fame of others has been, if more splendid, at the same time less pure and less lasting. The name of a certain A. Schrader, for example, was in everybody's mouth twenty years ago. Then there was the romantic figure of Franz Schlatter, with his meteoric career in Denver and elsewhere in the West, as Messiah and divine healer.62 But perhaps the most striking of all these personages was John Alex- ander Dowie,63 whose work in Chicago as general overseer of the Christian Apostolic Catholic Church in Zion — the product of his activities — attained gigantic proportions. A Scotchman by birth, an Australian Congregationalist in previous ministerial affiliation, he created, rather than built up, in Chicago a great religious community, over which he ruled with despotic power, and in the "divine healing rooms" of which he wrought many a cure. No doubt, the proportion of successful cures wrought by him was not larger than in the case of others. If a note in one of the issues of his newspaper — Leaves of Healing — may be taken as a criterion, the work of healing in his hands can scarcely be pronounced successful. "I pray and lay my hands," he says, "on seventy thousand people in a year." That would give a hundred and seventy-five thousand in two years and a half. Yet in the two years and a half im- mediately preceding the date of this statement he reports only seven hundred cures.64 One success in every two hun- dred and fifty trials does not impress one as a very suc- cessful ministry of healing to the sick and sorrowing world56.
MIND-CURE
MIND-CURE
When we speak of "faith-healing" we use ambiguous language so far as we leave it undetermined whether we understand the healing in question to be effected immedi- ately by the action of the faith itself, or by the God to whom it is committed in faith.1 In the latter case the healing is, in the proper sense of the word, a supernatural one. In the former it is a natural healing, as natural as if it were wrought by a surgical operation or by a drug. This is, of course, not to say that God has nothing to do with the healing in this case; or, indeed, has not Himself wrought it. God has very much to do with the cures wrought by the surgeon's knife or the physician's medica- ments; so much to do with them that it is He who really makes them. It is to Him that the efficacy of all means is due, in general and in particular. It is a wise man of very old time who in one breath bids us look to the physi- cian with his remedies and to the Lord who is behind the physician and works in and through him and his remedies. "Honor a physician for the honor due unto him, for the uses which ye may have of him. . . . For of the Most High cometh healing. . . . My Son, in thy sickness be not negligent; but pray unto the Lord and He will make thee whole. . . . Then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him ; let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him." 2 When we think of cures wrought by means, we do not exclude God from them. But just because they are wrought by means, we do not ascribe them to God as their proximate cause. The point is that a cure wrought proximately by faith, or by any other mental act, or attitude, or state, is just as truly wrought by means as if it were wrought by a drug or a knife. And
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it is just as truly wrought by natural means. Our minds are ours, and all their acts and states are our acts and states; and all that is produced by them in any of their acts or states are effects of our own. Any cure supposed to be produced by faith itself is accordingly a natural cure, and that just as truly as any other natural cure whatever.