The variety of forms in which mind-healing is practised to-day is very great. They differ from one another less in the results obtained, or even in the means employed to obtain these results, than in the theoretical basis by which they severally attempt to explain their production. Wil- liam F. Cobb, the writer of the article on "Faith-Healing" in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, to which we have already alluded, enumerates its principal species as Mental-healing, Magnetic-healing, Spiritualistic-healing, and Spiritual-healing, that is to say, if we may employ the popular designations of typical forms of each to symbolize the several varieties, Christian Science, Mesmerism, Spiri- tualism, and Faith-Healing. This enumeration is by no means exhaustive, but it will serve our present purpose. The point of importance for us is that in the action of all these varieties alike, as Cobb justly remarks, a leading part is taken by suggestion. This suggestion, when given its most scientifically developed form, is called hypnotism. But, under whatever name, and employed under the gui- dance of whatever underlying theory of the nature of being, or of the process of the cure established, it operates after essentially the same fashion.5
It is only with those forms of mind-cure which have in one way or another closely connected themselves with re- ligion that we are for the moment particularly concerned. One of these forms, very prominent in the public eye at present, is that which is known as the Emmanuel Move- ment. Nothing could be further from the thought of the leaders of the Emmanuel Movement than a pretension to miraculous powers.6 It only professes to deal, prosaically enough, and with an almost ostentatious disassociation of itself from the supernatural, with certain classes of func- tional or nervous diseases — by means of suggestion, of
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course, but also by any other forms of mental and spiritual influence which experience may commend as useful. It does not bother itself overmuch with underlying theory, although it proceeds actually on the theory — which it pre- fers to look upon as observed fact — of a subconscious life, the storehouse of energy capable of being tapped and drawn upon for the purposes of our daily living.7 The common experience of the whole Christian past, it thinks, supplies it with a general support for its practice as an ac- tivity of the organized church. It quotes with particular satisfaction an entry in John Wesley's Journal for May 12, 1759.8 Here Wesley remarks on the helplessness of the physicians in the presence of a woman kept ill from fretting over the death of her son. "Why," Wesley asks, "don't physicians consider how far bodily disorders are caused or influenced by the mind, and in those cases which are ut- terly out of their sphere, call in the assistance of a minister, as ministers, when they find the mind disordered by the body, call in the assistance of a physician?" In the in- timate co-operation of the physician and the minister here desiderated, it is suggested, we have the whole principle of the Emmanuel Movement.9 As the physician must be called in to remove the bodily disorders which inhibit right spiritual functioning, so the church may well step in to aid in correcting those bodily evils which are ultimately the result of spiritual disorders.
We confess to being chilled when we hear of such things as "religious faith and prayer" being looked upon as thera- peutical agents for the cure of disease, and administered to patients as such. We are frankly shocked at the coupling together of faith and paregoric, prayer and podophyllin in a single comprehensive pharmacopoeia. We are too accus- tomed to thinking of faith and prayer as terminating on God, and finding their response in His gracious activities, to feel comfortable when they are turned back on them- selves and — while still, no doubt, addressed to God — used
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