to the cures wrought by relics, and at the tombs of saints.  The boasted efficacy of the king’s touch, upon which Mr. Hume lays some stress, falls under the same description.  Nothing is alleged concerning it which is not alleged of various nostrums, namely, out of many thousands who have used them, certified proofs of a few who have recovered after them.  No solution of this sort is applicable to the miracles of the Gospel.  There is nothing in the narrative which can induce, or even allow, us to believe, that Christ attempted cures in many instances, and succeeded in a few; or that he ever made the attempt in vain.  He did not profess to heal everywhere all that were sick; on the contrary, he told the Jews, evidently meaning to represent his own case, that, “although many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land, yet unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow:”  and that “many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet, and none of them was cleansed saving Naaman the Syrian.” (Luke iv. 25.) By which examples he gave them to understand, that it was not the nature of a Divine interposition, or necessary to its purpose, to be general; still less to answer every challenge that might be made, which would teach men to put their faith upon these experiments.  Christ never pronounced the word, but the effect followed.*

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One, and only one, instance may be produced in which the disciples of Christ do seem to have attempted a cure, and not to have been able to perform it.  The story is very ingenuously related by three of the evangelists. (Matt. xvii. 14.  Mark ix. 14.  Luke ix. 33.) The patient was afterwards healed by Christ himself; and the whole transaction seems to have been intended, as it was well suited, to display the superiority of Christ above all who performed miracles in his name, a distinction which, during his presence in the world, it might be necessary to inculcate by some such proof as this. _________

It was not a thousand sick that received his benediction, and a few that were benefited; a single paralytic is let down in his bed at Jesus’s feet, in the midst of a surrounding multitude; Jesus bid him walk, and he did so. (Mark ii. 3.) A man with a withered hand is in the synagogue; Jesus bid him stretch forth his hand in the presence of the assembly, and it was “restored whole like the other.” (Matt. xii. 10.) There was nothing tentative in these cures; nothing that can be explained by the power of accident.

We may observe, also, that many of the cures which Christ wrought, such as that of a person blind from his birth; also many miracles besides cures, as raising the dead, walking upon the sea, feeding a great multitude with a few loaves and fishes, are of a nature which does not in anywise admit of the supposition of a fortunate experiment.