The late Doctor St. John Roosa once described mind- cure as faith-cure run to seed.21 The characterization is true as a general proposition in the history of thought. Man is a religious animal, and the religious explanation of phenomena antedates, in this department of thought also, the naturalistic. It is also, in the longer historical se- quences, true of the ultimate origin of the particular species of mind-cure which Doctor Roosa had in mind, that is to say, Christian Science. For Mesmer derives from Gassner, and Christian Science is unquestionably a granddaughter — however ungrateful a granddaughter — of Mesmerism.22 But there is no immediate affiliation of Christian Science with faith-cure, and certainly the adherents of Christian Science do not look upon themselves as its deteriorated descendants. They rather set themselves in irreducible antagonism to it.23 Not indeed that they deny that effects are produced by it. They appear to allow even that Faith- Healers may obtain effects which they cannot themselves obtain; or at least more readily than they can obtain them. Mrs. Eddy has her characteristic way of accounting for this. "It is asked," she writes, "why are faith-cures
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sometimes more speedy than some of the cures wrought through Christian Scientists?" And she answers thus: "Because faith is belief and not understanding; and it is easier to believe than to understand Spiritual Truth. It demands less cross-bearing, self-renunciation, and divine science, to admit the claims of the personal senses, and appeal for relief to a humanized God, than to deny these claims and learn the divine way, drinking his cup, being baptized with his baptism, gaining the end through per- secution and purity." It must not pass without notice that a somewhat odd admission is made here that the re- sults obtained by Christian Science may also be obtained without Christian Science ; sometimes more speedily than by Christian Science; by an appeal, for example, to a human- ized God; by the open road of faith, that is, rather than the difficult path of understanding. How anything can be ob- tained by an appeal to a humanized God is a puzzle, seeing that it is presupposed that no such being exists. The Faith- Healers only cry out to the void, and yet they get their re- sults, and that sometimes more quickly and always with less effort on their part, than the Christian Scientists.24 Various methods of accounting for this remarkable fact have been suggested. Marsdon says faith-cures are really mind-cures, wrought by "anything that will enable a sick person to change his thought," that is to say, they are not Mind-cures but mind-cures, wrought by our own change of thought, which indeed is asserted scores of times by Mrs. Eddy herself. Mrs. Kate Taylor, with much the same implications, explaining the difference as that faith-cure requires faith to be healed, and mind-cure does not, adds: "Prayer to a personal God affects the sick like a drug that has no efficacy of its own, but borrows its power from human faith and belief. The drug does nothing because it has no intelligence." Similarly Frances Lord represents the differ- ence to be one of theory only, not of practice, while with respect to the theory she remarks that there is more to be
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known than the Faith-Healers admit.25 Such statements undoubtedly show that Christian Scientists do not deny that faith-cure may be acknowledged to be an undeveloped form of their better practice. But this does not carry with it any implication of immediate historical connection.