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     The attack on the life of President McKinley inaugurates the silly season among the professed believers in the efficacy of prayer. Even the somewhat sporty mayor of New York is affected, and on Saturday he issued a proclamation directing citizens to go to church last Sunday and pray for Mr. McKinley’s recovery. And yet President McKinley will owe whatever of life he may hereafter enjoy to the last quarter of a century’s advance in surgery, a branch of the healing-art which has been a thousand times denounced by the church of God as an “Infidel science.”