“In this instance Mrs. Gamp has a good deal of reason on her side, and it is not unlikely that her explanation may have its foundation in fact. The uneducated mind has often made discoveries by observing and comparing this sort of facts which scientific men have after much scoffing been compelled to admit are correct statements of natural phenomena.
“For instance, in the case of the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi, all the scientific men for many years put the whole business down to imposture, if they took the trouble to consider it seriously at all. Now they are compelled to recognise that it is a fact that in highly nervous temperaments the concentration of the mind for a length of time on one engrossing idea, such as the wounds of Christ in the hands and feet, will produce just such a condition of the parts in question on the body of the absorbed individual, as is recorded of St. Francis. The influence of the mind upon the body is even yet only very partially understood. Mrs. Gamp, in the case you allude to, has my sympathy. Pray remember that our great Paracelsus, the father of our modern scientific medicine, derived much of his valuable information on treatment from the unlettered peasantry of the countries in which he travelled, and of whom he was not too proud to learn.”
“That is true, and I saw the other day that a layman of Vienna has discovered a method of treatment for the cure of that puzzling and intractable disease, writer’s cramp, which has been recognised by the physicians of Vienna as affording the only really good results they know of. But you are wandering rather wide of our argument. We started from the evidences of design as shown in the human hand, and went on to consider the question of a great First Cause. Paley’s argument from the watch might have been all very well for his time, but is of little force now, because you see where it lands you; it makes your designer—your watchmaker—responsible for all the imperfections as well as the excellencies. I see a watch lying by the road-side, and at once say it must have had a maker. Very well; it is a bad time-keeper—gains one day, loses the next, and is a generally shabby bit of workmanship. So much the worse for the watchmaker. Now, take the human eye. Helmholtz said, as an optical instrument it was so defective, that had such a piece of workmanship been sent to him by any optician, he should have forthwith forfeited his custom. If you persist in using the design argument after Paley, you make your Omnipotent Designer responsible for all the evil, the disease, the misery that is in the world. Here is the hand with all its wonders. ‘Behold the all-wise, all-powerful Creator,’ say you. Good. But there are scarlet fever, lunacy, cancer. How about your all-wise, all-powerful Creator now?
“Oh, if you would but read your Browning! Hear what he says:—
“‘I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,
Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve,
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of man—how else?—