amelioration had followed treatment by suggestion in cases of this kind
which had resisted all other treatment. Among these were instances
of neurasthenia (‘la grande hystérie’), claustrophobia, morphomania,
tendency to suicide, a morbid fear of cats. Dr. Seymour Tuke said that
he had found ‘suggestive treatment marvellously effective in cases
of inebriety in which the will was under some sort of control,’ but
that he was ‘unable to make encouraging report of the use of hypnotism
and suggestion amongst insane patients.’ [A useful and discriminating
testimony.] Dr. Lloyd Tuckey had cured ‘many cases of genuine
dipsomania, which could not be reached by drugs, by hypnotism--as well
as other intractable conditions, such as three cases of Menière’s
disease.’ Dr. R. H. Cole said that, twenty years ago, when he was
a House Physician, he first tried to hypnotise patients. Later, he
went to Paris and attended the ‘Salpétrière and Bernheim’s cliniques,
but was greatly disappointed in what he saw.... In his experience of
mental diseases he had only seen it do good in one insane patient.
It had never had any effect in his experience upon people with fixed
delusions, but it would cure dipsomania.’ Dr. T. F. Woods had treated
4000 cases, and he described a few of them in which he had obtained
remarkable results. One was that of a woman, with severe asthma and
delusions that she was going to be cut in pieces, who was cured by
suggestion at one sitting, and had kept well ever since. Another case
of severe sciatica, which had resisted every line of treatment for
eight months, was also cured rapidly. He did not find it necessary to
induce hypnotic sleep. Dr. E. A. Ash thought that ‘genuine hypnotism
(the state of somnambulism) was unsatisfactory in practice. Only a
small proportion of cases could be hypnotised, and these in his
experience did no better than those treated by simple suggestion. He
quoted two cases of nocturnal enuresis, one of which he had failed
to cure by hypnotism, whilst the other was cured by suggestion, and
a case of blepharospasm, which had been cured by suggestion, with
light massage on the eyelids, although a similar case treated only by
suggestion had not been relieved.’ Dr. W. H. Blake described ‘a series
of cases in which he had used hypnotism with the utmost benefit.... His
most remarkable cures had been effected in a case of asthma, for which
the patient was accustomed to drench himself unavailingly with drugs,
and in a severe case of dipsomania.’
Here we have grouped together the expression of the opinions of trained
minds of responsible medical men. The differences are comparatively
slight. The agreement is remarkable. Not one of them (though in one
case as many as 4000 records are in his hands) claims to have cured
what are usually called organic conditions. The whole question is as
to the best way in which suggestion can be brought to bear on patients
whose lives are in many cases rendered miserable by persistent, but
none the less ‘functional,’ ailments.
Moreover, we observe that the result of years of patient clinical
investigation is to lead them to treat every variety of psychic
therapeutics as a form of ‘suggestion.’ In no case is there so much
as a hint that a new force, viz. ‘spiritual healing,’ has appeared,
different in kind not only from other varieties of suggestion but from
the countless cults of spiritual healing, which have flourished and
disappeared in the past or the relics of which still survive in many
continental and eastern shrines.
Now, with regard to ‘spiritual healing’ in its present manifestation
in our own country the general attitude of medical science is well
described in an article which appeared in the _British Medical Journal_
of January 9, 1909. The article begins by describing some meetings
of different societies, in some cases mutually antagonistic, but
all existing for the purpose of advancing the claims of healing by
‘spiritual’ means. It goes on to say:
‘If all or any of them can show that they have discovered a new force,
or a new method of applying one already known, to the cure of disease,
rational medicine will welcome a new weapon. As we have often said,
the wise physician understands the action of the mind or the spirit
on the body, and uses it for the benefit of his patient. A man who
firmly believes in his doctor’s skill, or in the efficacy of the
treatment to which he is subjected, is in the best possible condition
for the operation of curative forces. On the other hand, a patient
who believes that nothing can cure him helps to seal his own doom.
Avicenna well said, _Plus interdum prodesse fiduciam in medicum quam
ipsam medicinam_. The “lady of the highest rank,” who is reported to
have said that she would rather die under the care of Sir Henry Halford
than recover under that of any other physician, must have been a living
tribute to his skill.
‘The fact cannot be too much insisted upon that there is nothing in the
least new about faith healing. 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. By all means let us know the full power of
the spirit over the body. Only let us have facts that can be fairly
and fully tested. A scientifically trained doctor takes nothing on
trust, and there can be no useful co-operation between medicine and
spiritual healing unless the facts of each case are fully disclosed.
That is the point where science and faith part company; the former is
as importunate as Arthur Clennam at the Circumlocution Office, and
the wonder workers are as painfully surprised at this as the youthful
Barnacle was at the persistence of “the fella that wanted to know, you
know.”’
Let us dispose at once of one simple question of fact. Modern medical
science has given the ‘spiritual healers,’ who claim to cure any
and every disease by touch or prayer or unction, an absolutely
fair hearing. Evidence is asked for, and, if it is forthcoming, is
patiently investigated, no matter how antecedently unlikely may be the
pretensions which such evidence is brought forward to support.
The general attitude of mind of the supporters of the ‘spiritual
healers’ is shown by the following illuminating extract, quoted by Sir
H. Morris in the course of a recent lecture on ‘Looking back’:
‘We have no difficulty in believing that ulcers that have a malignant
aspect may be healed by the hope that comes from a potent suggestion.
We have ourselves known of more than one case in which every clinical
sign of malignant disease of the stomach was present, and in which a
cure was effected by means that could only have derived their potency
from suggestion.’
People who are prepared to accept this _without clearly ascertained
and properly sifted evidence_ will accept anything. They simply
believe what they wish to believe. When one widely advertised ‘case of
spiritual healing’ breaks down on investigation, another is put forward.
Indeed, for the most part they have no idea as to what constitutes
evidence in these matters. In many cases the unsupported statement of
a patient, as to the diagnosis pronounced by a medical man, is calmly
accepted by them as though there were no need of further investigation.
We have heard, perhaps, more than enough of a highly placed dignitary
of the Church who believes (no doubt quite sincerely) that he was cured
of cancer by the ministrations of one of these ‘healers,’ after an
absolute diagnosis as to the existence of an inoperable tumour had been
made by a leading specialist. The repeated denial by the specialist in
question, that he ever supposed the condition which he examined to
be cancerous, makes no difference. The patient continues to announce
as a fact what is almost demonstrably untrue; and his followers will
no doubt continue to accept his statement in preference to first-hand
evidence, so long as this particular cult survives.
But, for those who are not blinded by ignorant credulity, the following
extracts from a letter from Dr. Combe Atthill may be of interest. Dr.
Atthill’s experience could, of course, be paralleled by any medical man
of long practice:
‘Shortly after I retired from practice, some ten years ago, a
well-known clergyman wrote to me, saying that members of his
congregation were being much disturbed by the advent amongst them of
a lady professing herself to be a faith healer, and saying that her
conversion was due to the fact of my having told her that she was
suffering from a dreadful disease, and that her sole hope of cure lay
in the performance of a very dangerous operation. She refused to submit
to this, and instead placed herself in the hands of “the healer,” and
was cured. He concluded by asking me to give him particulars of her
case.
‘I had no recollection of any such patient, but, as the name was given,
I traced her, and found the following particulars recorded in my case
book.
‘I had only seen the lady once in my own house, when she stated that
she was well past middle life, and for more than a year had been
weakened by a well-known condition.
‘On my telling her I must examine her she replied that she could not
submit to it that day for sufficient reasons, so I arranged that when
she was in a condition for examination she would let me know, and I
would call on her and examine her. I made no diagnosis, and gave no
opinion as to the nature of the case. I said no word about performing
an operation.
‘Instead of writing to me to call on her, she went to London. No doubt
an examination would have revealed the fact that no disease ever
existed.
‘It is impossible to deal with patients of this class. Their mental
equilibrium is disturbed; they distort what the doctor may say, and not
infrequently invent and circulate statements he never made.’
II. _The Society of Emmanuel_
Special attention has been directed of late to the claims of the
‘Society of Emmanuel.’ This society appears to profess adherence to
the tenets of the Church of England, though, except for Dr. Mylne
(formerly Bishop of Bombay), no well-known churchman, lay or cleric,
seems to be a member of the executive. The names of some ladies of
title are given in the list of the General Committee. The president
and principal ‘healer’ is a Mr. James M. Hickson. The objects of the
society are closely akin to those of other similar societies, except
that they have a distinctly ‘Church’ flavour. For instance:
‘To develop the Divine gifts left to His Church by the Master,
especially the gift of healing by prayer and laying on of hands, with
the object of using these Divine gifts ... for the healing of the body.’
A perusal of its literature reveals the usual pretension to cure and
to have cured any and every disease. Nothing like a tabulated list of
cases treated appears anywhere. The society has now opened a ‘Hospice,’
where free treatment (by prayer and laying on of hands, &c.) is given
by the aforesaid Mr. Hickson.
For some time the _British Medical Journal_, the official organ of the
British Medical Association, called attention to widely advertised
‘cures,’ and asked for information which would make it possible for an
investigation into the true facts to be carried out. The results were
hardly satisfactory. Here are some of the cases:
(1) In the _British Medical Journal_ (May 1, 1909) the following case
is given as recorded in _The Healer_ (the organ of the Society of
Emmanuel):
‘The patient fell and injured the patella, which had previously been
broken four times--two doctors expressed the opinion that he would
never have full use of the knee again. It was very painful and quite
callous (_sic_) at the time of the first treatment by prayer, but in
twenty minutes he was able to bend it without help; the following day
to walk about the house, and after four visits to resume ordinary
duties.’
Inquiries failed to elicit any details which would enable investigation
to be made.
(2) From the _British Medical Journal_ of June 5, 1909:
‘Mr. Hickson is reported to have said that he has another case of
“cancer of the throat” under his care; the patient had undergone two
operations before going to him, and is now apparently getting well. We
should be glad to have particulars of so interesting a case, but we
doubt whether they will be forthcoming.’
Apparently they were not. But the case was identified without
difficulty. A clergyman, the vicar of a country parish in the Oxford
diocese, was under ‘treatment’ by Mr. Hickson at this time for what
was undoubtedly cancer (epithelioma) of the larynx. A friend of mine
who saw him in the summer described him as being quite certain that he
was being cured, though he looked extremely ill and could hardly speak
above a whisper. A few weeks later the patient died. If Mr. Hickson
has anywhere publicly announced the failure of his ‘treatment’ in this
case, after having stated that the patient was ‘apparently getting
well,’ no such announcement has come under my notice.
(3) In its issue of June 12, 1909, the _British Medical Journal_
published a quotation from the _Evening News_, which ran as follows:
‘The following account of a cure of cancer is furnished by a lady
member of the Society of Emmanuel: “The patient was a Bishop of the
Church of England. The doctors abandoned all hope of a cure. Then Mr.
Hickson took the case in hand. He arrived on the morning of the day
on which the sufferer had to undergo an operation. Mr. Hickson prayed
with him and anointed him, followed by a laying on of hands (_sic_).
In the afternoon the surgeon arrived and made his examination. He was
greatly surprised. ‘The case puzzles me,’ he said. ‘There is a mark
of a new wound, but the cancer has gone!’ The cleric in question is
now perfectly well, and was with us the other day, but I believe the
surgeon has not yet recovered from his surprise.”’
The usual request to Mr. Hickson or any member of the Society of
Emmanuel to furnish details of this truly miraculous cure, which could
serve as a basis of investigation, followed, but no reply came to hand.
Again, I ask, has Mr. Hickson publicly repudiated this account of his
healing powers?
(4) The following is an extract from an article in the _British Medical
Journal_ of May 22, 1909:
‘SPIRITUAL HEALING AND CANCER.
‘One of the most serious difficulties in arriving at a correct
conclusion as to the curative powers claimed for spiritual healing
is the intangible nature of the evidence. For instance, most of the
patients on behalf of whom prayers were asked in the earlier numbers
of _The Healer_--which is published by Mr. J. M. Hickson, and which,
we suppose, may be regarded as the organ of the Society of Emmanuel
of which that gentleman is the president--are vaguely described
as suffering from “rheumatism,” “loss of nerve power,” “spinal
trouble,” “internal weakness,” “low vitality and great weakness,”
“heart trouble,” “internal trouble.” Some, indeed, are said to be the
subjects of “locomotor ataxy” and “consumption,” but no particulars
are given by which the diagnosis can be checked, and it is difficult
or impossible to trace the result of the treatment. In a report of the
past year published in the number for November 1908, Mr. Hickson does
give some details of a few cases. The two following taken at random
may be given as specimens: “Priest. Cancer in bowel. Specialist,
who examined him nine months ago under an anaesthetic, said that an
operation was impossible, and that he could not live for more than
about three months. He then sought help through Divine Healing, when
he was anointed with oil in the name of the Lord, and Mr. Hickson laid
his hands on him in prayer, after which he was examined by the same
Specialist, who found that a process of absorption was taking place.
He is now quite well.” “Lady’s Maid. Age about 28. Suffering from
rupture, which gave great pain. One year under treatment at Middlesex
Hospital, and, while waiting for an in-patient’s bed for operation,
was advised to seek help through Divine Healing. After three visits
to Mr. Hickson, two months ago, she is now quite well and strong, with
no pain or swelling. Her mistress also reports that serious defects of
her character are no longer apparent and her whole spiritual nature is
quickened and her duties are better done.”
‘These cases are sufficiently definite to be tested, and we should be
glad if Mr. Hickson would supply us with the information necessary
for the purpose. We should undertake not to publish the names of the
patients or any particulars by which they could be identified. We
should place the results of our investigation honestly before our
readers.’
Result: No reply. If the first of these cases is the one already
referred to, it will be observed that the clear and definite denial of
the specialist in question goes for nothing; also that, like all other
stories of the kind, this has lost nothing in the telling.
(5) The article goes on:
‘In the meantime, we have succeeded in tracing a case more remarkable
than either of the two just cited, and the result is very instructive.
It was related in the third number of _The Healer_ (March 1908, p. 9)
by the Right Rev. L. G. Mylne, D.D., formerly Bishop of Bombay, in
a paper entitled “The Anointing of the Sick for their Healing.” It
has already been quoted in the _British Medical Journal_ of January
9, 1909, p. 109; but, to enable the reader to form a correct judgment
on the subject, it must be repeated here. Bishop Mylne said: “In the
latest up-to-date book on cancer, which is in the hands of the most
scientific men of to-day, there is a case quoted which is, I have no
doubt, correctly said to be a unique one of _abortive_ cancer. The
case is fully described from a medical point of view--how a patient,
stricken unquestionably with cancer, was found to have, in place of the
tumour, something which could only be called abortive cancer, the like
of which was never heard of before. I happen to know the whole history
of the case from the brother of the patient, himself a medical man.
It was this: The patient had been suffering from a serious affection
of the throat. He went to one specialist after another. Three eminent
men told him without hesitation that he was suffering from a cancer
growing on the vocal cords, and that nothing but their total excision
could save his life. He was a hard-working priest of our Church, and,
of course, the operation meant that he would never utter a word again.
However, his life had to be saved. The doctors came; the throat was
laid open; the operator had his knife in his hand to excise the vocal
cords. He stopped dead. Instead of applying the blade of the knife, he
took hold, between his thumb and the handle, of all he found there, and
peeled it off, just like the skin of a fruit. Between the diagnosis
and the operation the patient had been anointed with oil in the name
of the Lord. That is one of not a few cases which some of us know
about, but it is by far the best defined one I know of, and one that is
actually celebrated in medical circles; not, of course, being quoted as
an instance of what may be done by anointing, but as a case unique in
surgical experience.” We went on to say that we should be glad to have
fuller particulars, and we respectfully invited Bishop Mylne to furnish
us with the name of the “latest up-to-date book on cancer” from which
he quoted.
‘In the meantime, we had been put on the track of the case by a
distinguished physician, and had obtained a report of the case from
the surgeon who operated. All, therefore, that was wanting was the
name of the book from which the quotation purported to be taken.
We communicated with Bishop Mylne on the subject, and we have to
acknowledge the courtesy with which he received our request for
information and the pains he took to procure it for us. _His Lordship
was, however, unable to gain the consent of those to whom he applied to
help in any way in supplying an answer to a very simple question._[12]
As the matter is one of general interest not only to the medical
profession but to the whole of mankind, we think it right to give the
true facts of the case, of course without disclosing the patient’s
identity.
[12] The italics are mine. The Bishop is one whose statements, made
on behalf of ‘spiritual healing,’ have been accepted by persons at
any rate adequately educated. He writes a preposterous account of ‘an
abortive cancer,’ and professes to quote from ‘the latest up-to-date
book on cancer, which is in the hands of the most scientific men of
to-day.’ On being asked to give the name of the book, he says that he
cannot ‘obtain the consent of those to whom he applied.’
‘The operator was Mr. Butlin, who has been good enough to give us
permission to publish the following account. He saw the patient, who
was at that time thirty-seven years of age, in 1890. There was then a
very white patch, flat and sessile, on the middle of the left vocal
cord, looking like a papillary growth. A month later the surface seemed
to be ulcerated. The patient was seen by other well-known specialists,
who, like Mr. Butlin himself, were puzzled as to the nature of the
disease. Tubercle, papillary growth and malignant disease were in turn
considered, but no definite conclusion was arrived at. The patient was
treated in various ways for four months before it was thought right to
open the larynx. Mr. Butlin then operated in the presence of an eminent
specialist, a distinguished surgeon, and another medical man, a friend
of the patient.’
Somewhat to curtail the account, let me simply say that when the larynx
was opened it appeared that they had to do with a case either of what
is known as leukoplakia or a rather rare form of papilloma. The latter
seemed on the face of it to be the more probable, though evidently
Mr. Butlin did not think so. Whatever it was, it was certainly not
malignant. It was scraped away without difficulty: no signs of
infiltration were observed, and, when last heard of, the patient’s
recovery seemed to be complete. The rest of the article in the
_British Medical Journal_ consists of some criticisms of Dr. Mylne’s
proceedings, which certainly do not appear to me to err on the side of
severity.
The Society of Emmanuel has at last consented to allow the British
Medical Association to carry out a full investigation into its alleged
cures. The report will be interesting reading. Incidentally, it will be
instructive to note how many of the above cases have been submitted to
the investigators.
Meanwhile, the danger is a real one. Probably an investigation into the
facts of the ‘cures’ reported by other ‘psychotherapeutic’ societies
would yield much the same results as have attended the inquiries into
the claims of the Society of Emmanuel. Not one of them, so far as I
know, even attempts to put its work on a scientific basis; and all
claim implicitly, if not explicitly, that they possess a power to cure
the most malignant organic diseases as well as functional neuroses.
If this cult is allowed to spread among the ignorant and credulous
(and it seems to me that, _pari passu_ with waning faith, the most
childish credulity is rapidly increasing in our midst, often appearing
in the most unexpected places), a golden opportunity will be offered
to plausible impostors, without even the pretence of a scientific
training, to set up as ‘healers’ and reap a rich harvest of gain. A few
startling successes will be widely advertised, and the huge tale of
failures quietly ignored. But a more serious danger lies behind.
I take the following from the _British Medical Journal_ of May 1, 1909:
‘A man with some slight symptoms of bladder trouble consulted an
eminent specialist, who discovered a small growth which could easily
have been removed. It was arranged that the patient should undergo an
operation. In the meantime he fell among Christian Scientists, who
persuaded him that he was quite well. And, indeed, for a time the
symptoms almost ceased. But the insidious disease remorselessly went
its way, till the unfortunate patient was past all surgery.’
If it be said that the societies I have mentioned repudiate all
connexion with Christian Science, I reply that by their fruits must
they be judged. Both Christian Science and the various associations
for spiritual healing profess to heal any and every disease, and offer
proofs of their claim, which, whenever they have been tested, have been
shown to be utterly without foundation.
III. _Spiritual Healing on a Scientific Basis_
In a book which has recently appeared, ‘Body and Soul,’ by the Rev.
Percy Dearmer, we have a serious and able attempt to put ‘spiritual
healing’ on a scientific basis. Considerations of space do not permit
me to deal as fully as I should wish with this really interesting
book, but, if I may try to put the general argument into a single
paragraph, Mr. Dearmer’s contention is as follows:
Bodily functions and bodily health are regulated and sustained by
what may be called the lower nerve centres in the medulla of the
brain. It is by the exercise of these centres, which in turn control
the circulation, the secretion of various glands, &c., that the body
combats disease. This work is continually going on and we are for the
most part quite unconscious of it. But, says Mr. Dearmer, ‘we now know
that these centres are in direct connexion with the higher centres of
the cortex of the brain.’ I should think we do. So did our ancestors a
hundred years ago. Their knowledge of the work of such centres as the
vasomotor, the respiratory, the heat-regulating, &c., was fragmentary
and imperfect to the last degree, but not one of them had any doubt
that myriads of nerve fibres connected the cortex with the medulla.
Let us, therefore, know how to stimulate the cortex, and all disease
(organic as well as functional) can be cured. Hence, when our Lord
cured Bartimæus’s blindness, and when a ‘healer’ cures locomotor ataxy,
they are performing a function quite as natural as in the case of a
doctor who cures malaria with quinine or restores the use of muscles
in musculo-spiral paralysis by the use of the interrupted current.
This sounds plausible enough. There is nothing very new in it; indeed,
when we come to analyse it, we shall see that, so far as general
principles go, there is nothing which was not perfectly familiar in
Sydenham’s day, or which the most materialistic practitioner of our
own time would not admit without a moment’s hesitation. But, of the
limitations of his process, Mr. Dearmer only seems to have a confused
idea. Let us take one of the instances which he adduces in illustration
of his argument. He is speaking (p. 33) of the familiar phenomenon of
blushing. ‘When a person blushes,’ says our author, ‘the small arteries
are relaxed and dilate, the amount of blood in them is increased, and
this hot red fluid flows in such quantities through the capillaries
of the skin that the skin itself becomes hot and red. It is strange
that the thought “He says I am a pretty girl” should cause the small
arteries to behave in this way; but the physiological explanation is
simple enough. These arteries are supplied with muscles which regulate
them, and all muscles are worked by nerves. The thought in the higher
conscious centres has somehow seen fit to hitch itself on to the
arterial muscles, just as when we telephone to a friend in the City
the exchange connects us on to his office. _Now, supposing it to be
possible to cure a man, say of indigestion by thought, the process
would be the same._’
‘Supposing it to be possible to cure a man of indigestion by thought,’
this is a statement which no one would wish to dispute. But I
expect Mr. Dearmer would be surprised to hear that the analogy of
the excitation of the vaso-dilator centre, which causes blushing,
can be applied to only a few varieties of indigestion. Roughly, the
commonest causes of indigestion might be said to be: (_a_) anæmia,
or an insufficient supply of blood to the mucous membrane of the
stomach; (_b_) an imperfect secretion of hydrochloric acid and the
digestive fluids owing to structural defects in the glands of the
stomach, usually a hereditary condition; (_c_) a dilated organ; (_d_)
some pathological condition of the accessory large glands, e.g. liver
and pancreas; (_e_) dyspepsia, owing to faulty balance of the nervous
system. Any one of these five is fairly common, but only in the
last is there a shred of evidence for supposing that suggestion or
any other factor which would cause the higher, and through them the
lower, nervous centres to show a healthy activity, would bring about
amelioration or a cure, while there is much evidence against any
supposition of the kind.
Mr. Dearmer elsewhere lays it down that healing by excitation of the
‘undermind’ is only possible where the case is ‘curable.’ If, he says
in effect, the case is incurable, then anything like spiritual or
faith healing or suggestion will fail to bring about a cure [will the
faith-healers kindly take note of this admission?], _but so will any
other more material means_. To this one may be permitted to reply:
(i) In many acute infections, e.g. scarlet fever, typhoid fever,
cholera, where complete recovery may be expected if (_a_) the infection
is not too virulent, (_b_) the resisting power of the tissues is
vigorous and unimpaired, suggestion in any form--hope, the desire
to live, the unexpected arrival of a much-loved friend, &c.--will
most certainly assist the patient to battle with the disease. But
these factors will always operate without the elaboration of a
psychotherapeutic philosophy, and really I do not like the idea of
encouraging the adoption of a solemn form of prayer, unction, and
the laying on of hands, when all the evidence to hand points to this
‘treatment’ having in acute infections just as much value as (but
no more than) the realisation on the part of the patient that, if
he dies at that particular time, his business will be left in an
unsatisfactory condition and perhaps in incompetent hands.
(ii) In the case of what are usually termed chronic ‘organic’
conditions, honours are no longer even. Let us take four crucial
examples.
(_a_) Malignant tumours.
Certainly we have no warrant for supposing that in any, except cases
of the extremest rarity, the ‘undermind’ can possibly effect a cure.
But in a very large number of cases which are taken sufficiently early
and are otherwise favourable, extirpation by the surgeon’s knife can
and does save the life of the individual and prevent recurrence of
the tumour. I say again that an attitude of hesitancy on this subject
by those who, like Mr. Dearmer, approach the question in a scientific
spirit, and their quasi-acceptance of the alleged cures of cancer by
spiritual and other healers, which hopelessly break down when anything
like impartial investigation is brought to bear on them--all this is
likely to be productive of infinite harm. In the case of cancer or
sarcoma a day’s delay may make the whole difference between hope and
despair.
(_b_) A class of disease of which a good example is tuberculous
affections of bone.
Here we have to do with what is strictly a non-malignant condition.
That is to say, there is always a fair ground for hoping that surgery
may operate like auxiliary steam power in the battleships of the
Crimean period. Help nature (or the ‘undermind’) enough and, other
conditions being favourable, a tolerably satisfactory result may be
expected. But, really, clinical experience in all civilised communities
for the past fifty or sixty years must be allowed to have some value;
and the value surely lies in this, that the experienced surgeon knows
more or less exactly when to excise or scrape and when to refrain.
That anyone should prefer to this the services of some unqualified,
inexperienced ‘healer,’ who bids his patient trust in prayer, unction,
or whatever his method is, telling him that if his faith is sufficient
the largest sinus will be cleared up and the most distressing ankylosis
broken down, simply strikes me with amazement. If the ‘healers’ really
wish us to believe their claims, let them produce a properly codified
list of cases which can be thoroughly investigated.
(_c_) Diseases in which certain drugs are empirically known to act with
marked success, e.g. malaria. Here, properly graduated quantities of
quinine _can_ and _do_ effect an absolute cure. There is no evidence
whatever that suggestion in any form can do the same.
(_d_) What may be called progressive organic conditions, e.g. cirrhosis
of the liver.
I entirely agree that, in the conditions of which this is an example,
scientific medicine can only hope to ameliorate and render life more
tolerable to the sufferer.
But here I come to close grips with our author, whose close and fair
reasoning it is a real pleasure to follow. In a very large proportion
of the diseases from which people die, the pathological condition
consists in the deposition of fibrous tissue in some organ or part of
the general system. The causes and clinical varieties are endless, but
the result the same. To instance only a few, we have:
(_a_) Granular kidney, i.e. chronic Bright’s disease.
(_b_) Cirrhotic liver.
(_c_) Arterio-sclerosis, resulting in cerebral hæmorrhage
(stroke--apoplexy--paralysis).
(_d_) Locomotor ataxy.
(_e_) Tuberculous peritonitis with adhesions.
Now, in all these, the fibrous tissue is first deposited as an
effort on the part of Nature to repair the damage done by an acute
or chronic inflammation. But, unfortunately, not only does this
fibrous tissue take the place of normal cells, whose activity is of
the utmost importance in preserving the health of the individual, but
it invariably tends after a time to contract; from which contraction
further damage and the gravest results are likely to ensue. It will
be observed that in its simplest form a fibrotic change is of the
nature of real repair. Thus, after a deep cut or extensive injury to
the skin, we all know that a ‘scar’ results. This affords admirable
protection to the damaged area. Nor does the subsequent contraction
seriously matter. Care has to be taken to allow for it in the treatment
of extensive burns, and considerable allowance is made for contraction
in the suturing of skin incisions made in the course of an operation.
But except when the scar is on the face, where it is objectionable
for cosmetic reasons, a contracting superficial scar is seldom a
cause of serious inconvenience. But the case is very different in
the kidney or the spinal cord. Contraction there causes an extensive
destruction of delicate cells, and, by cutting off the blood supply, a
great impairment of function, if not actual necrosis, of an infinite
number of cells which were not directly affected by the preceding
inflammation. And so the vicious circle goes on.
Does Nature make no effort to play the part of the spear of Achilles
and ‘heal the wounds which she herself has made’? Only to a negligible
extent, on account of the vicious circle just alluded to. So we have
the curious phenomenon that in the skin and round the broken ends of a
fractured bone (for what is called callus is really only fibrous tissue
with special bony elements superimposed) fibrous tissue is very slowly
but more or less steadily absorbed; while in the places where such
absorption would be of the utmost value to the individual it hardly
takes place at all.
Now, the reader will observe that this fibrous tissue is, in the first
instance, laid down by the activity of leucocytes acting, to some
extent at any rate, in obedience to impulses from the circulatory
centres of the medulla, to which Mr. Dearmer quite rightly attaches
considerable importance. They make up, in fact, his ‘undermind.’ I can
only say that, so far as any pathological evidence which we possess
justifies us in coming to a definite conclusion, we can but suppose
that a stimulation of these lower centres to greater activity, by
excitation through suggestion of the higher ones, would lead to a
further deposition of fibrous tissue, to the great detriment of the
general condition of the patient. Any attempt at subsequent absorption
seems to be practically negligible.
So, in the case of blind Bartimæus, Mr. Dearmer’s contention that our
Lord acted by suggestion is almost demonstrably untrue. At least, it
is only even remotely probable on the supposition that Bartimæus was
suffering from snow blindness, toxic amblyopia, or one of those rare
conditions following on such a sudden, but transitory, disturbance of
the nervous system as sea-sickness. And since snow blindness is for
obvious reasons unknown in Palestine, and since he certainly did not
use tobacco, and probably, like most Jews, hated the sea, this does
not seem to be a likely explanation. If, on the other hand, it was a
case of corneal opacity following trachoma, cataract, or glaucoma,
or some condition resulting in atrophy of the optic nerve, it may be
safely affirmed that the method of healing was emphatically not that so
carefully worked out by Mr. Dearmer.
IV. _The ‘Neurotic’ Theory of the Miracles of the New Testament_
The whole question of our Lord’s miracles of healing, regarded merely
as so many faith cures, has been discussed in an admirable essay
contributed by Dr. R. J. Ryle to the _Hibbert Journal_ of April 1907.
He had before him no such systematic attempt to defend this view
as that made by Mr. Dearmer, but only the rather loose theorising
of certain ‘Modernists’ who, however competent they may be to deal
with textual criticism, are hardly in their element when reviewing
pathological probabilities. Dr. Ryle quotes Professor Harnack as saying:
‘That the earth in its course stood still, that a she-ass spoke, that
a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never
again believe; but that the lame walked, the blind saw, and the deaf
heard will not be so summarily dismissed as an illusion.’[13]
[13] _What is Christianity?_
Others write to the same effect. ‘Progressive criticism,’ says Dr.
Ryle, ‘has adopted, with much assurance, the opinion that the diseases
which were healed were what doctors commonly speak of as functional
diseases of the nervous system, and that the production of a strong
mental impression was the means by which the miracles of healing were
brought about. Upon this point there seems to be a practical unanimity
no less decided than that which has been reached among critics of
the liberal school upon the other two points. Thus Dr. Abbott tells
us that the mighty works were simply “acts of faith-healing on a
mighty scale.” The “Encyclopædia Biblica” lays it down that “it is
quite permissible for us to regard as historical only those of the
class which, even at the present day, physicians are able to effect
by psychical methods.” Principal Estlin Carpenter (in the “First
Three Gospels”) says, “The real force which worked the patient’s cure
dwelt in his own mind: the power of Jesus lay in the potency of his
personality to evoke this force.”
‘The writers have adopted what may be called, for brevity, the Neurotic
Theory. It is for them to show by an actual examination of the records
that the ministry of healing which is admitted “to stand on as firm
historical ground as the best accredited parts of the teaching,”
consisted in the curing of neurotic patients by strong mental
impressions. Have they done so?’
Dr. Ryle has, of course, no difficulty in showing that they have done
nothing of the kind.
‘It is not too much to say that no one of the writers who has pinned
his faith to the Neurotic Theory has made any attempt to carry it out
in detail. We are offered a number of quite commonplace allusions to
the power of mind over body, and we find a complacent conviction
expressed in several ways by several writers to the effect that a
certain class of disorders, which are vaguely alluded to as “nervous,”
are promptly curable by emotional methods. But we do not find any
recognition of the fact that only a small portion of the diseases to
which human flesh is heir are nervous diseases; and that of nervous
diseases, again, only a very small and unimportant group admit of cure
in this way.
‘What the critics have to do if they wish to convince their readers of
the Neurotic Theory of the miracles of healing is nothing less than
this:
‘1. They must show that the diseases which Christ is said to have
cured were of the kind which experience proves to admit of psychical
treatment.
‘2. They must show some good grounds for the assertion that the way in
which the cures of the healing ministry were effected was the way by
which at the present day such cures are effected, when what has been
called moral therapeutics has been the method employed.’
The difficulty is obvious. If our Lord was merely a faith healer, the
results of long and laborious investigations into many faith-healing
systems, all presenting very much the same features both in methods of
treatment and effects, justify us in assuming that the number of cures
would have been strictly limited.
‘But then, quickly enough, would follow the discovery that the powers
of healing were available not for all, but only for a small and limited
group of disorders; for in any casual collection of sick people, though
there might be perhaps here one and here another suitable patient for a
faith-healing exhibition, the majority would be unsuitable. What, then,
of the failures?
‘The difficulty here referred to has not been wholly overlooked, and it
is worth while to notice how the attempt has been made to meet it. “Did
a kind of instinct (asks Dr. Abbott) tell Him that the restoration of
a lost limb was not like the cure of a paralytic, not one of the works
prepared for Him by His Father?” and again, “Experience and some kind
of intuition may have enabled Him to distinguish those cases which He
could heal from those (a far more numerous class) which He could not.”
‘The suggestion would not commend itself to a medical reader as a
very happy way out of the difficulty. The naïve supposition that
in cases of disease which require unusually minute and scientific
investigation diagnosis was made “by a kind of instinct” or “some
kind of intuition” is quite on a par with the innocent conception of
the nature of diseases of the nervous system which Dr. Abbott shows
elsewhere. Dr. Abbott would hesitate to allow that Jesus had a kind of
instinct to guide Him safely concerning the Davidic origin of a psalm
or the date of the taking of Jerusalem. Why should he imagine that he
was less likely to be at fault in the presence of equally difficult
problems of another kind? The assumption of an infallible capacity
for discrimination, which could arrive at correct conclusions without
the use of any of the methods and appliances of scientific medicine,
is merely to substitute one kind of “supernaturalism” for another.
A miraculous faculty of diagnosis is no easier of acceptance than a
miraculous cure. A “kind of instinct” is an absurd supposition.’
Dr. Ryle then examines in detail certain of the healing miracles as
related by the Evangelists. The result is to leave the intelligent
reader in no doubt that in nine out of ten of the cases of ‘paralysis’
brought to Him, our Lord would have been, on the ‘neurotic’ hypothesis,
no more likely to effect a cure than (to take Dr. Abbott’s example) in
‘the restoration of a lost limb.’ His clear account of the case of the
man with the withered hand, which the non-medical reader will be able
to follow without difficulty, is worth quoting in full.
‘In the story of the man with the withered hand it is probable that we
have to do with another case of paralysis; and if so, we may assume
with considerable confidence that the case was one of “infantile
paralysis.” This is the affection to which at the present day nearly
all the instances of “withered hand” or of “withered leg” are owing. A
child who has been in good health, or has suffered perhaps from a few
days of feverishness, is found to have lost power in an arm or leg.
The limb hangs flaccid and motionless. The muscles are found to be
wasting when the limb is examined a week or two later, and the limb to
be cold. For a month or two there may be a little recovery of movement.
This soon stops, and the arm or leg remains ever after more or less
powerless and shrunken and cold. Normal growth is largely checked,
and, in addition to the actual atrophy and arrest of development,
various contractions and deformities become established as time goes
on. After death the muscles are found to have become much diminished
and shrunken, and throughout a certain portion of the spinal cord,
corresponding with the affected limb, destructive changes are found to
have occurred where the normal structure of ganglion cells and nerve
fibres is replaced by the remains of the inflammatory process which
has been the cause of the palsy. Such is the ordinary history of a
withered hand. Here the very word “withered,” which aptly describes
the condition of the limb, is the most appropriate description of the
result of the process which has taken place. If such was the pathology
of the case described in Mark iii. 1, it is needless to say that,
although it belongs to the group of the nervous diseases, it does not
belong to that class of nervous disease which admits of treatment by
moral impression or emotional shock.’
If this is accepted in the case of what may truly be described as
‘nervous diseases,’ then _à fortiori_ the improbability of the view
taken by ‘progressive criticism’ is enormously enhanced when we come to
consider the healing of the blind, the ‘woman with an issue of blood,’
and others where the nervous system was not primarily, if at all,
affected.
The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be this. Medical science
has at her command a vast accumulation of clinical material on which
she is able to form a clearly reasoned judgment. There is no such
thing in Medicine as a ‘chose jugée.’ No single verdict ever found
but is open to revision if the evidence is satisfactory. But we do
claim that it should be recognised, by all who have the interests of
truth at heart, that the limits of ‘psychotherapeutics,’ ‘spiritual’
or otherwise, are, according to our present knowledge, sufficiently
well defined, and that nothing has yet been brought forward to warrant
anyone in making an exception in favour of any one society or method.
V. _Clergy and Doctors_
So much may be said on the critical side.
A few words, for many are not needed, may be added as to the positive
advantages of a clear understanding between the Church and scientific
Medicine, as to the spheres in which both may hope to operate in
fulfilment of a genuine desire to cure or alleviate bodily disease.
(1) The clergy have an unrivalled opportunity of taking the lead in
educating public opinion on the subject. In no other religious body in
the world is the ministry of so high a class, not merely socially (a
small matter) but intellectually, morally, and spiritually, as in the
Anglican Communion. As a result, I know no body of men better able to
come to sane and balanced conclusions on any subjects, the details of
which are within their own experience. They touch life at many points.
Their calling brings them into contact with vast numbers of people,
and they usually show in their dealings with others a broad-minded
tolerance and shrewd common-sense which is beyond praise. I do not
hesitate to say that, if I were accused of a crime which I knew I had
not committed, I should feel safer if the trial were conducted before
a jury of Anglican clergymen than before men drawn from any other
profession; but in this matter of ‘spiritual’ or ‘psychic’ healing
they have not risen to the occasion. An article in the _Church Times_
of February 18, 1910, lies before me. A dogmatic gentleman (or lady,
perhaps--the style is essentially feminine) writes the most confident
nonsense on the subject of the ‘Gift of Healing’ that ever filled two
columns. Here is an extract, not by any means the most precious gem
from the entire chaplet, but a fair example of the whole:
‘The gift of healing is simply a human gift ... like the gift of
music or any other gift, and also, like music, present in some people
more than in others, though probably present in some degree in nearly
everybody.... The gift transcends all knowledge, it cures diseases
considered incurable. Consumption, cancer, blindness, deafness,
cripples (_sic_), &c., this is within our practical experience to-day,
so that it stands to reason that the art of curing by medicine will
gradually disappear as the gift of healing grows and develops. Not
so the scientific knowledge of the doctors, which will be used more
and more where it ought to be used, and that is _in the prevention of
disease_.’
Comment would be quite superfluous. But what follows is instructive.
In the next issue of the _Church Times_ the irrepressible Mr. Hickson
and the ‘Warden of the Guild of Health’ rush into print with some
rather vague assertions about the ‘spiritual nature’ of this gift.
There is an extremely sensible letter from a doctor, pointing out with
great moderation that, if there is any evidence for those confident
assertions, he would be glad to know what it amounted to. No clergyman
seems to have thought it worth his while to disclaim agreement with the
wild statements of the writer of the article.
In the first place, then, I would appeal to the clergy to inform
themselves as to the limitation of ‘spiritual healing,’ according to
the immense mass of evidence which has been collected and does enable
us to lay down those limitations with sufficient accuracy for the
practical purpose of life; and to act as wise advisers to their people
in this matter.
(2) The clergy will do well to remember that a great deal of bodily
_ill-health_ may exist quite independently of bodily _disease_. These
cases are commoner than cases of organic malady. There is plenty of
scope for ameliorative work in connexion with them. At the risk of
being thought egotistical, I may be allowed to quote a case which
recently came under my own observation, and which is typical of a large
number of others.
A young man, who was clearly very far from being of a neurotic or
hysterical type, came to me complaining of severe pain in the region of
the heart. It had, according to his account, been gradually increasing
for some time. It frequently came on after he had run upstairs, and on
one occasion had been intense after running to catch a train. It was
sometimes accompanied by violent palpitation and breathlessness, and
had no relation to food. Would I tell him if his heart was all right? I
examined the heart and could find no trace of any abnormal condition.
Nor could I find any evidence of anything in the abdomen which would
be likely to account for the pain. I told him that his heart was
absolutely sound and that there appeared to be nothing to suggest
disease anywhere. A rather careful diet would do him no harm. If it
did not do any good, it would be easy enough to prescribe a tonic, but
I did not think it necessary. I never expected to see him again. Five
months later, however, he called and explained with much gravity that
he had come to thank me for ‘curing his heart.’ I then remembered the
case, and was fairly staggered. ‘But bless my soul,’ I said rather
brusquely, ‘there never was anything the matter with your heart.’ ‘No,’
he replied, this time with a quiet smile, ‘I know there wasn’t. All I
can say is that from the time you told me it was all right, the pain
disappeared, and I have never had any return of it. But, look here,
when it was there, _the pain was real_.’
I have no doubt it was. To label all such cases as ‘hysterical,’
‘neurotic,’ and so on (in the ordinary connotation of these terms)
is utterly unscientific. This young fellow was a sensible, cheerful,
rather unimaginative youth without a trace of ‘_neurasthenia_’ about
him. Yet, by coming to believe that his heart was diseased, he had
quite unconsciously so excited the higher centres that the vagus nerve
returned exactly the impressions to the brain which would be conveyed
by various morbid organic conditions.
Now, in such a case as this (and the number of them must be very large
indeed) the parish clergyman has a great scope for quiet, useful work.
Let him urge the patient not to dwell on his supposed condition, but
go at once to a competent practitioner and find out what exactly
(if anything) is the matter. The clergyman will find that (if he
has the patient’s consent) the doctor will make no difficulty about
affording him the fullest information about the physical condition of
the patient, and from their co-operation the happiest results may be
expected.
(3) Conversely, there are many cases where a sympathetic doctor would
be only too glad to be in touch with a parish clergyman. Occasionally
we get at the hospital a note from a clergyman, saying that X. Y. is to
call at the Out-Patients’ Department to-day, and that the writer would
be glad to know in confidence what is the matter with him. I only wish
we had more. If there is no objection raised by the patient, there is
no difficulty whatever about entering into the fullest particulars,
and in those cases (and they are far from infrequent) where the
patient complains of ‘worries,’ a sympathetic adviser on the spot
will probably do more to bring about an improvement in the physical
condition than all the compounds of iron, strychnine, &c., in the
hospital pharmacopœia. The full consent of the patient is, of course,
an indispensable preliminary. When this is obtained, the rest is easy
enough.
(4) 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.
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.
OUR LORD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SICKNESS
BY
W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.
VICAR OF CHEDDAR AND PREBENDARY OF WELLS
OUR LORD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SICKNESS
BY W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.
(1) Men are commonly influenced by actions and personal example much
more powerfully than by abstract teaching; and the Christian tradition
conforms to this principle in placing the three Synoptic Gospels in
the forefront of the New Testament. For they set before us the mind
of Christ in the words and acts of Jesus. Thus when the thoughtful
Christian is asked, ‘What is the Gospel view of disease?’ he will be
inclined to reply, ‘The question is a difficult one, but we may say
with some confidence that our Lord answered it by His miracles of
healing.’ A study of these and of their underlying principles may help
us towards the definition we seek.
The records are fragmentary. Yet they are warm with living realism. The
great facts of our Faith stand out before us in the moving drama of
the Synoptic Gospels,[14] just as truly as they are interpreted for
us in the spiritual Gospel, the Fourth. Jesus Christ is portrayed as
the Son of Man: and whatever else that most significant title denotes,
it speaks to us of His human activity, His practical and energetic
sympathy with the sins and sorrows of men. And this activity found
its exercise in two directions: teaching and healing. The association
of the two things is noteworthy, as indicating a great principle. The
sins of mankind are not unconnected with their sicknesses; spiritual
restoration with bodily relief. A calm of soul may bring rest to the
body. He who fulfilled in His earthly ministry the prophetic office
was also a ‘Physician of extraordinary achievement.’[15] To render
Professor Bousset’s words, though we cannot reproduce their eloquence:
[14] Euseb. H. E. vi. 14. 7. So called first by Clement of Alexandria.
[15] Professor Bousset’s _Jesus_ (3rd ed. 1907, p. 26).
‘How the simple populace must have hailed this Deliverer in every time
of need! With what unspeakable confidence they must have thronged
him! At his coming, despair lifted its head, dull eyes glistened,
weary hands and arms reached forth towards him. They trusted him
for everything, all things became possible. Body and soul with all
their needs they brought to him for healing. The cries of need and
anguish, the confidence which knew no limitations, the craving for
help, the faltering prayer, the shouts or sobs of joy, the tears of
gratitude--daily he moved in the midst of it all.’
Are we then to conclude that our Lord attached no less importance to
the cure of bodily ailment than to the spiritual redemption of men?
Much has been written of late years which might seem to imply this.
But the whole trend of Christ’s teaching forbids us to emphasise the
value of physical well-being at the expense of the master claims of
the spirit: witness His words in the Sermon on the Mount about taking
thought for the life or the body.[16] And therefore we must avoid mere
rhetoric and special pleading.
[16] Matt. vi. 25.
(i) It is plain, at the outset, that our Lord set certain limits to the
exercise of His healing activity. What has often been said of miracles
in general[17] may be said of the miracles of healing. There is a
severe economy in the exercise of such supernatural, or extranatural,
powers. This is illustrated by our Lord’s apparent reluctance to work
miracles when it is not certain that a true faith asks for it.[18]
In other words, the receptivity of men is necessary to the Divine
transaction with the sufferer.
[17] E.g. by Dr. Illingworth, _Divine Immanence_, p. 120.
[18] Cp. John iv. 48: ‘Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not
believe.’
Again, He is slow to exercise His power outside the boundaries of
Israel, within which He was pleased to confine His work of preaching
and healing. Possibly He knew that there He would be welcomed as a mere
wonder-working magician. He makes it a condition of His action that the
atmosphere should be one of real faith.[19] He could there do no mighty
works because of their unbelief.[20] Was it because of the waning
faith of the multitudes that, towards the end of His work on earth,
the Healing Ministry almost ceases?[21] Whether on this account, or in
the desire to escape the demonstrations of popular interest which the
miracles evoked, or because the full evidential effect of these ‘signs’
was now almost attained, He restricts His healing, life-giving power to
some four cases, one of them the raising of Lazarus. For each and all a
special reason can be found.[22]
[19] On this see next chapter, p. 209.
[20] Mark vi. 5, 6; Matt. xiii. 58.
[21] Professor A. B. Bruce, _Miraculous Elements in the Gospels_, p.
265.
[22] Luke xiv. 3: Vindication of the true principle of the Sabbath;
John xi.: Lazarus, His ‘friend,’ the only brother of Martha and Mary;
also Trench’s _Miracles_, p. 434 sq.; Luke xvii. 16: The universality
of His salvation; Mark x. 47: The appeal to the Son of David. (The
Healing of Malchus stands by itself.)
(ii) Christ’s healing activity was therefore strictly limited in
scope. It may be asked, Was it a ‘unique manifestation of a unique
Personality’[23] or did it differ in degree rather than in kind from
the wonderful works of human healers, or, at all events, of healers
who have wrought ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’? The latter view by no
means commits its advocates to a ‘humanitarian’ view of the Person of
Jesus Christ: while it amply satisfies the facts. Again, it is not
necessary, for the purpose of the present discussion, to digress into
the field of New Testament criticism. Renan, in his ‘Vie de Jésus,’
feels himself constrained to apologise for the miraculous action of
Christ, on the ground that ‘the rôle of thaumaturge was unwelcome to
him, but was imposed upon him by his contemporaries.’[24] To Loisy, a
critic of profounder learning and far more reverent temper, it appears
that the miracles were in reality ‘works of mercy ... and not a direct
argument in favour of the Messiahship of the Saviour,’ a complexion
which was afterwards put upon them more or less unconsciously by
the Evangelists.[25] But it is quite consistent with a reverent
acknowledgment of the Divinity of our Lord, and an acceptance of the
Gospel records in substance as they stand, to hold that the miracles
of healing--with the nature-miracles we are not here concerned--were
the simple outcome of that all-embracing human pity which, in itself,
betokened the expected Messiah; rather than an immediate exercise of
Almighty power, and the utterance, within the physical order, of the
Eternal Word. We find our Lord proclaiming Himself, in the synagogue
of Nazareth, the Fulfiller of that great prophecy of Isaiah in his
sixty-first chapter, in which the Messianic mission is set forth
in language in which a spiritual and a physical deliverance are
inseparably intertwined.[26] Similarly, in answer to the Baptist’s
message, the same blending of evangelical teaching and spiritual
healing is to be noticed; and, once again, sin and disease stand out as
the dominant factors in the condition of this present world.
[23] Illingworth, _Divine Immanence_, p. 119.
[24] Renan, _Vie de Jésus_, p. 264.
[25] Loisy, _L’Évangile et l’Église_, p. 17.
[26] Luke iv. 18: note the double sense in the words
(iii) But if the source of the miracles is thus to be sought in the
Sacred Humanity, that Humanity is, after all, the perfect ideal and
norm of all humanity. Whatever exceptional powers of genius, whatever
special faculties and latent gifts of mind and will have appeared at
rare intervals among men, these we should expect to find exemplified,
one and all, in the Life of Christ, had that Life come down to us in
a complete form. Now, it cannot be questioned that in every age a few
individuals have been found, who were endowed with a preternatural
therapeutic power, connected generally with a very subtle power of
sympathy, but, in some instances, if we may believe what we are told,
inherent in a person who had no wish whatever to exercise it.[27] That
some such virtue resided in Christ, and accounts for some part of His
healing work, need not be questioned. The records may be said to imply
it in two passages,[28] that which relates to the act of the woman who
touched the hem of His garment in the crowd, and that which speaks of
this method of cure as ofttimes repeated. They besought Him that they
might touch if it were but the border of his garment--and as many as
touched were made whole.
[27] See an article by Dr. A. T. Schofield in the _Contemporary
Review_, March 1909, for examples.
[28] Matt. ix. 20 (Mark v. 27); Matt. xiv. 36 (Mark vi. 56); also
Luke vi. 19: Power came forth from Him and healed them all. Cp.
Acts, xix. 11, 12 and v. 15; the Apostles and, apparently, our Lord
sanctioned a sort of sacramental medium of cure to meet the needs of
a simple populace.
It is possible, no doubt, to account for such cures on a purely
naturalistic hypothesis, such as that which Keim[29] accepts, viz.
that they were cases of faith-healing; a phenomenon which recurs in
connexion with nearly every form of religious belief, and in every
stage of social development. The influence of the spiritual imagination
on the bodily state is undeniable. Everyone knows something about the
phenomena of Lourdes and Bethshan, healing resorts which, theologically
speaking, lie at opposite poles. In a cruder form the same effects are
found in connexion with holy wells and relics of the saints.[30] We may
go back to the ancients and find wonderful cures reported in the pagan
world, from the shrines of Asclepius (the patron deity of physicians).
A blind man touches the altar of Aesculapides (as he was called at
Rome) on the island of the Tiber and receives his sight.[31] The
Emperors Hadrian and Vespasian used to touch for the ‘King’s evil.’[32]
[29] See Bruce, _op. cit._ p. 275.
[30] See chaps. xxvi. and xxxi. in Rev. Percy Dearmer’s _Body and
Soul_.
[31] O. Weinreich, _Antike Heilungswunden_, p. 63. Scholars will
remember how Plutus recovered his sight by incubation in the temple
of Asclepius in Aristophanes’ play.
[32] Weinreich, p. 75.
But can anyone study the miracles of our Lord as a whole (for we must
not lose sight of those wrought upon inanimate nature) and feel that
they are sufficiently explained by a familiar truth in psychology,
viz. that the religious imagination is able to stimulate the bodily
forces, whatever may be the spiritual soil in which that imagination
is bred? Faith, or a conscious receptivity in the mind of the patient,
was a frequent factor in the healing process; although there is really
nothing in the records to make us predicate it of Jairus’s daughter or
the centurion’s slave or the nobleman’s son. It is surely remarkable
that our Lord held Himself aloof from all those methods of cure which
might have suggested the enchanter and magician, particularly in the
case of demoniacs. The Jews, like other ancient nations, resorted to
the use of exorcism, incantation, and talismans, which owed their
potency to their effect on the imagination. Christ does not hypnotise
men or throw them into an ecstasy. Where faith is present, He gladly
works through it towards the salvation of the whole man. But often
there is a mere flicker of faith, a spark in the flax. In the sick
room, when the vital forces are enfeebled, the brain clouded, and the
spirits depressed by physical malady, it is a rare thing, surely, for
the flame of faith to burn brightly and the imagination to glow with
the consciousness of an unseen Presence. And the Church would have but
little encouragement to invoke for her own ministries the healing Power
of her Master, if it could only be enlisted on behalf of such patients
as already possessed ‘comfort and sure confidence in their Lord.’
We believe that the Church has something less elusive to offer her
people in their hour of need: and we return to the records of Christ’s
miracles in order to discover it.
(iv) The value of what is called ‘mental therapeutics’ is no longer
contested; it receives, and has received for some time, the careful
attention of the medical profession.[33] We approach the subject from
the religious standpoint, we base our study of it upon the teaching
and practice of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we must discriminate
between psychic treatment and spiritual treatment. The former term,
if applicable to religious treatment, can also denote forms of mental
cure which are unconnected with religion, e.g. the use of hypnotism.
But Christ addresses Himself to the Spirit (πνευμα), that highest
element of our nature, through which the mystics hold that we have
kinship with God, and in unison with which the Holy Spirit attests
our Divine sonship. His miracles are works of _spiritual_ healing,
they are wrought for the whole man, not only for soul, and certainly
not only for body. Christ’s view of healing is relative to His view
of disease, His view of disease to His view of human nature. Had
he attached to bodily health the supreme importance which it is the
tendency of our day to assign to it, and regarded bodily pain as a
thing at all costs to be effaced, we must suppose that His whole
Life upon earth would have been devoted to the relief of sickness
and pain, and that the ‘Healing Ministry’ of His Church would have
been far more clearly defined. But no more does He abolish disease
than He abolishes pauperism. The tendency of His teaching is to
inculcate self-sufficingness (the αὐταρκεία, of St. Paul[34] and the
Greek philosophers) in the face of all temporary evils and ailments,
the conquest of things material by the spirit, its supremacy in the
hierarchy of human nature; in a word, the principle of inner control or
autonomy, as the birthright of the human spirit. In his great picture
of the Transfiguration, Raphael has caught this contrast between
the calm of the heavenly Mount above and the ineffective, agonised
distraction of suffering humanity here below, in the person of the
lunatic boy and his father. But that heavenly calm of spirit is not the
self-centred aloofness of the Stoic. The doctrine of the Incarnation
brings the Divine Saviour down to men, lifts man up to the peace of
heaven,[35] and at the same time bids him find that peace in fulfilling
the bodily duties of his corporate Church life. It will not admit of a
selfish quietism. But before this peace of God which Christ proclaims,
the worry and ‘fear-thought’ of our overstrung modern age, its neurotic
sensationalism and morbid self-analysis, would retire abashed. Christ
would teach us that human nature is itself only when it is itself in
its completeness, when the physical is truly the instrument of the
spiritual. There is no dualism, no schism in human nature as Divinely
planned. The voluptuary and the ascetic are both at fault, the former
more so because he sins against the higher self. Christ is the Saviour
of the whole man, and to the sick He restores ‘perfect soundness,’[36]
nor does He refuse to be called the Saviour of the body.[37]
[33] See _British Medical Journal_, June 18, 1910.[**unmatched
footnote]
[34] Philippians, iv. 11.
[35] There is an adumbration of this in the four sublime truths of
Buddhism, which lead a man by the sacrifice of the lower self and the
helping of others to the final extinction of pain. Bishop Westcott’s
_Gospel of Life_, pp. 162, 163. Hardwick, _Christ and other Masters_,
p. 168.
[36] Acts iii. 16: St. Peter and the lame man.
[37] Eph. v. 23.
(v) It is a significant fact that in the Gospels the word for ‘save’
(σῴζειν) is applied to bodily as well as spiritual salvation; it
denotes ‘to restore to health or sanity.’[38] A protest may here be
entered against the very prevalent opinion that God sent sickness upon
man, by an Almighty fiat, in order to discipline him into patience
and other Christian virtues. Such a view, crudely stated, has led to
much perplexity and distress of faith, and it is not warranted by the
teaching of the New Testament. God can bring good out of evil, even
in its worst forms. But that is not to say that God by a deliberate
act designs and causes evil. More than once in the New Testament
sickness is attributed to Satanic agency, in the case of ‘the woman
which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years,’[39] and in that of
St. Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh.’[40] Disease is a disturbance of the
balance of human powers, mental and bodily, a derangement of faculties
and functions. Consider the bearing of this upon life. Modern science
teaches us the doctrine of the persistence of matter; in Sir Oliver
Lodge’s words, ‘a really existing thing never perishes, but only
changes its form’--in the case of our complex human constitution,
that change of form is what we call death. It is vital force which
maintains that inner harmony which we call health: it is disease, an
accident, which impairs it. This derangement and discord is but one
instance of that general disturbance of the world’s harmony which sin
has introduced. Sometimes, as in the case of the impotent man of St.
John v., disease is the direct consequence of sinful conduct. It is
the work of the Son of Man to restore harmony and repair the breaches
in Nature’s order. And this His healing power on its spiritual, which
is its essential, side effects. Incidentally, miracles are ‘signs,’
evidences of the Christian Revelation, but their primary character is
that of ‘mighty works’ (δυνάμεις), particular manifestations of that
Power (δύναμις) which resides in the Person of the Lord. As such they
impressed King Herod, though he attributed their authorship to the
Baptist risen from the dead.[41]
[38] E.g. Mark v. 23, 28; vi. 56; James v. 15.
[39] Luke xiii. 16.
[40] 2 Cor. xii. 7.
[41] Mark vi. 14.
(vi) This Healing Power of Christ stands in closest relation to His
claim to be ‘the Life of them that believe and the Resurrection from
the dead.’ It flows from His Personality. Though that Personality is
veiled for us in profound mystery, we know that in It the Human will
and the Divine will are in perfect accord; and, therefore, it does not
surprise us that, while a place is found in the Saviour’s Life upon
earth for weariness and pain, none is found for sickness; for, in all
things, He conformed to the Will of God for man, which is health, not
sickness. Sickness is a violation of that normal condition which God
has appointed for man. When infection and disease entered into the
world, we must believe that they were part of that general imperfection
which God can only be said to will as a means to an end, or as a
passing stage in the evolution of good. 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.
Recent psychology, especially in the investigations of Professor W.
James and the late F. W. H. Myers, has thrown a new light upon those
recesses of human nature in which our religious experiences take place.
We have learned that there is a subconscious self, a submerged portion
of our faculties, which responds to spiritual impressions and accepts
those suggestions of a Higher Power, to which mind and intellect are
sometimes deaf, a ‘subliminal self,’[42] in which religious faith
and the inspirations of genius are alike rooted, and which is _en
rapport_ with another world than that of the senses. We are reminded of
Tennyson’s words:
[42] I.e. a self beneath the margin of consciousness. Mr. Dearmer has
named it the ‘undermind.’
Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--
Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where.[43]
[43] _The Two Voices_
It is through that under-self that mental cures appear to operate.[44]
[44] ‘If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates
through the subliminal door.’--Professor James.
The theory certainly contributes something to our problem, making it
conceivable, even to our finite intelligence, how the Divine Life of
Christ should enter into man, sick of body and sad of soul, and this
quite in the line of the order and natural law of God’s universe.
Christ is one with the Father; He came down from Heaven to do the will
of the Father; His works are done in the Father’s name (John x. 25).
The Father hath given the Son to have life in Himself (John v. 26).
The Divine Life is communicated to those who seek it in Christ. We
are not to restrict the thought of that Life to the immaterial part
of our nature; it is the more abundant life which floods the being of
him who ‘liveth unto God.’[45] We may not fathom its hidden processes:
like spiritual teaching, spiritual healing can come home only to the
‘spiritual men’ whose minds are ‘in tune with the Infinite.’[46] But
some desire for ‘more life and fuller’ is found in every man. Classical
scholars will remember the pathetic lines written by the statesman
Mæcenas in his last illness:
[45] John x. 10; Rom. vi. 10.
[46] 1 Cor. ii. 14, 15.
Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa ...
Vita dum superest, bene est.[47]
[47] _Seneca_, Ep. 101:
‘What matters crippled hand and halting thigh?
So life be left the cripple, what care I?’
In this universal fact of human nature, this desire to live, which
varies infinitely among men from the mere craving of animal existence
up to the desire for the life in God, we see man’s response to the
Giver of Life.
The appeal of the Good Physician is to human nature, and ‘He knows
what is in man.’ He takes a natural emotion or faculty, vitalises
and invigorates it. We have had to keep the connexion of spiritual
health and physical health constantly before us. There is a parallelism
between them which is no mere analogy, but is a sort of pre-established
harmony; and therefore a wise interpretation of Scripture has seen in
the Miracle an ‘acted parable.’ Thus it is in regard to the ‘desire to
live’ which supports our bodily vitality. This categorical imperative
or instinctive ‘ought’ of health is a primary instinct. The ‘will to be
well’ corresponds with the ‘will to be good’ which is the basis of the
moral life.
(2) Bearing these principles in mind, we must turn to a closer
examination of some of the miracles, with a view to some practical
conclusions in regard to the healing office of the Church of our own
day.
(i) Has the age of miracles long ceased? It has long been assumed by
religious minds, as a kind of axiomatic truth, that this is so. They
have seen in the healing miracles of Christ the unique exercise of a
power specifically Divine, a power which was continued for a time,
with other extraordinary gifts, to the early Church for reasons which
no longer held good when once she had taken firm root in the world.
But we have already shown reasons for the opinion that, unique as
is our Lord’s Humanity, we are to regard it as conditioned by those
laws of nature and material existence which are the expression in the
visible sphere of the Creative will. ‘It behoved Him in all things
to be made like unto His brethren.’[48] And there is strong reason
to hold that the true believer will be permitted, in virtue of his
fellowship with Christ, to do ‘greater works’ than those which Christ
Himself wrought,[49] greater, that is to say, not in a material but a
spiritual way. That the works in question were wrought ‘in the spirit’
is unquestioned. Consider what those ‘spiritual’ methods of the Great
Healer were. He wrought His mighty works in the Father’s name. Not only
does He lay down for others the principle of intercessory prayer, but
as Man He exercises it Himself. Of the demoniac boy He says: ‘This kind
goeth forth not but by prayer and fasting.’ St. Luke records the fact
that He made the importunity of the multitude, who sought His teaching
and healing grace, a fresh occasion for retirement and prayer.[50] The
same Gospel tells us of a night spent in prayer before the election
of the Twelve Apostles.[51] They received His commission to heal and
to teach on the succeeding day, which saw also the vast concourse of
people resorting to Him once more from all quarters. In the account
of the raising of Lazarus it is clearly laid down that Jesus Christ
knew the Father’s will in virtue of fellowship with Him in prayer
and meditation, and that He exercised His own life-giving powers in
accordance with that Will.
[48] Heb. ii. 17.
[49] John xiv. 12.
[50] Luke v. 15, 16.
[51] Luke vi. 12.
Health in itself is an ideal, the perfect harmony of all the elements,
the spiritual and the material, which constitutes a man. One of the
greatest living authorities writes: ‘Health, like every other such
name, is to be used in a relative sense; absolute health is an ideal
conception.’[52] This being so, it is apparent to any religious mind
that the true concept of the well-being, physical and even mental, of
any person is only to be found in the Mind of God. And that is only an
abstract way of saying that, if we follow Christ’s example, we shall
seek to enter into His fellowship with the Father. In that Divine
fellowship we shall be able to pray for the true health and recovery
of our sick people. ‘The prayer of faith shall save the sick,’ for
faith implies a whole-hearted acceptance of the Will of God for the
uncertain future. This gives a man the tranquillity of soul which is no
less needed for prayer than for action. Such an one possesses his own
soul. Our Lord promises to those, who ‘have faith and doubt not,’[53]
that they shall ‘remove mountains,’ a hyperbolic expression, but yet
one which seems to claim a certain power of acting upon inanimate
nature.[54] Such a power need not carry with it a positive breach of
cosmic law. It is impossible for any really reverent mind to wish, even
in the supposed interest of his dearest friend, to bend the Will of
God to his own desire. Such a rash prayer involves the fatal flaw of
that ‘doubting mind’ which is forbidden us, the mind ‘divided’ between
God and self. The spirit which unites us to God, that unfathomed inner
self, desires the universal good.
[52] Professor Clifford Allbutt, _System of Medicine_, vol. i.,
Intro. p. 22.
[53] Matt. xxi. 21. Cp. James i. 6: ‘Nothing doubting.’
[54] See Dr. Sanday, _Life of Christ in Recent Research_, pp. 223,
224.
Our wills are ours, we know not how:
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
God wills the true health and salvation of each human soul, as He alone
can view it, in its relation both to the vast whole of immaterial being
and to the order of the material universe. ‘His will He knoweth which
way to accomplish.’ Prayer is the act of resignation of our individual
desires and thoughts into His all-wise hands. 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.
Prayer is the spiritual instrument on which our Lord in His Human
Nature relies, and on which He encourages His Church to rely--‘a mighty
engine of achievement.’[55] His method was grounded in prayer, the
prayer of that Divine fellowship, which is His, as it cannot belong
to any of the sons of men, and yet in Him, ‘in the Name of Christ,’
the Church must still expect to accomplish the miracles of faith, in
proportion to the degree of her own spirituality. Who, indeed, would
have looked for miracles of healing in the English Church of the
eighteenth century, unless it were among the non-jurors, who actually
revived the apostolic rite of unction,[56] and the pious followers of
John Wesley?[57]
[55] Sir Oliver Lodge.
[56] The Rev. P. Dearmer, _Body and Soul_, p. 289 sq.
[57] _Ib._ 362, 363.
(ii) But that spiritual power, thus resident in the Healer, has to
communicate itself to the subjects of His grace; subjects they must be
rather than objects. And His first purpose is to excite the dormant
energies of life and action. He does it as a wise physician will do
it, by concentrating the patient’s mind upon Himself.[58] This is done
by a question, or other means, adapted, with His profound insight into
character, to the individual case. In the case of the deaf man who had
an impediment, He effected this by isolating him,[59] and then using
physical means (with finger and saliva). Exactly parallel is the case
of the blind man, which, like the former, is recorded by St. Mark
alone.[60] He asks blind Bartimæus, ‘What wilt thou that I should do
unto thee?’[61] And this is one of several cases in which the sovereign
faculty of will leaps forth, and the confession of faith attends
it.[62] In the cure of the lame man by St. Peter (in Acts iii. 4, 5)
this concentration of the thought of the patient upon the healer is
reciprocal (ἀτενίσας ... ἐπει̑χεν).
[58] ‘When the eye of the patient meets the eye of the physician, the
cure begins if it is likely to take place.’--Dr. A. T. Schofield,
cited by Dr. Worcester in _Religion and Medicine_, p. 50.
[59] Mark vii. 33.
[60] _Ib._ viii. 23.
[61] Luke xviii. 41.
[62] John v. 6, 8.
The tonic influence of a healthy personality upon the hysterical,
neurotic, and mentally diseased, not to speak of minds depressed in
a normal way, is familiar to everyone. In Dinah Morris’s visit of
comfort to the widowed Lisbeth, we have a sample of that subtlest
perception and ‘subduing influence of the spirit’ which we may call
inspiration.[63] In the New Testament it appears at its highest in
treatment of those strong cases of dual personality, mental disorder,
or hysteria, which we know as demoniacal possession. We cannot here
discuss the question, whether the sufferer was the victim of the lower
elements in his own nature or of a malignant outside influence (known
in the language of the day as a ‘demon’). On the other hand, it has
to be remembered that the Jews personified ordinary diseases; and our
Lord conformed to popular ideas when ‘He rebuked the fever’ of Simon’s
wife’s mother, unless we hold that the evangelist has coloured the
record of His action by his own mentality.[64] On the other hand, we
know little as yet of the psychological problems of civilised humanity
and less of those of half-civilised or uncivilised peoples, such as
the Galileans of our Lord’s day. But if we should allow that the demon
was merely the sufferer’s lower ego, the marvel of the cure is not
lessened. There is a great power of evil in the world; and the lower
self was entirely dominated by it until Christ emancipated the man by
His sovereign demand upon his spirit. Inner harmony was restored. They
find the man ‘sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right
mind.’ The bodily and the mental well-being are combined in the cure.
The sufferer’s enfeebled will is braced up to respond to the Will of
the Healer, that ease shall expel disease. Within the man’s being, as
truly as without it, ‘imperavit ventis, et facta est tranquillitas
magna.’[65]
[63] G. Eliot, _Adam Bede_, chap. x.
[64] Luke iv. 39: _ib._ viii. 24 raises a parallel question.
[65] Matt. viii. 26.
(iii) An analysis of the miracles of Christ indicates His attitude
towards the material and outward means, on which the physician still so
largely relies. The letter of King Abgarus to our Lord (preserved by
Eusebius), genuine or not, indicates, we may believe, the feature in
His treatment which most impressed the men of His day. ‘The story hath
reached my ears of Thee and Thy healings as wrought by Thee without
drugs and simples.’ Though this was so, He did not eschew the use of
material and visible signs, such as clay and saliva, which were adapted
to convey to sick folk that ‘mental suggestion’ of returning health,
which was His constant method of healing. In the following miracles
the use of such material means is recorded: the case of the deaf man
with an impediment (Mark vii. 33), of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark
viii. 24), of the man blind from his birth (John ix. 6), who also was
sent to wash in the pool of Siloam. Of the Apostles, on their first
mission, it is said that they anointed with oil many that were sick,
and healed them (Mark vi. 13). Probably this element, which was in
frequent medicinal use, was in their hands ceremonial, a symbol of that
healing power of their Master which they were allowed in His name to
exercise. He Himself is found, in the great majority of instances, to
rely on the touch of the hand alone.[66] He knew that it spoke to the
heart of a Divine effluence of power as well as a human sympathy. In
one of the frescoes of the Creation, on the roof of the Sistine Chapel,
Michelangelo has pictured the form of the first man, perfect as a
statue, but lifeless until the Finger of God quickens it with a touch.
And, after all, a universal instinct associates ideas of sympathy and
positive relief with the movement of the hand. Thus in the Greek myth,
the distracted Io is comforted by the prophecy of Prometheus that the
God would restore her by his touch.[67]
[66] Thus Luke iv. 40; Mark i. 41, vi. 5; Matt. ix. 29; Luke xiii.
13. Mr. Dearmer gives a careful ‘Table of the healing works of
Christ,’ _Body and Soul_, chap. xiii.
[67] _Aesch._, Pr. V. 848, 849.
(iv) The healing of the nobleman’s son, of the centurion’s slave,
and that of the Syrophœnician woman’s daughter stand by themselves
as instances of ‘absent treatment.’ The strong impression wrought
in the mind of the father, the master, the mother, respectively, is
conveyed by a sort of telepathy to the mind of the patient. ‘Why
herein,’ surely, is a marvellous thing for those who cannot accept our
Lord’s claim to be the Son of Man in a unique sense--that He should
thus have possessed, 2000 years ago, a knowledge of the mysterious
processes of human nature which modern science is only now beginning
to divine. It is in that fact that the ‘glory’ (Luke xiii. 17; John
xi. 40), the ‘wonder’ (Matt. xxi. 15), the ‘strangeness’ (Luke v. 26)
of the miracles of Christ consist. They are ‘works of power,’[68]
‘outcomings of that mighty power of God which was inherent in
Christ,’[69] and which He exerted within a region of human nature then
unexplored. We cannot ponder too deeply on that great saying of St.
Augustine, ‘Portentum fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota
natura.’[70] Who shall attempt to lay down the laws which govern the
operation of the spiritual upon the material? and still more to delimit
the powers of the Personality and Will of Him, in whose name Apostles,
Saints of the Church, and humble Christians unrecorded in history have
wrought cures, which only a purblind scepticism can gainsay?
[68] Matt. xi. 20; Luke xxiv. 19; Acts ii. 22, &c.
[69] Abp. Trench, _Synonyms of New Testament_ (Art. xci.).
[70] _De Civitate Dei_, xxi. 8; quoted by Dr. Sanday, _Life of
Christ, &c._, viii., adding, ‘miracle is not really a breach of the
order of nature; it is only an apparent breach of laws that we know,
in obedience to other and higher laws that we do not know.’
THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING
BY
W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.
VICAR OF CHEDDAR AND PREBENDARY OF WELLS
THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING
BY W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.
The psychologists teach us that a man’s ‘self’ is a larger thing than
the ‘me’ which, we might say, a child has in view when it puts out a
hand to get a sweetmeat for itself. As Professor W. James says, ‘The
old saying that the human person is composed of three parts--soul,
body, and clothes--is more than a joke’; and he goes on to include
in that self the man’s immediate family, his home, the property he
has collected.[71] And then we think of Aristotle’s definition of man
as a ‘political’ or social animal--the social self with its wider or
narrower reach--for ‘properly speaking a man has as many social selves
as there are individuals who recognise him.’
[71] _Text Book of Psychology_, pp. 177, 178.
(i) All this has an important bearing on the subject of health and
disease. We are all influenced by our environment for better or worse.
The material and visible conditions of life, our home, our friends and
associates, our country, our daily occupations, contribute to make us
what we are. Life is defined by Herbert Spencer as ‘the continuous
adjustment of internal relations.’ It may be difficult or even
impossible to attain to the stable equilibrium of perfect goodness,
perfect health, perfect happiness; and, in fact, neither science nor
religion encourage us to expect such a consummation within the limits
of this earthly existence.
But there may be a ‘continuous adjustment’; and it must be the
practical aim alike of religion and of science to mould the individual
by the environment which will best harmonise his personal good with
the good of the whole. We have to elevate the conditions of human
existence. The individual has not only to adapt himself to his
environment, in the temper of _laisser faire_, but to adapt it to
the satisfaction of his highest good. ‘Great religious consciences
have taken their post, confronting society, as representing in
themselves truth and right, because behind them was God, while behind
existing societies there is only man, nature, and circumstances. Far
from consenting to identify himself with the social conscience, the
religious conscience 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. And much might have
been said of the duty of a Christian State to secure to all its members
the elementary conditions of a healthy, useful citizenship. Most of
our disease is a disgrace to our Christian civilisation, because it is
preventable. The ancient poet rightly associates the spectres of Care,
Hunger, and Fear with the grim forms of Disease at the portals of his
Inferno:
[72] Emile Boutroux, _Science et Religion_, p. 206.
Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae:
Pallentis qua habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas.[73]
[73] Virg. _Æneid_, vi. 273 sq. ‘Right in front of the doorway and
in the entry of the jaws of hell Grief and avenging Cares have made
their bed; there dwell wan Sickness and gloomy Eld, and Fear, and
ill-counselling Hunger, and loathly Want.’--J. W. Mackail.
(ii) But the problem of the prevention of sickness scarcely concerns us
here, though it requires a passing reference. It has been sufficiently
shown that you cannot isolate the individual from the society in
which he moves; that were to make him an unreal abstraction. The
Church has never committed that mistake in her dealing with the sick.
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. But,
however far our actual practice falls short of it, we must work towards
it. It is said of St. Francis of Assisi that, ‘in each one, with whom
he had to deal, he saw a possible Christ.’ A bold saying, had it not
been that the Master Himself had anticipated it.[75] In the Christian
view of things, the sick and suffering, whatever their religious
attainments and professions may have been, have a clear claim upon the
other members of the One Body. Christian faith can only heighten human
sympathy.
[74] Dean Savage, _Pastoral Visitation_, p. 76.
[75] Matt. xxv. 35, 36.
And in the New Testament there are not wanting indications that the
faith of friends has a vicarious efficacy. In such faith the force of
suggestion is at work, but it is a collective suggestion. There is
the typical case of the four friends, who were not to be put off by
the crush at the doors, but resolutely stripped the roofing in order
to lower the paralytic, as he lay on his pallet, into the Saviour’s
immediate presence. Such unconventional faith was irresistible. ‘When
Jesus saw their faith, He said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy
sins be forgiven thee.’[76] The bodily cure soon followed. The fact
is, that such faith diffuses a spiritual atmosphere; it is contagious
and works from mind to mind. ‘Our bodies isolate us, our spirits unite
us.’[77]
[76] Mark ii. 5. Cp. T. T. Carter, _Holy Eucharist_, pp. 150, 151,
especially the words, ‘To lean one’s own failing faith on the more
trustful, assured faith and convictions of others. So that the same
spirit may communicate itself to the sad and darkened soul by a
mutually organic sympathy.’
[77] Sir Oliver Lodge, _Man and the Universe_, p. 47.
Similarly, in the raising of Jairus’s daughter an emphasis is laid on
the necessity of a sympathetic atmosphere: first, by the fact that only
three, the elect among the chosen Twelve, SS. Peter, James and John,
were allowed to attend their Lord; secondly, by the exclusion of all
others in the house, except the father and mother of the child. The
professional mourners and musicians were turned out--not merely because
they ‘insulted the dumbness of sincere sorrow and the patient majesty
of death’ (Farrar), but because they diffused, as their behaviour soon
showed (κατεγέλων αὐτου̑), an atmosphere of unbelief. The Lord wishes
to remove all antagonistic and disturbing human presences and to speak
Himself in power to the innermost soul of the departed maiden. On the
other hand, if the air was charged with unbelief, if those He wished
to help were without faith, as was the case in His own village of
Nazareth, ‘He could there do no mighty work.’[78]
[78] Mark vi. 5.
We trace the same principle in His dealing with those whom He had
healed. Sometimes He bids them ‘go and tell their friends how great
things God has done for them,’ as when he refused to keep the Gadarene
demoniac by His side. At another time he bids them tell no man of
the cure which had been wrought. This difference of treatment can be
explained most simply, if we suppose that in the one case Christ knew
that the patient’s ordinary _milieu_ was favourable to his progress in
bodily and spiritual health, in another case He knew that this was not
so. So it was in the case of the leper of St. Mark i. 44. And, again,
this difference of treatment may have been ‘grounded,’ as Archbishop
Trench says, ‘on the different moral conditions of the persons healed.’
It is so still, for human nature remains constant to certain broad
types. Some overwrought people require the absolute isolation of a
‘rest cure’; others, who are moody and self-centred, can only rally
their disused powers in contact with invigorating companionship.
They are the unhappy victims of that numbness of spirit of which R.
L. Stevenson writes so pathetically in his essay entitled ‘Ordered
South.’[79]
[79] Cp. the medieval complaint of ‘accidie.’
(iii) This brings us naturally to consider the special value which
Christ attaches in His teaching to a corporate act of prayer. For this
is the meaning of the words ‘If any two of you shall agree on earth
as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them
of my Father which is in Heaven; for where two or three are gathered
together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.’ And this it
is which has moulded the form of the Lord’s Prayer, and that of the
great Sacrament of Unity, our highest act of intercession. Thus our
Lord enjoined upon His disciples the duty and the efficacy of combined
spiritual effort.[80] There is a power intensive, as well as extensive,
in collective prayer. In this, as well as in other activities of
the spirit, the total effect gained is larger than the sum total of
units of effort. There is a sort of analogy here with the force of
collective suggestion, which we have been considering above: but we
must not expect to find a complete philosophical explanation of any
great spiritual principle. Our personal experience verifies the value
of corporate prayer. If it were not so, religion would be an individual
matter alone; it would lack its most universal expression, that of
common worship. It is because the Church in our country lost for a long
period her corporate consciousness, at least in a large degree, that
she lost sight of the power of corporate intercession for the sick
members of the Body of Christ. (Of the faithful departed we may not
here speak.) But her formulas and liturgy have been a standing witness
against such obliviousness, with which the Church of to-day can hardly
be taxed, and those who profess their belief in the Communion of
Saints find in such intercession its most practical expression.
[80] Bertroux, _op. cit._ p. 189: ‘une volonté collective est sans
rapport avec la somme algébrique des volontés individuelles.’