“ We need say only one thing more about Christian Science, which, to speak plainly, is a repulsive subject, inasmuch as it shows, in a way no other form of spiritual healing does, the depths of degradation to which the human mind can sink under the weight of superstition. That it cures cases of the kind that have been healed at all sorts of shrines—pagan, Christian, Buddhist, Mohammedan—from time immemorial, it would be idle to deny. That it brightens the lives of some persons who have no aim in life, and have nothing to do but evoke pains and ailments by thinking of their health, is also true. ”

“ It is as old as medicine and religion, which in the beginning were one, as they still are among many savage tribes. Faith can move mountains, and it matters little on what it is based or how it is excited. As John Hunter has told us, the touch of a dead man’s hand has charmed away a tumour. But there are limits to its action, and while willing to accept faith as an adjuvant, no one who knows anything about disease will admit that by itself it can heal any but ailments the origin of which lies hid in the unknown recesses of the nervous system. ”

“ In this melancholy, this debility, this disappointment, perhaps this remorse, energy is wasted which is sorely required for the conflict with disease. And even the man of religious life likewise—if in less degree, as one who has accumulated more inward light—is also disheartened to perceive that the fountains of spiritual contemplation are then less copious, and aspiration a wearier effort. He too needs help, if not to make, yet to reinforce, the happier conversations of his fuller life. In health the mind in solitude droops and wastes, and the sick-bed is a kind of solitude ”

“ We have no right to dictate to God what His answer shall be. We have no right to assume that it must be His will to remove all pain and suffering. Any such assumption leads logically to conclusions which those who make it might not be prepared to accept. If pain and suffering are contrary to God’s will, and God is omnipotent, it follows that there can be no such thing as pain and suffering; and as pain and suffering are located in the body, it will further be concluded that there is no such thing as a body; and here at once we have Christian Science in a nutshell. ”

“ Instead of sending out our subconsciousness (the phraseology is necessarily materialistic and fearfully inadequate) to work on that of another, we merely commission it to work on the seat of our own malady. The method now becomes one of auto-suggestion, i.e. the healing suggestion is made by us to ourselves. We know the power of this process in the moral sphere; we know how, by fixing our minds on lofty and ennobling ideas, we can break the power of temptation, not by a frontal attack, but by getting round it and above it to a higher level of life and thought. ”

“ Shall we answer that the gain must be of a spiritual character, that what we have received is ‘the strengthening and refreshing of our souls,’ that this is what is intended when the Eucharist is spoken of as a ‘means of grace’? Assuredly we shall be right to answer thus. We cannot insist upon it too strongly, or claim it too confidently. We may not feel at the moment that we are stronger and more able for our life and duty; but then we do not always feel the benefit of physical food and medicine the moment they have been taken. ”

“ God, who brought me into the world by my mother’s pain, will some day put me out of the world, by my own pain. He is in no sense more on the side of life than on the side of death. I have been looking at the ‘Order for the Visitation of the Sick’ in the Prayer-book and I am quite sure that nobody now could write anything half so sensible or so majestical. . . . Know this, that Almighty God is the Lord of life and death, and of all things to them pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness, and sickness. ”

“ It is for the psychologist to investigate the relation in which such phenomena stand to the normal working of the mind; and it is for the psychologist and physiologist together to probe the method by which subconscious mentality affects the diseased tissue, and in many cases effects a cure. The facts are becoming patent to all; the causes are a subject matter for science. Where, then, does religion come in? I answer that whilst the forces at work are psychical, and the inquiry into their mode of operation is scientific, they can be best put in motion by religion. ”

“ It is only the evil that man deliberately assimilates which defiles him. ‘There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him’—a parabolic saying which has a deep meaning. As it is with sin, so it is with disease. Wilful sin is lawlessness in the spiritual being; disease is disorder in the material being. Much remains yet to be done, which lies well within the range of the free human will, to combat this lawless disorder in the life of body and soul. We believe that the spirit can impose its own order and law and harmony upon the material elements of our bodily frame. ”

“ In the same way, when there is a suspicion or fairly clear evidence that health is being undermined by some evil habit, the sympathetic clergyman, who knows the patient well, can do far more for him than the most skilled doctor who has probably only seen him once or twice. Why any clergyman should want to babble about a special ‘gift of healing’ in dealing with these most distressing cases, considering what the evidence on the subject of a ‘gift of healing’ is, I cannot conceive. ”

“ There can be no doubt that cures of certain kinds of diseases have been effected by Christian Science and kindred faith-healing cults, all of which cures come under the head of healing by suggestion. I do not think that healing disease by suggestion is specially a Christian work, it can be achieved in many ways. But I think the average medical man likely to be more willing to seek the aid of a duly accredited minister of religion than a so-called ‘Spiritual Healer’ who is subject to no authority. ”

“ We know well how many cases there are in our various hospitals and infirmaries, that have baffled all the skill of diagnosis and treatment that has been vouched to the world up to the present time. Is it rational to believe that such cases will be healed by a glance, or a touch, or a word of any merely human person, however holy, who is manifestly ignorant of any ordinary scientific knowledge? No, Spiritual Healing as a cult, as a part of the sacramental life of the Church, will cease to exist, but all that has come out of it will be quickened and strengthened. ”

“ We have here attained, if we have attained it, Oneness at the expense of the Many. It is One simply by means of containing nothing, and, in place of the inspiring conception of the true thinker of the Unity as One because it includes the Many harmoniously related within itself—a Unity of infinite richness and fecundity—we have a dead, empty One, misnamed Unity because there is nothing to unite. The worship of such a Oneness, it has well been said, would be the worship of the None. ”

“ I very much question whether there is more than one system, and I am convinced that physical and mental are one and the same. And I would go so far as to say, that the disastrous mistakes that have been made in the past, and which are still in operation to-day in the treatment of one large section of sick people, viz. the insane, largely owe their origin to this arbitrary division. And, by a curious irony, the branch of medical science where there is the most marked predominance of materialism86 is this very department of mental diseases. ”

“ Prayer universalises a personal longing; and so wonderful is the magic of true prayer, fetching up from the deep of our being suggestions, inspirations, forces unperceived by man, that it can never fail to induce a sense of calm, the most favourable for a physical recovery; and many a time it has effectuated that recovery itself. Science may teach the ‘reflex action of prayer’; religion will always find authentic answers to prayer. ”

“ God does not send sickness to scourge us, but overrules it to purge us. In saying this, we need not deny the possible place of death in a perfect cosmos; a death which should have been the gradual ebbing of physical vitality, not its sapping and undermining by the malignant forces of disease. We should expect, then, that our Lord’s healing power would be the action of the life-giving Spirit of God upon the spirit of man, from the very fact that in Christ man was brought into living contact with God. ”

“ No one who has been connected with one of our big general hospitals can doubt for a moment the advisability of the collaboration of the physician and the clergyman, each helping the patient from his own standpoint. It must not be imagined that I advocate any usurping of the duties of one by the other, but in the cure of certain types of disease,44 and certainly in the cure of diseases that are primarily diseases of mind or character, the doctor should welcome the minister of religion as a valuable ally. ”

“ That we should fall for a while, now and then, from our waking, time-marking life, into the timeless slumber of this primeval life is easy to understand; for the principle solely operative in that primeval life is indeed the fundamental principle of our nature, being that “vegetative part of the soul” which made from the first, and still silently makes, the assumption on which our rational life of conduct and science rests—the assumption that life is worth living. ”

“ There is a great deal too much of considering poverty as a real cause of suffering. Christ’s mission of redemption was not primarily a mission for the relief of suffering. If He bids us to take up our cross, He also bids us, as a quite essential corollary, to follow Him. Indeed, taking up our cross is useless, if we do not follow Him. Pain, far from being shunned, should be welcomed and embraced, because it brings us nearer to the sufferings of our Blessed Lord. It is not, of course, mere pain in itself that lifts and cleanses: it is pain rightly and courageously borne, from whatever motive. ”

“ No one will deny that psychic healing is a question of paramount interest at the present time. It is an everyday topic of conversation in the market place, the workshop, and in the schools. As a leader writer in one of the chief medical papers pointed out the other day, ‘spiritual or mental healing is going on all around us.’
That psychic medicine is daily becoming of more value to the community most people probably realise, but, if not properly controlled, it may lead to evils against which the public are entitled to be safeguarded. ”

“ The piety of the sick-bed is at best a passive piety, which on recovery is pushed aside again by the custom of the world; but herein it is that in sickness the soul flags and droops upon itself, and that the support of other sympathy is more precious. The sympathy we all depend on in health we need most when enfeebled by ailment. There is no delusion more terrible than that which lets a man run up a score of sins and negligences to be repented of under the discouragement of a sick-bed. ”

“ If, then, faith is so important an adjuvant to ordinary medical treatment, we see at once that religion that stands for faith in its highest and purest form should represent a tremendous recuperative force. We have said that medicine and religion had become estranged—the one given over to a rigid materialism, and the other so busy with men’s souls that it forgot their bodies altogether. This book is a humble attempt to bridge over the gulf. There is a great movement that has its roots in history that is already written and that will go on into the far distant future, around about us. ”

“ The unostentatious, healthy influence of a cultured Christian gentleman has a potency which no manipulation or ritual is in the least likely to enhance. If he will equip himself with the necessary information as to the ‘patient’s’ actual physical condition, he can set to work to exercise his influence, with the knowledge that he will probably effect more, so far as a permanent result goes, than all the self-styled ‘healers’ who ever supported scientific misstatements with bad logic, or clouded with frothy verbiage what intellect they possess. ”

“ Far from consenting to identify himself with the social conscience, the religious conscience207 disposes man to oppose the rights of God to those of Cæsar, the dignity of the human person to public constraint.’72 In the language of religion, ‘No man hath seen God at any time: if we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.’ That is the ideal of the Christian Society, the Body of Christ, actuated by the great principles of faith, hope, and love. ”

“ Eddy has been occupied in distorting.
However much it may have been possible in the past for the doctor and the parson in dealing with the less nervous, more easy-going type to look upon him as composed of two distinct and separate parts, body and spirit respectively, having no intimate relationship and amenable to quite different influences, such a view of men and women is to-day out of the question. To entertain it for a moment is to court failure. Mind and matter act and react upon one another, and more than this, without faith all human enterprise would be stultified. ”

“ And in the end that small focus of malignant disease, that might have been eradicated by the surgeon’s knife, has extended and disseminated itself until all hope of cure is gone. And such results are more likely to follow while this treatment remains in the hands of untrained laymen. There is great danger that an earnest person, with limited knowledge both of theology and of medicine, may come to regard himself as superior to theologian and physician, owing to the fervour of his faith, combined possibly with a belief that he is endowed with special powers. ”

“ When we pray, in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, that God would ‘preserve and continue this sick member in the unity of the Church,’ the prayer breathes the very spirit of ancient piety. It is an unspeakable help, in dealing with a sick man, to be able to appeal to his own conscious and sincere membership in the Body of Christ. The Visitation Office is ‘peculiarly a ministration for those who have been trained beforehand in the fulness of Church life and privileges.’74 Herein, as often, the Prayer-book sets up an ideal standard. ”