The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

means, and this leads to the fanatical attitude of demanding from God apart from all means that for the attaining of which He has ordained appropriate means. We are not to refuse to cultivate the soil and then demand to be fed by miracle. (9) The Faith-HeaHng practice leads to the production of "professionals," standing between the soul and God. There is grave danger in a soul permitting an unauthorized intermediary to take up a position between it and the gracious activities of God toward it. From this germ the whole sacerdotal evil has grown. And, on the other hand, to the practitioner himself there comes inevitable temptation to spiritual pride and autocracy, which is most disastrous to his spiritual Ufe; and sometimes even something worse.

One of the phenomena of the Faith-Heahng delusion has been the production of a series of these practitioners, whose activities have not always been wholesome. From time to time an individual healer has risen to public notice and attracted the attention of the whole religious community, for a time at least attaining tremendous vogue and commanding great applause. There was, for example, to confine ourselves to recent times, Prince Alexander of Hohenlohe, who during the first half of the nineteenth century created a great stir with his miraculous heahngs in Austria and Germany.^ ^ A lesser light burned contemporaneously in Ireland in the person of Father Matthew.^* One of the most admirable of these figures was Johann Christoph Blumhardt who, says William James, quite spontaneously developed in the early forties of the last century **an extremely pure faculty of healing," which he exerted during nearly thirty years.^^ Perhaps Doctor A. B. Simpson of New York, who has been since 1887 the president of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, founded in that year at Old Orchard, Maine, has been blamelessly in the public eye as a healer of the sick through faith for as long a period as any of our recent American healers.^^ The fame of others has been, if more splendid, at the same time less pure and less lasting. The name of a certain A. Schrader, for example, was in everybody's mouth twenty years ago. Then there was the romantic figure of Franz Schlatter, with his meteoric career in Denver and elsewhere in the West, as Messiah and divine healer.^^ But perhaps the most striking of all these personages was John Alexander Dowie,^^ whose work in Chicago as general overseer of the Christian Apostolic Catholic Church in Zion — the product of his activities — attained gigantic proportions. A Scotchman by birth, an Australian Congregationalist in previous ministerial affiliation, he created, rather than built up, in Chicago a great religious community, over which he ruled with despotic power, and in the "divine healing rooms" of which he wrought many a cure. No doubt, the proportion of successful cures wrought by him was not larger than in the case of others. If a note in one of the issues of his newspaper — Leaves of Healing — may be taken as a criterion, the work of healing in his hands can scarcely be pronounced successful, *'I pray and lay my hands," he says, "on seventy thousand people in a year." That would give a hundred and seventy-five thousand in two years and a half. Yet in the two years and a half immediately preceding the date of this statement he reports only seven hundred cures.^* One success in every two hundred and fifty trials does not impress one as a very successful ministry of healing to the sick and sorrowing world ^®.

When we speak of "faith-healing" we use ambiguous language so far as we leave it undetermined whether we understand the heaHng in question to be effected immediately by the action of the faith itself, or by the God to whom it is committed in faith. ^ In the latter case the healing is, in the proper sense of the word, a supernatural one. In the former it is a natural healing, as natural as if it were wrought by a surgical operation or by a drug. This is, of course, not to say that God has nothing to do with the healing in this case; or, indeed, has not Himself wrought it. God has very much to do with the cures wrought by the surgeon's knife or the physician's medicaments; so much to do with them that it is He who really makes them. It is to Him that the efficacy of all means is due, in general and in particular. It is a wise man of very old time who in one breath bids us look to the physician with his remedies and to the Lord who is behind the physician and works in and through him and his remedies. "Honor a physician for the honor due unto him, for the uses which ye may have of him.... For of the Most High cometh healing,... My Son, in thy sickness be not negligent; but pray unto the Lord and He will make thee whole.... Then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him; let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him." ^ When we think of cures wrought by means, we do not exclude God from them. But just because they are wrought by means, we do not ascribe them to God as their proximate cause. The point is that a cure wrought proximately by faith, or by any other mental act, or attitude, or state, is just as truly wrought by means as if it were wrought by a drug or a knife. And it is Just as truly wrought by natural means. Our minds are ours, and all their acts and states are our acts and states; and all that is produced by them in any of their acts or states are effects of our own. Any cure supposed to be produced by faith itself is accordingly a natural cure, and that just as truly as any other natural cure whatever.

It might conduce to clearness if writers would agree to classify all such cures, the natural products of faith itself, under some such caption as mind-cures — or, if we prefer a big name, under the general designation of psychotherapy — reserving the term " faith-heahng " for those cures which are ascribed not to faith itself, but to the immediate action of God sought in faith. Meanwhile this is not the universal usage. The nomenclature is far from jQxed. Very frequently the term "faith-cure" is employed to express specifically cures wrought directly by faith itself. As often, it is used in a sense wide enough to em^brace both of these very diverse species of cures. Naturally, this produces confusion. The confusion shows itself, for example, in the definition given to "Faith-Healing" at the head of the article printed under this title in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. There at least emerges from this definition, however, an express recognition of a double sense of the term "faith-cure," a strict and a wide sense. Taking so much as gain, we shall, contrary, no doubt, to this author's own meaning, discriminate these two senses in such a manner as to assign to the strict sense of the term those cures which are supposed to be immediately wrought by God on faith, and to the broader sense those which are supposed to be wrought more or less wholly by faith itself.

Having the latter of these varieties in mind, we find ourselves more in accord with our author when he remarks that "faith-healing is the oldest form of healing in the world," antedating, or at least growing up side by side with, "medical practice in its earliest and crudest form, and

as its predominant partner." ^ We cannot, indeed, ascribe with him the miracles of our Lord and His Apostles to this category.^ But, apart from the miraculous attestation of the special revelation of God which has been recorded for us in the inspired Scriptures, we recognize with him a continuous stream of faith-healings in this sense, extending from the earliest ages quite down to our own day. The numerous "Healing- Gods" of classical antiquity, such practices as "temple-sleeping," and the endless narratives of cures sought and found through it and other means, attest its prevalence in pre-Christian times; the Patristic and Mediaeval Ages overflow with instances; the Reformation was far from bringing its practice to an end, and — if we may now enlarge the category to that of mind-healing in general — the history of such movements as those still going on among us under the names of Animal Magnetism, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Mental Healing, New Thought, Christian Science, evince the place its conscious practice still takes in the life of the people of to-day.

In a former lecture we have sought to give some account of the assertions which are still made that faith-healings, in the strict sense of healings made directly by God, continue to occur among us. For the sake of completeness it may not be improper to proceed now to some account of at least the more prominent varieties of faith-healing in the wider sense — or, in a less confusing nomenclature, of mind-cure — prevalent in our day. No doubt, in doing so, we overstep the Hmits of our formal subject. Faith-healing in this sense — that is to say, mind-cure — by virtue of the very fact that some mental act or state is held to be the producing cause at work, can make no pretense to miraculousness, and in point of fact, in the forms at least in which it is most commonly practised, it makes no pretense to miraculousness. Nevertheless, its relation to faith-healing in the stricter sense is so close, confusion with it is so common, and the lessons to be learned from it as to the real nature of the alleged instances of faith-healing in the strict sense occurring among us are so instructive, that we should not be justified in passing it by altogether.

The variety of forms in which mind-healing is practised to-day is very great. They differ from one another less in the results obtained, or even in the means employed to obtain these results, than in the theoretical basis by which they severally attempt to explain their production. William F. Cobb, the writer of the article on "Faith-Healing" in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, to which we have already alluded, enumerates its principal species as Mental-healing, Magnetic-heaHng, Spiritualistic-healing, and Spiritual-heahng, that is to say, if we may employ the popular designations of typical forms of each to symbolize the several varieties, Christian Science, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Faith-Healing. This enumeration is by no means exhaustive, but it will serve our present purpose. The point of importance for us is that in the action of all these varieties alike, as Cobb justly remarks, a leading part is taken by suggestion. This suggestion, when given its most scientifically developed form, is called hypnotism. But, under whatever name, and employed under the guidance of whatever underlying theory of the nature of being, or of the process of the cure established, it operates after essentially the same fashion.^

It is only with those forms of mind-cure which have in one way or another closely connected themselves with religion, that we are for the moment particularly concerned. One of these forms, very prominent in the public eye at present, is that which is known as the Emmanuel Movement. Nothing could be further from the thought of the leaders of the Emmanuel Movement than a pretension to miraculous powers.^ It only professes to deal, prosaically enough, and with an almost ostentatious disassociation of itself from the supernatural, with certain classes of functional or nervous diseases — by means of suggestion, of

course, but also by any other forms of mental and spiritual influence which experience may commend as useful. It does not bother itself overmuch with underlying theory, although it proceeds actually on the theory — which it prefers to look upon as observed fact — of a subconscious life, the storehouse of energy capable of being tapped and drawn upon for the purposes of our daily livingJ The common experience of the whole Christian past, it thinks, supplies it with a general support for its practice as an activity of the organized church. It quotes with particular satisfaction an entry in John Wesley's Journal for May 12, 1759.^ Here Wesley remarks on the helplessness of the physicians in the presence of a woman kept ill from fretting over the death of her son. "Why," Wesley asks, "don't physicians consider how far bodily disorders are caused or influenced by the mind, and in those cases which are utterly out of their sphere, call in the assistance of a minister, as ministers, when they find the mind disordered by the body, call in the assistance of a physician?" In the intimate co-operation of the physician and the minister here desiderated, it is suggested, we have the whole principle of the Emmanuel Movement.^ As the physician must be called in to remove the bodily disorders which inhibit right spiritual functioning, so the church may well step in to aid in correcting those bodily e\'ils which are ultimately the result of spiritual disorders.

We confess to being chilled when we hear of such things as "rehgious faith and prayer" being looked upon as therapeutical agents for the cure of disease, and administered to patients as such. We are frankly shocked at the coupling together of faith and paregoric, prayer and podophylHn in a single comprehensive pharmacopoeia. We are too accustomed to thinking of faith and prayer as terminating on God, and finding their response in His gracious activities, to feel comfortable when they are turned back on themselves and — while still, no doubt, addressed to God — used as instruments for moving man.^*' It is unfortunate, moreover, that the form of Christianity which is professed by the leaders of the Emmanuel Movement, and the inculcation of which they rely upon to soothe troubled minds and to inspire to effort, is rather that taught by Renan and Harnack and Theodor Keim (the collocation of names is not our own^^), than that taught by John and Paul and Jesus; so that a rationalistic veil hangs over all their religious prescriptions. Nevertheless, although Christianity is emphatically an "other-world" religion, and a merely "this-world" religion is just no Christianity at all, it is not to be denied that there is a "this-world" side to Christianity. Undoubtedly, it has the promise of the life that now is as well as of that v/hich is to come, and they who seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness may rightly expect all these things to be added unto them. It is as little to be doubted that there are valuable reflex effects which may be confidently counted upon from the exercise, say, of faith and prayer, as it is undeniable that these reflex effects are of infinitely less importance than their direct working. And of course it is unquestionable that it belongs to the Christian calling to relieve so far as it is within our power to do so, by the use of all legitimate means, every distress under which we find our fellow men to be suffering. We would not lag behind the Emmanuel Movement in zeal for service; and if we find it moved at this or that point by extravagances of pretension, and limited here and there by defective spiritual insight or outlook, surely, in avoiding what is bad in it, we may not refuse to imitate what is good, and our chief concern should be to fashion our own conduct more, not less, completely after the higher Christian ideal.

The particular psychological assumptions upon which the Emmanuel Movement is at present conducted may seem to us little assured. No doubt, we are told that the work "does not depend upon any theory, whether psycho-