort of scoundrelism in one of the Catholic churches.