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This is an 1880 book, The Apparitions and Miracles at Knock, prepared and edited by John MacPhilpin of Tuam and published in Dublin by M. H. Gill and Son. The Internet Archive holds a Google scan of the Harvard College Library copy. It reprints Tuam News accounts and the official depositions of eye-witnesses to the apparition of 21 August 1879 on the sacristy gable of Knock Church, County Mayo. It argues that natural light could not have caused the apparition and lists cures recorded in Archdeacon Cavanagh's diary.
“Hill”15 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
two hours, is a thing quite impossible to comprehend. A person can understand how one could be deceived even with his or her eyes open, and the senses quite alive to all things else around and about; but how fifteen could be deceived or could conspire, differing, as they did, in age, state, and condition, is something as marvellous in the moral world as the Apparition itself is in the order of material events. One of three conclusions must be come to by any sensible and rational being who weighs the evidence: Either the Apparition was a reality; or, it never took place; and all the fifteen witnesses have conspired without cause, and have been deceivers; or they all of one accord innocently imagined they beheld what they never saw. Which of the three is the easier to credit: (1) that they saw it; or (2) imagined they saw it; or (3) concocted the whole thing, and were deceivers? The non-Catholic affirms, "there was no such thing as an apparition;" "it is all a hoax." So, too, says the incredulous Catholic; and, mind you, very few learned Catholics yet give any credit to the events that have been narrated. This is fair. It is natural that the people should doubt. It is even right that they should doubt, for every story that one hears ought not to be readily credited. And it always happens that those who doubt longest, like St. Thomas the Apostle, are those who are, in matters of truth, the firmest supporters afterwards of that which they are certain is true. Well, then, in respect to the non-Catholic section of the community and of the Catholics who do not give credit to the story or narration of the first Apparition, one could say: You must $ (a)$ either believe that the apparition did de facto take place, account for its appearance as you will; or $ (b)$, that fifteen quiet, rational people, while in their senses, and while awake, were deceived; or that, worse still $ (c)$, they were rogues and cheats prepared quite well enough to combine. The reply
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 91 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.