Their belief has
in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of
their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing
in amount.
The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life-long
invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have
been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a
healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never
supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone
on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to
countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great.
The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that
one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the
"Gospel of Relaxation," of the "Don't Worry Movement," of people
who repeat to themselves, "Youth, health, vigor!" when dressing
in the morning, as their motto for the day.
Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many
households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad
form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the
ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general
tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more
striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so
that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and
self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything
human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook
the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of
which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed
that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible
to read it at all.
The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been
due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of
character of the American people has never been better shown than
by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution
to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately
knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of
mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United
States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and
protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop
still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest
writers are far and away the ablest of the group.[45] It matters
nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray,
so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be
influenced by the mind-curers' ideas. For our immediate purpose,
the important point is that so large a number should exist who
CAN be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied
with respect.[46]
To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The
fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the
general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has
a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a
shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may
learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is
that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of
egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas
Christian theology has always considered FROWARDNESS to be the
essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say
that the mark of the beast in it is FEAR; and this is what gives
such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion.
"Fear," to quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the
evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of
forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part
of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity.
I find that the fear clement of forethought is not stimulating to
those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the
natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it
becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and
should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living
tissue. To assist in the analysis of fear and in the
denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word
fearthought to stand for the unprofitable element of forethought,
and have defined the word 'worry' as fearthought in
contradistinction to forethought. I have also defined
fearthought as the self-imposed or self-permitted suggestion of
inferiority, in order to place it where it really belongs, in the
category of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable
things."[47]
The "misery-habit," the "martyr-habit," engendered by the
prevalent "fearthought," get pungent criticism from the mind-cure
writers:--
"Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.
There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged
requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the
world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early
training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life.
Following close upon this, there is a long series of
anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children's
diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought
that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become
childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there
is a long line of particular tears and trouble-bearing
expectations, such, for example, as ideas associated with certain
articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot
weather, the aches and pains associated with cold weather, the
fear of catching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of
hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and
so on through a long list of fears, dreads, worriments,
anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities,
and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our
fellow-men, and especially physicians, are ready to help us
conjure up, an array worthy to rank with Bradley's 'unearthly
ballet of bloodless categories.'
"Yet this is not all. This vast array is swelled by innumerable
volunteers from daily life--the fear of accident, the possibility
of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of robbery, of
fire, or the outbreak of war. And it is not deemed sufficient to
fear for ourselves. When a friend is taken ill, we must forth
with fear the worst and apprehend death. If one meets with
sorrow . . . sympathy means to enter into and increase the
suffering."[48]
"Man," to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him
before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear;
all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death,
and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and
depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and
specification . . . Think of the millions of sensitive and
responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the
dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that
health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love?
exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though
unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an
ocean of morbidity."[49]
Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian
terminology, one sees from such quotations how widely their
notion of the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary
Christians.[50]
Their notion of man's higher nature is hardly less divergent,
being decidedly pantheistic. The spiritual in man appears
in the mind-cure philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly
subconscious; and through the subconscious part of it we are
already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or
abrupt creation of a new inner man. As this view is variously
expressed by different writers, we find in it traces of Christian
mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the
modern psychology of the subliminal self. A quotation or two
will put us at the central point of view:--
"The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of
infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests
itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and
power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what
term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul,
Omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as
we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God
then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in
Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our
life our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God;
and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized
spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, as well
as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life
of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not
in essence or quality; they differ in degree.
"The great central fact in human life is the coming into a
conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite
Life and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow.
In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of
our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this
divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and
powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels
through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work. In
just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the
Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony
for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and
strength. To recognize our own divinity, and our intimate
relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our
machinery to the powerhouse of the Universe. One need remain in
hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we
ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher
powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward."[51]
Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more
concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I
have many answers from correspondents--the only difficulty is to
choose. The first two whom I shall quote are my personal
friends. One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses
well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which
all mind-cure disciples are inspired.
"The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or
depression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine
Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in
serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: 'I and my
Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing.
This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for
wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine
union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted
on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the
Deific Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter
the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?
"This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has
been abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears
a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine
and lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than
they are to-day, although my belief in the necessity of illness
was dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the
flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years
without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never
known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch
constantly with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all
kinds. For how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?--since
'Greater is he that is with us than all that can strive against
us.'"
My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following
statement:--
"Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking
down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous
prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of
insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the
digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of
doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed
up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never
recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of
me.
"I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning
the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or
mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that
essence of life which permeates all and which we call God. This
is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves
ACTUALLY, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost,
deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for
illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light,
warmth, and invigoration without. When you do this consciously,
realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live
in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the
unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning
and which have engrossed you without.
"I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily
health AS SUCH, because that comes of itself, as an incidental
result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire
to have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred
to above. That which we usually make the object of life, those
outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live
and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness,
they should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere
outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the
bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the
kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so
that all else comes as that which shall be 'added unto you'--as
quite incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is
the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre
of our being.
"When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that
which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which
the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success
in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or
renown in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be
results, not objects. I would also include pleasures of many
kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued
because many accept them--I mean conventionalities,
sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these
being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal,
and even unhealthy superfluities."
Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read
you these cases without comment--they express so many varieties
of the state of mind we are studying.
"I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.
[Details of ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in
Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air,
but steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part
of October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as
it were these words: 'You will be healed and do a work you never
dreamed of.' These words were impressed upon my mind with such
power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I
believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and
weakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to
Boston. Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a
mental healer (this was January 7, 1881). The healer said:
'There is nothing but Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind;
body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.' I
could not accept all she said, but I translated all that was
there for ME in this way: 'There is nothing but God; I am
created by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind is
given me to use; and by just so much of it as I will put upon the
thought of right action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage
to my ignorance and fear and past experience.' That day I
commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for
the family, constantly saying to myself: 'The Power that created
the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.' By holding
these suggestions through the evening I went to bed and fell
asleep, saying: 'I am soul, spirit, just one with God's Thought
of me,' and slept all night without waking, for the first time in
several years [the distress-turns had usually recurred about two
o'clock in the night]. I felt the next day like an escaped
prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that would in time
give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able to eat
anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have
my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to me
like stepping-stones. I will note a few of them, they came about
two weeks apart.
"1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.
"2d. I am Soul, therefore I am well.
"3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four-footed beast
with a protuberance on every part of my body where I had
suffering, with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as
myself. I resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and
refused to even look at my old self in this form.
"4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with
faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.
"5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing
look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner
consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for
I was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to
me the perfect and completed separation between what I was and
what I appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after
this of my real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by
degrees (though it took me two years of hard work to get there) I
expressed health continuously throughout my whole body.
"In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known
this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I
have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have
learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child."
But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must
lead you back to philosophic generalities again. You see already
by such records of experience how impossible it is not to class
mind-cure as primarily a religious movement. Its doctrine of the
oneness of our life with God's life is in fact quite
indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's message
which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of
your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.[52]
But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical
explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact
of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering,
timorous finite consciousness, the mind-curers, so far as I am
acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation
Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but
the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree
with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it
as a "mystery" or "problem," or in "laying to heart" the lesson
of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don't
reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass
beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be
outgrown and left be hind, transcended and forgotten. Christian
Science so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical
branch of mind-cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is
simply a LIE, and any one who mentions it is a liar. The
optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even
of explicit attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show
us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately
linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining.
Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind-curer would ask us, if I
can put you in possession of a life of good?
After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed
a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have
thrown all previous literature of the Diatetit der Seele into the
shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of
optimism: "Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to
power." "Thoughts are things," as one of the most vigorous
mind-cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of
his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and
success, before you know it these things will also be your
outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence
of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns
indefeasibly this inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary,
and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets
to destruction. Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that
thoughts are "forces," and that, by virtue of a law that like
attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies
all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over.
Thus one gets, by one's thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere
for the realization of one's desires; and the great point in the
conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one's side by
opening one's own mind to their influx.
On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between
the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements.
To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query,
"What shall I do to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied: "You
are saved now, if you would but believe it." And the mind-curers
come with precisely similar words of emancipation. They speak,
it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has
lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless
with the same eternal human difficulty. THINGS ARE WRONG WITH
THEM; and "What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole,
well?" is the form of their question. And the answer is: "You
ARE well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it."
"The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence," says one of
the authors whom I have already quoted, "GOD IS WELL, AND SO ARE
YOU. You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being."
The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large
fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels.
Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure
message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its
rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is
tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very
reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its
manifestations[53]
) to play a part almost as great in the
evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those
earlier movements in their day.
But I here fear that I may begin to "jar upon the nerves" of some
of the members of this academic audience. Such contemporary
vagaries, you may think, should hardly take so large a place in
dignified Gifford lectures. I can only beseech you to have
patience. The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine,
be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which
the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their
susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be
classed under different heads. The result is that we have really
different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these
lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we
must take it where we find it in most radical form. The
psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even
to be sketched as yet--our lectures may possibly serve as a
crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to
bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the
clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and
conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable" type, for
which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing
can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice,
merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like
them ourselves.
Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic
conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to
prove the existence of numerous persons in whom--at any rate at a
certain stage in their development--a change of character for the
better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by
official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if
those rules be exactly reversed. Official moralists advise us
never to relax our strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day and night,"
they adjure us; "hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink
from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent." But the
persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to
nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes
them twofold more the children of hell they were before. The
tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever
and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the
bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by
innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an
anti-moralistic method, by the "surrender" of which I spoke in my
second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not
intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of
responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny
to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of
it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward
relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you
sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation
through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran
theology, the passage into NOTHING of which Jacob Behmen writes.
To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner
turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness
must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall
abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and
leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on
by an external power.
Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is
certainly one fundamental form of human experience. Some say that
the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious
from the merely moralistic character. With those who undergo it
in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its
reality. They KNOW; for they have actually FELT the higher
powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.
A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man
who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice.
At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained
clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had
to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he
let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up
the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the
mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the
everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and
give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength,
with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that
never save.
The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of
experience. They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration
by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable
from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan
acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have
no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology.
It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and
finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or
sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and
expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the
abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no
matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or
a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal
explanation.[54]
When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we
shall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say
a brief word about the mind-curer's METHODS.
They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence
of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education.
But the word "suggestion," having acquired official status, is
unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part
of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all
inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases.
"Suggestion" is only another name for the power of ideas, SO FAR
AS THEY PROVE EFFICACIOUS OVER BELIEF AND CONDUCT. Ideas
efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others.
Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings
are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian
churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day,
whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the
whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or
gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word "suggestion"
as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid
psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but
ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and by
this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all
there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form.
Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that
can be done." And this in spite of the actual fact that the
popular Christianity does absolutely NOTHING, or did nothing
until mind-cure came to the rescue.[55]
Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by
special miracle have at all times been recognized within the
church's pale, almost all the great saints having more or less
performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to
maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of
healing after confession and conversion on the patient's part,
and prayer on the priest's, was quite spontaneously developed in
the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties
and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt's Life by
Zundel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x.,
xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity,
which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition.
Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical
character, and in this part of his work followed no previous
model. In Chicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a
Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly "Leaves of Healing" were
in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who,
although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as
"diabolical counterfeits" of his own exclusively "Divine
Healing," must on the whole be counted into the mind-cure
movement. In mind-cure circles the fundamental article of faith
is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the
pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not
tolerate ourselves on any lower terms.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the
force of a revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of
healthy-mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts
the church Christianity had left hardened. It has let loose
their springs of higher life. In what can the originality of any
religious movement consist, save in finding a channel, until then
sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some
group of human beings?
The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above
all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency
in this kind of success. If mind-cure should ever become
official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of
suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its acuter stages every
religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows
this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the
acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the
many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which
irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. "We may pray,"
says Jonathan Edwards, "concerning all those saints that are not
lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken
away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day,
that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and
lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if
they were all dead."[56]
The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large
numbers, of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readiness for
regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too
pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too
legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to
appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of
this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here
present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it
forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the
world.
Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant countries is
an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their
reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added
systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and
meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic
practice. I quote some passages at random:--
"The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on
which the New Thought most strongly insists--the development
namely from within outward, from small to great.[57] Consequently
one's thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though
this trust be literally like a step in the dark.[58] To attain
the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought
advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the
attainment of self-control. One is to learn to marshal the
tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a
unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart
times for silent meditation, by one's self, preferably in a room
where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In
New Thought terms, this is called 'entering the silence.'"[59]
"The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy
street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the
mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there
and everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace,
Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.
This is the spirit of continual prayer.[60] One of the most
intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where
several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often
talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds
about him, this self-centred faithful man would, in any moment of
perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him
that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and
thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though
he were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with
him into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to
which he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly
passive until the reply came, and never once through many years'
experience did he find himself disappointed or misled."[61]
Wherein, I should like to know, does this INTRINSICALLY differ
from the practice of "recollection" which plays so great a part
in Catholic discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the
presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in
Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez
de Paz in his work on Contemplation.
"It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all
places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us
commune respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with
desire and affection for him. . . . Would you escape from every
ill? Never lose this recollection of God, neither in prosperity
nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke
not, to excuse yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or
the importance of your business, for you can always remember that
God sees you, that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an
hour you forget him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection.
If you cannot practice this exercise continuously, at least make
yourself as familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those
who in a rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can,
go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your
soul."[62]
All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of
course unlike anything in mind-cure thought, but the purely
spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both communions,
and in both communions those who urge it write with authority,
for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that
whereof they tell. Compare again some mind-cure utterances:--
"High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and
strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until
it forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such
discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of
beauty, wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty
thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but
perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and
finally delightful.
"The soul's real world is that which it has built of its
thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we WILL, we can
turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift
ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there
gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and
receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in
as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum. . . . Whenever the
though; is not occupied with one's daily duty or profession, it
should he sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere. There are
quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when
this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great
advantage. If one who has never made any systematic effort to
lift and control the thought-forces will, for a single month,
earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised
and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go
back to careless, aimless, and superficial thinking. At such
favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of
daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent
sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire. The
spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the
'still, small voice' is audible, the tumultuous waves of external
sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego gradually
becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine
Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which is
nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul contact
with the Parent- Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue,
health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain."[63]
When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep
an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be
wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of
doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect you will have
long since passed away-- doubt, I mean, as to whether all such
writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down pour
encourager les autres. You will then be convinced, I trust, that
these states of consciousness of "union" form a perfectly
definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionally
partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense
than they live by anything else with which they have
acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical
reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of
healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already
only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this
systematized healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to
scientific method and the scientific life.
In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the
relation of religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval
savage thought on the other. There are plenty of persons
to-day--"scientists" or "positivists," they are fond of calling
themselves--who will tell you that religious thought is a mere
survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which
humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left
behind and out-grown. If you ask them to explain themselves more
fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought
everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The
savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the
sake of individual ends. For him, even external nature obeys
individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many
elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these
positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being
an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the
really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and
psycho-physical, which are all impersonal and general in
character. Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the
universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some
universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what means
science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited
its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say
it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental
verification. Follow out science's conceptions practically, they
will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and
you will always be corroborated. The world is so made that all
your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and
only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them
impersonal and universal.
But here we have mind-cure, with her diametrically opposite
philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I
were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you
right. That the controlling energies of nature are personal,
that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of
the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and
needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental
experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify
these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the
mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and
assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results. Here, in
the very heyday of science's authority, it carries on an
aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and
succeeds by using science's own peculiar methods and weapons.
Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain
ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only
genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds
the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its
observation.
How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident
enough from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet
another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly
concrete turn. Here is one:--
"One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two
months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right
ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had
to use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully
guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the
positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): 'There
is nothing but God, and all life comes from him perfectly. I
cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.'
Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that
day."
The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification,
but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile
ago I made such account.
"I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not
been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling
increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and
faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an
attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the
grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The
mind-cure teachings that I had been listening to all the winter
thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was an
opportunity to test myself. On my way home I met a friend, I
refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt. That was
the first step gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband
wished to send for the doctor. But I told him that I would
rather wait until morning and see how I felt. Then followed one
of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
"I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did 'lie
down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.' I gave up
all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and
obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.
My dominant idea was: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it
unto me even as thou wilt,' and a perfect confidence that all
would be well, that all WAS well. The creative life was flowing
into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the
Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth
understanding. There was no place in my mind for a jarring body.
I had no consciousness of time or space or persons; but only of
love and happiness and faith.
"I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell
asleep; but when I woke up in the morning, I WAS WELL."
These are exceedingly trivial instances,[64] but in them, if we
have anything at all, we have the method of experiment and
verification. For the point I am driving at now, it makes no
difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded
victims of their imagination or not. That they seemed to
THEMSELVES to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough
to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident
that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results
(for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any
more than every one can be cured by the first regular
practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic
and over-scrupulous for those who CAN get their savage and
primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such
experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for
more scientific therapeutics.
What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a
claim?
I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say
the least, premature. The experiences which we have been
studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of
religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to
be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific
sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications
but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of
ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why
in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such
system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total
experience is that the world can be handled according to many
systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will
each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he
cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of
profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of
us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in
preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in
the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise,
and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as
science does, or even better in a certain class of persons.
Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them
genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-house to him who
can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is
exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And
why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of
many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus
approach in alternation by using different conceptions and
assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the
same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical
geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and
each time come out right? On this view religion and science,
each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to
life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in
individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever
from being driven by science from the field to-day. Numbers of
educated people still find it the directest experimental channel
by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.[65]
The case of mind-cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not
resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home
to your attention, but I must content myself to-day with this
very brief indication. In a later lecture the relations of
religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to
receive much more explicit attention.
---
APPENDIX
(See note [64].)
CASE I. "My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and
one of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had
been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for
reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been
to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of
immediate and great exhaustion. I had been under the care of
doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men
in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no or ill
result. Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly
losing ground, I heard some things that gave me interest enough
in mental healing to make me try it; I had no great hope of
getting any good from it--it was a CHANCE I tried, partly
because my thought was interested by the new possibility it
seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I then
could see. I went to X in Boston, from whom some friends of mine
had got, or thought they had got, great help; the treatment was a
silent one; little was said, and that little carried no
conviction to my mind, whatever influence was exerted was that of
another person's thought or feeling silently projected on to my
unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat
still together. I believed from the start in the POSSIBILITY of
such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping
or hindering, the body's nerve-activities, and I thought
telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it
as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any
mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that
might have brought imagination strongly into play.
"I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at
first with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite
suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising
within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of
power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had
long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb. I
began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the
change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This tide seemed to
mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having
come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months
later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly
gaining ground instead of losing, it but with this lift the
influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my
confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from
this first experience, and should have helped me to make further
gain in health and strength if my belief in it had been the
potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as
striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made
trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful expectation.
It is difficult to put all the evidence in such a matter into
words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases
one's conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had abundant
evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I
came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change
which came at that time was, first, the result of a change
wrought within me by a change of mental state; and secondly, that
that change of mental state was not, save in a very secondary
way, brought about through the influence of an excited
imagination, or a CONSCIOUSLY received suggestion of an hypnotic
sort. Lastly, I believe that this change was the result of my
receiving telephathically, and upon a mental stratum quite below
the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more
energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose
thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the
idea of this attitude upon me. In my case the disease was
distinctly what would be classed as nervous, not organic; but
from such opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come
to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is
an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities
and the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the
central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres,
can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can
be brought to bear. In my judgment the question is simply how to
bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable
differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but
show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the
means we should take to make them effective. That these results
are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and
others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination,
enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but
in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly
seems to enter in at all. On the whole I am inclined to think
that as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the
plane of the normally UNconscious mind, so the strongest and most
effective impressions are those which IT receives, in some as yet
unknown subtle way, DIRECTLY from a healthier mind whose state,
through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces."
CASE II. "At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith
and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful
experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was
placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about
which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis.
This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and
philosophy of this method of healing. Gradually an inner peace
and tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner
changed greatly. My children and friends noticed the change and
commented upon it. All feelings of irritability disappeared.
Even the expression of my face changed noticeably.
"I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion,
both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and
receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and
irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick
headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh.
I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely
disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching every
business interview with an almost morbid dread. I now meet every
one with confidence and inner calm.
"I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of
selfishness. I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual
forms, but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such
as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has
been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the
immanence of God and the Divinity of man's true, inner self.
[31] C. Hilty: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.Back
[32] The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852,
pp. 89, 91.Back
[33] I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to
think that she "could always cuddle up to God."
Back
[34] John Weiss: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.Back
[35] Starbuck: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.Back
[36] "I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day
refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they
are the most voluptuous of all sensations," writes Saint Pierre,
and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on
Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines
de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude--each of them more
optimistic than the last.
Back
[37] Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67.Back
[38] R. M. Bucke: Cosmic consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.
Back
[39] I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and
published monthly at Philadelphia.
Back
[40] Song of Myself, 32.Back
[41] Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.
Back
[42] "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic
friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling
particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the
phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still
rankled in his breast.
Back
[43] "As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a
bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to
procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest
things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of
life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic--or
maenadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit
reconciles me. R. L. Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355.
Back
[44] "Cautionary Verses for Children": this title of a much used
work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far
the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind
fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the
original gospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a
reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which
marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles
of England and America.
Back
[45] I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood,
especially the former. Mr. Dresser's works are published by G.
P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London; Mr. Wood's by Lee &
Shepard Boston.
Back
[46] Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another
reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on
"the Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures" is
published in the American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol.
x.). This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludes
that the cures by mind-cure exist, but are in no respect
different from those now officially recognized in medicine as
cures by suggestion; and the end of his essay contains an
interesting physiological speculation as to the way in which the
suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the
general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes:
"In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of
cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a
powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of
diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best
physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have
tried their hand at curing, but without success. People of
culture and education have been treated by this method with
satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been
ameliorated, and even cured. . . . We have traced the mental
element through primitive medicine and folk-medicine of to-day,
patent medicine, and witchcraft. We are convinced that it is
impossible to account for the existence of these practices, if
they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it
must have been the mental element that was effective. The same
argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics--
Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable
that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body
known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist
if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day;
it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true that
many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument.
There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the
failures, otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion. .
. . Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not,
and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases;
nevertheless, the practical applications of the general
principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent
disease. . . . We do find sufficient evidence to convince us
that the proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a
sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would
even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the
power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer
philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor
time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable" (pp.
33, 34 of reprint).
Back
[47] Horace Fletcher: Happiness as found in Forethought Minus
Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York,
Stone. 1897, pp. 21-25, abridged.Back
[48] H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.
Back
[49] Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography.
Boston, 1899, p. 54.
Back
[50] Whether it differs so much from Christ's own notion is for
the exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about
evil and disease much as our mind-curers do. "What is the answer
which Jesus sends to John the Baptist?" asks Harnack, and says it
is this: "'The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is
preached to the poor.' That is the 'coming of the kingdom,' or
rather in these saving works the kingdom is already there. By
the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by
these actual effects John is to see that the new time has
arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this work
of redemption, but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of
his mission. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address
himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of
sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the
ills, he never spends time in asking whether the sick one
'deserves' to be cured; and it never occurs to him to sympathize
with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a
beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he
calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all
wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great
kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the saviour within
him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is
overcome, when sickness is made well." Das Wesen des
Christenthums, 1900, p. 39.
Back
[51] R. W. Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N.Y.
1899. I have strung scattered passages together.
Back
[52] The Cairds, for example. In Edward Caird's Glasgow Lectures
of 1890-92 passages like this abound:--
"The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus
that 'the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at
hand,' passes with scarce a break into the announcement that 'the
kingdom of God is among you'; and the importance of this
announcement is asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a
difference IN KIND between the greatest saints and prophets who
lived under the previous reign of division, and 'the least in the
kingdom of heaven.' The highest ideal is brought close to men
and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be
'perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.' The sense of
alienation and distance from God which had grown upon the pious
in Israel just in proportion as they had learned to look upon Him
as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would
punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is
declared to be no longer in place; and the typical form of
Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between
this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews
had continually been growing wider: 'As in heaven, so on earth.'
The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from
the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is
not indeed lost; but it can no longer overpower the consciousness
of oneness. The terms 'Son' and 'Father' at once state the
opposition and mark its limit. They show that it is not an
absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible
principle of unity, that can and must become a principle of
reconciliation." The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147.
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[53] It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser,
which assumes more and more the form of mind-cure experience and
academic philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score
the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects.Back
[54] The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a
new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely
given up. The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most
mind-curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into
the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is
your own "subconscious" self), the moment the isolating barriers
of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico-materialistic
explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely
where they are left to act automatically by the shunting-out of
physiologically (though in this instance not spiritually)
"higher" ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in
inhibiting results.--Whether this third explanation might, in a
psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either
of the others may be left an open question here.
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[55] Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to
regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our
good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for
exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning
"merit." "Illness," says a good Catholic writer P. Lejeune:
(Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), "is the most excellent
corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not
one's self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the
direct expression of his will. 'If other mortifications are of
silver,' Mgr. Gay says, 'this one is of gold; since although it
comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on
its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the
providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are
its blows! And how efficacious it is! . . . I do not hesitate to
say that patience in a long illness is mortification's very
masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.'"
According to this view, disease should in any case be
submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances
even be blasphemous to wish it away.Back
[56] Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I
quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is
easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead
church members.
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[57] H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.
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[58] Dresser: Living by the spirit, 58.
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[59] Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 33.
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[60] Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214
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[61] Trine: p. 117.Back
[62] Quoted by Lejeune: Introd. a la vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.
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[63] HENRY Wood: Ideal suggestion through Mental Photography,
pp. 51, 70 (abridged).Back
[64] See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished
me by friends.Back
[65] Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse
integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers
assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best
be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What
is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each
corresponding to some part of the world's truth, each verified in
some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.Back
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