In this canvas is worked out a very delicate central intrigue, as in 'Dr.Pascal,' and around this are many little stories or subsidiary plots.

There is the story of the sick person who gets well, of the sick person who is not cured, and so on.

The philosophical idea which pervades the whole book is the idea of human suffering, the exhibition of the desperate and despairing sufferers who, abandoned by science and by man, address themselves to a higher Power in the hope of relief; as where parents have a dearly loved daughter dying of consumption, who has been given up, and for whom nothing remains but death.

A sudden hope, however, breaks in upon them: 'supposing that after all there should be a Power greater than that of man, higher than that of science.' They will haste to try this last chance of safety.

It is the instinctive hankering after the lie which creates human credulity.
"I will admit that I came across some instances of real cure.