led the crooked woman. He
said to her, "Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity," and he laid
his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she
glorified God.

Look where we will, we find the hand in time and history, working,
building, inventing, bringing civilization out of barbarism. The hand
symbolizes power and the excellence of work. The mechanic's hand, that
minister of elemental forces, the hand that hews, saws, cuts, builds, is
useful in the world equally with the delicate hand that paints a wild
flower or moulds a Grecian urn, or the hand of a statesman that writes a
law. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of thee." Blessed
be the hand! Thrice blessed be the hands that work!

THE POWER OF TOUCH

IV

THE POWER OF TOUCH

SOME months ago, in a newspaper which announced the publication of the
"Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind," appeared the following
paragraph:

"Many poems and stories must be omitted because they deal with sight.
Allusion to moonbeams, rainbows, starlight, clouds, and beautiful
scenery may not be printed, because they serve to emphasize the blind
man's sense of his affliction."

That is to say, I may not talk about beautiful mansions and gardens
because I am poor. I may not read about Paris and the West Indies
because I cannot visit them in their territorial reality. I may not
dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a
venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound whose
meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy. This hazardous game is
half the delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow as I read of
splendours which the eye alone can survey. Allusions to moonbeams and
clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction: they carry my soul
beyond affliction's narrow actuality.

Critics delight to tell us what we cannot do. They assume that blindness
and deafness sever us completely from the things which the seeing and
the hearing enjoy, and hence they assert we have no moral right to talk
about beauty, the skies, mountains, the song of birds, and colours. They
declare that the very sensations we have from the sense of touch are
"vicarious," as though our friends felt the sun for us! They deny _a
priori_ what they have not seen and I have felt. Some brave doubters
have gone so far even as to deny my existence. In order, therefore, that
I may know that I exist, I resort to Descartes's metho