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This book was prepared and edited by John MacPhilpin of Tuam and published in Dublin by M. H. Gill & Son in 1880. It reprints Tuam News reports on the apparition of the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist, which about twenty people saw on the south gable of Knock chapel, County Mayo, on 21 August 1879. It also gives the witnesses' official depositions, which a commission of priests appointed by the Archbishop of Tuam judged trustworthy. It lists cures recorded in Archdeacon Cavanagh's diary.
“Hill”15 pages
24 given is : "I do not believe they saw the Apparition." Very well. They were all deceived, then, without any fault on their part, or they conspired without cause. If deceived, there have been fifteen miracles instead of one wrought, for it is a wonderful and, indeed, a miraculous thing to make a person seriously believe he saw what he did not see, and to hold him to it for one hour, or two, or longer. No rational being could by human possibility be so deceived, and, above all, convinced rationally that the events occurred which, in point of fact (if he were deceived), never had occurred. And then you must multiply that deception by fifteen, for that number of rational, sensible men and women declare that they beheld the apparition, not for a moment, not in a loose, tran sient way, but in a settled manner for hours, so that they had time to come and go, to think and examine, to see the hands, eyes, and the minutest outline of the beings who stood before them. They endured cold, and rain, and wet, while looking at the vision they declare they saw, but which the man who does not credit the story says they did not see. His alterna tive is a far greater miracle in itself than that of the believer, for, in his case, it is simply one apparition, in the other, it was fifteen apparitions deceiving each of the rational beings who stood on looking at what had, according to their theory, no reality. If they conspired without cause, there was an additional miracle ; for, in matters of lying and deception, it is seldom or ever all can be at one in narrating the same events. Witness the two judges or elders whom the Prophet Daniel examined. Each told a different story when examined separately and apart, simply because each of the two was tell ing an untruth. Now, in the case of these fifteen witnesses, it is amazing that all of them and each ef them tell in sub stance the same event. How, supposing they were deceivers, and that they conspired, did each hit exactly on the same
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