The leaders of the Emmanuel Movement are theists. Therefore, instead of saying of an act of healing, "The forces of nature do it," they prefer to say, " God does it in and through the forces of nature." In accordance with their theistic presuppositions this is the proper account to give of any natural act of healing. No " miraculous agency" is supposed; "the forces of nature" do the work. But there is a God, and this God works in and through the forces of nature, and thus in the end it is God that does it. God does it, that is, in the same sense and after the same fashion that it is God that does everything that is done throughout this whole great universe. W. F. Cobb, to whom we have already alluded more than once, is not purely a theist ; he is a mystic. In describing the varieties of what he calls broadly faith-healing, therefore, he natu- rally reserves the culminating place for a variety which posits behind the act of healing, as its explanation, a mys- tical theory. It is not quite clear whether he would give his personal adhesion to all the details of this "spiritual healing," as he calls it.15 It is clear, however, that his sympathies go very largely with it, and that he looks upon it as, in the main at least, the true rationale of faith-healing. Its main postulate is that all physical disease, without ex- ception, is the result, directly or indirectly, of psychical disorder, and is to be struck at, therefore, not in the body, where only symptoms manifest themselves, but in the soul, where alone lie the causes. What is sought is to procure for the soul of the sufferer an influx of spiritual lif e ; and this life can be found, of course, only in God. "The power which alone can heal the soul," we are told, "is God." God, now, is reached by "faith" — the faith, it is to be observed, however, not of the sufferer, but of the practi- tioner, for in this form of theory a healer is necessary.
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"This faith is defined as a quality in the spirit of the healer, . . . which enables him to render quiescent his 'mortal mind,' and so to place his spirit in a positive state of calm, poised and at peace, and a channel for the Divine Spirit to pass through to the sufferer." The state of openness and serenity thus described as faith, we are further told, is simply the normal condition for prayer. We may express the process, therefore, by saying that spiritual healing is the product of the power of God directed by faith through prayer to the soul that needs healing. Hence, it is said that it is God, and God alone, who performs the act of healing, and that all healing is obtained by the in- flux of spiritual life into the soul from God; although the door of ingress into the soul is opened for it by a practi- tioner, the soul itself being in a state of passive, not active, faith in the process. The healing is conceived thus as in a true sense supernatural: an influx into the soul from without. Accordingly, it is asserted, there can be no real failure in it. An influx of spiritual life from God, the source of all life, must bring benefit. If this benefit does not show itself on the physical plane, it is nevertheless there — the soul at least has the benefit.
From a mysticism like this it is but a single step to open pantheism, and that step is taken by the form of mind-cure which is most in vogue among us:16 that which calls itself for some inexplicable reason by the name of Christian Science.17 There is a sense, of course, in which — just because the fundamental elements of her thought are pantheistic— Mrs. Eddy will not allow that her Christian Science is mind-cure. It is not "mind-cure" with a small "m," she affirms, but "Mind-cure," with a capital "M."18 But just because her fundamental thought is pantheistic, this is merely a verbal distinction. She is intensely em- phatic that her Mind-cures are "not supernatural but su- premely natural." 19 In its practice Christian Science does . not differ greatly from other forms of mind-cure. Per-
208 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
ceiving, or at least acknowledging, less readily than the Emmanuel Movement the limitations of mind-cure, it accepts, like the spiritual healing of which we have just been speaking, all kinds of cases — although the range of its actual cures, as Elwood Worcester dryly remarks, is not enlarged thereby.20 Its real differentiation from its . sister systems lies wholly in the pseudo-philosophical back- ground which it has washed in with a broad brush behind its activities. This certainly is portentous enough, but it serves only for ornament, and has no effect on the prac- tice of the mind-cure, which is the real source of the move- ment's vogue. It is incumbent on us before we close this series of lectures to give some account of this system of mind-healing, which has become a religion, and has in the course of a very few years overspread the earth.