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Show SUPERSTITIOUS CURES. The Los Angeles Times last week enjoyed a loud laugh over the credulity of a Mexican peon Avho asked his priest for a few drops of the olive oil which burned before the Blessed Sacrament. He was suffering from a bad sprain and believed the sanctuary oil would help him. The Times indulges in-dulges in a loud guffaw and hints that only among ignorant Roman Catholics may be found examples of puch gross superstition. The Los Angeles paper is advertising its own ignorance, and had better "go slow' The Anglican Bishop of Bedford Protestant England is quite at home among his own people and knows them in sickness and health. In an article ar-ticle he contributes to the Church Times he gives some curious examples of the still prevalent superstition, super-stition, as to charms against sickness, among the rural and village population of his diocese. For I many years he labored in a country parish in I . Shropshire and the remedies believed to be effi- I , oaeious in many complaints were as wonderful as I ' the hoodoos of African fetichism, and absolutely I ' surprised him. I In case of whooping cough, for instance, a I ; mother would send her coughing child to a tow- I path of a canal to wait for a certain boat and 1 ask the captain of the boat who was a seventh J son to cure her. Another popular remedy was to pass an ailing child over and under a briar branch seven times; another horrible thing was to draw ihree yards of black ribbon through the body of a frog and wear it around a sore throat; and an- I other cure for the whooping cough was to make , i lie child breathe into a frog's mouth. It was also If-upposed that riding a piebald horse would charm away skin disease. The Bishop had seen a woman of his congregation professing to charm away a tumor on the lip of another woman with elder-pith elder-pith which was gathered at night under a full moon, making use at the same time of some words which were taught her by a witch. A farmer who had the toothache killed a gander and applied its liver to his cheek. These, the Bishop tells us, are only a few of the superstitions that had come under his notice in the comparatively small parish of Shropshire alone. Unless the Los Angeles Times man be an atheist he can't afford to throw stones at Catholic Mexico. If he be of the Protestant Episcopal church let him now take his medicine like a little man. |