DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION
logical or physiological, of the subconscious." ^^ We are simply to act on the empirical fact that even broken men are accessible to spiritual influences, and through these spiritual influences may be brought to a better adjustment with life. To that extent we may all be believers in psychotherapy. What Christian pastor, what Christian person, has not acted on that assumption since Christianity began? But there is the organization? Well, what has the Emmanuel Movement to offer here which was not offered in the old Faith-Houses — say, Zeller's House in Mannedorf — except a very much thinner religion and a more advanced medical science? There remains the question of method. We ourselves prefer the older method of, say, the establishment of hospitals like the Presbyterian Hospitals in New York and Philadelphia, in which Christian charity provides the best medical service for human ills. We feel grave doubts as to the desirability of the minister himself becoming officially a medical practitioner, even by the method of suggestion; perhaps we would better say especially by the method of suggestion — even though that be spiritual suggestion. When Sir CUfford Allbutt declares that "notions of the priest as medicine-man" are "essentially pagan," he speaks no doubt unnecessarily harshly, but, we must admit it, essentially justly. When Doctor Charles Buttar advises the clergymen to be "content for the present to leave the untrained practice of methods of suggestion to quacks," we cannot deny that he has had some provocation for his counsel. When Stephen Paget in his gracious way remarks that "they who desire, extravagantly, to put 'spiritual heahng' among the methods of the Christian ministry, seem to me to be losing sight of the fact that common sense is an essential trait of the Christian life," we cannot help feeling that he has said the right word in the right place. ^^ Is it not plain common sense for each organ of the body to be content with its own functions, the eye with its seeing, the ear with its hearing? And is there not a profound warning in Paul's remark, especially to us who have a work of our own to do, that all cannot be the ear — else where were the seeing?^'*
The leaders of the Emmanuel Movement are theists. Therefore, instead of saying of an act of heaHng, "The forces of nature do it," they prefer to say, "God does it in and through the forces of nature." In accordance with their theistic presuppositions this is the proper account to give of any natural act of healing. No "miraculous agency" is supposed; "the forces of nature" do the work. But there is a God, and this God works in and through the forces of nature, and thus in the end it is God that does it. God does it, that is, in the same sense and after the same fashion that it is God that does everything that is done throughout this whole great universe. W. F. Cobb, to whom we have already alluded more than once, is not purely a theist; he is a mystic. In describing the varieties of what he calls broadly faith-healing, therefore, he naturally reserves the culminating place for a variety which posits behind the act of heaHng, as its explanation, a mystical theory. It is not quite clear whether he would give his personal adhesion to all the details of this "spiritual healing," as he calls it.^^ It is clear, however, that his sympathies go very largely with it, and that he looks upon it as, in the main at least, the true rationale of faith-healing. Its main postulate is that all physical disease, without exception, is the result, directly or indirectly, of psychical disorder, and is to be struck at, therefore, not in the body, where only symptoms manifest themselves, but in the soul, where alone lie the causes. What is sought is to procure for the soul of the sufferer an influx of spiritual Hf e; and this life can be found, of course, only in God. "The power which alone can heal the soul," we are told, "is God." God, now, is reached by "faith" — the faith, it is to be observed, however, not of the sufferer, but of the practitioner, for in this form of theory a healer is necessary.
MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM
"This faith is defined as a quality in the spirit of the healer,... which enables him to render quiescent his 'mortal mind,' and so to place his spirit in a positive state of calm, poised and at peace, and a channel for the Divine Spirit to pass through to the sufferer." The state of openness and serenity thus described as faith, we are further told, is simply the normal condition for prayer. We may express the process, therefore, by saying that spiritual healing is the product of the power of God directed by faith through prayer to the soul that needs healing. Hence, it is said that it is God, and God alone, who performs the act of healing, and that all healing is obtained by the influx of spiritual life into the soul from God; although the door of ingress into the soul is opened for it by a practitioner, the soul itself being in a state of passive, not active, faith in the process. The healing is conceived thus as in a true sense supernatural: an influx into the soul from without. Accordingly, it is asserted, there can be no real failure in it. An influx of spiritual life from God, the source of all life, must bring benefit. If this benefit does not show itself on the physical plane, it is nevertheless there — the soul at least has the benefit.
From a mysticism like this it is but a single step to open pantheism, and that step is taken by the form of mind-cure which is most in vogue among us:^^ that which calls itself for some inexplicable reason by the name of Christian Science. ^^ There is a sense, of course, in which — just because the fundamental elements of her thought are pantheistic — Mrs. Eddy will not allow that her Christian Science is mind-cure. It is not "mind-cure" with a small "m," she affirms, but "Mind-cure," with a capital "M."^^ But just because her fundamental thought is pantheistic, this is merely a verbal distinction. She is intensely emphatic that her Mind-cures are "not supernatural but supremely natural." ^^ In its practice Christian Science does not differ greatly from other forms of mind-cure. Perceiving, or at least acknowledging, less readily than the Emmanuel Movement the limitations of mind-cure, it accepts, like the spiritual healing of which we have just been speaking, all kinds of cases — although the range of its actual cures, as Elwood Worcester dryly remarks, is not enlarged thereby.^ ° Its real differentiation from its sister systems lies wholly in the pseudo-philosophical background which it has washed in with a broad brush behind its activities. This certainly is portentous enough, but it serves only for ornament, and has no effect on the practice of the mind-cure, which is the real source of the movement's vogue. It is incumbent on us before we close this series of lectures to give some account of this system of mind-healing, which has become a rehgion, and has in the course of a very few years overspread the earth.
The late Doctor St. John Roosa once described mindcure as faith-cure run to seed."^ The characterization is true as a general proposition in the history of thought. Man is a religious animal, and the religious explanation of phenomena antedates, in this department of thought also, the naturalistic. It is also, in the longer historical sequences, true of the ultimate origin of the particular species of mind-cure which Doctor Roosa had in mind, that is to say. Christian Science. For Mesmer derives from Gassner, and Christian Science is unquestionably a granddaughter — however ungrateful a granddaughter — of Mesmerism."^ But there is no immediate affiliation of Christian Science with faith-cure, and certainly the adherents of Christian Science do not look upon themselves as its deteriorated descendants. They rather set themselves in irreducible antagonism to it.^^ Not indeed that they deny that effects are produced by it. They appear to allow even that Faith- Healers may obtain effects which they cannot themselves obtain; or at least more readily than they can obtain them. Mrs. Eddy has her characteristic way of accounting for
sometimes more speedy than some of the cures wrought through Christian Scientists?" And she answers thus: "Because faith is belief and not understanding; and it is easier to believe than to understand Spiritual Truth. It demands less cross-bearing, self-renunciation, and divine science, to admit the claims of the personal senses, and appeal for relief to a humanized God, than to deny these claims and learn the divine way, drinking his cup, being baptized v^ith his baptism, gaining the end through persecution and purity." It must not pass without notice
that a somewhat odd admission is made here that the results obtained by Christian Science may also be obtained without Christian Science; sometimes more speedily than by Christian Science; by an appeal, for example, to a humanized God; by the open road of faith, that is, rather than the difficult path of understanding. How anything can be obtained by an appeal to a humanized God is a puzzle, seeing that it is presupposed that no such being exists. The Faith- Healers only cry out to the void, and yet they get their results, and that sometimes more quickly and always with less effort on their part, than the Christian Scientists.^'* Various methods of accounting for this remarkable fact have been suggested. Marsdon says faith-cures are really mind-cures, wrought by "anything that will enable a sick person to change his thought," that is to say, they are not Mind-cures but mind-cures, wrought by our own change of thought, which indeed is asserted scores of times by Mrs. Eddy herself. Mrs. Kate Taylor, with much the same implications, explaining the difference as that faith-cure requires faith to be healed, and mind-cure does not, adds: "Prayer to a personal God affects the sick like a drug that has no efficacy of its own, but borrows its power from human faith and belief. The drug does nothing because it has no intelligence." Similarly Frances Lord represents the difference to be one of theory only, not of practice, while with respect to the theory she remarks that there is more to be known than the Faith-Healers admit.^^ Such statements undoubtedly show that Christian Scientists do not deny that faith-cure may be acknowledged to be an undeveloped form of their better practice. But this does not carry with it any implication of immediate historical connection.
It was out of a very different soil, in point of fact, that Christian Science actually grew. According to Mrs. Eddy's own account her previous experience had been in other forms of distinctively mind-cure. She had dabbled in homoeopathy (her then husband sometimes practised this art), and had found that she could dilute the drugs until nothing of them was left, and still they cured. Then she tried — so she says — mesmerism under the guidance of "a distinguished Mesmerist," or as she elsewhere speaks of him,^^ "the magnetic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby." When it was subsequently pointed out that she had learned her system from him — as she certainly did — she repelled the statement thus: "The cowardly claim that I am not the originator of my own writings, but that one P. P. Quimby is, has been legally met and punished." She also toyed with Spiritualism. Her own account of the origin of her doctrine is, that having been for years a sufferer from chronic disease, she met with an injury pronounced by her physician to be necessarily fatal, and was left to die. She concluded not to do so, and got suddenly well instead. For twenty years she had been seeking to trace all physical effects to a mental cause, and now, in the early days of February, 1866 — the birth-year of the new science, then, according to her account — she "gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon." ^^ Quimby died on January 16, 1866, and here, hard on his heels follows his successor, with, despite all denials, nothing in her hands but what she had got from him. For Quimby was not a mesmerist or magnetic healer as she represents him, but the founder of the whole school of Mental-Healers which has flourished in