A committee composed of eminent doctors and clergymen - including the Dean of Westminster, the Bishop of Stepney, Sir Douglas Powell, Sir J. Rickman Godlee - is sitting to consider the rationale and genuineness of reported cures. I was asked to give evidence and did so with pleasure. But I had to confess I knew nothing about spiritual - i.e. miraculous - cure except what I had read in Dr. Boissarie's ' Annals of Lourdes' and similar books. The evidence brought forward always seemed to me to fall just short of scientific proof of cure of organic disease.

I have read of ununited fractures of months' standing being rectified by twenty minutes immersion in the Grotto of Lourdes, and I have heard Father Gerrard, S.J., say he would go to the stake if required to prove the truth of such stories. Mr. Eccles asked me if I thought a hare-lip could be made normal by prayer or other spiritual means, and I replied that I couldn't conceive such a thing. Devout clergymen and doctors would say that God works through His agents and by natural laws, and it would be as reasonable to expect Him to make a chemical experiment turn out as the experimenter wished when, through carelessness or ignorance, the wrong reagents were used; as to expect Divine interference in sickness or injury brought about by man's defiance of natural laws. We must work on scientific lines, and, as we have seen in our own times scientific miracles achieved in the elimination and cure of tuberculosis, enteric, malarial fevers, etc., so our children may see nearly all diseases successfully dealt with, and preventive take the place of clinical medicine. ' Prayer and moral training are powerless to help the cretin, while thyroid extract tabloids will convert him into a normal and useful being.

No man by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature, but we can often add many inches to a boy who is too short to enter the navy by feeding him with thyroid.' 'Incantations and quinine will cure most fevers,' said an old priest, 'but don't forget the quinine.'

* British Medical Journal, May 24, 1913.