self from suffering in the process.84 The explanation she gives runs as follows: " Bishop Berkeley and I agree that all is Mind. Then, consistently with this premise, the con- clusion is that if I employ a dental surgeon, and he believes that the extraction of a tooth is made easier by some ap- plication of means which he employs, and I object to the employment of this means, I have turned the dentist's mental protest against myself, he thinks I must suffer be- cause his method is interfered with. Therefore, his mental force weighs against a painless operation, whereas it should be put into the same scale as mine, thus producing a pain- less operation as a logical result." This is very ingenious. The application of the anaesthetic to Mrs. Eddy's tooth was to operate not on Mrs. Eddy, directly, but on the dentist; it was not to keep the extraction of the tooth from hurting Mrs. Eddy, but to keep the dentist from thinking that its extraction would hurt Mrs. Eddy. But the real question of interest is, Why did Mrs. Eddy have recourse to a den- tist at all? 85 The toothache and the tooth, Mrs. Eddy and the operator, the soothing application and the cruel forceps were one and all illusions. It is safe to say that the extraction itself — the act of a nonentity on a nonentity — did not happen.
Sir William Osier tells us in a few direct words why Mrs. Eddy went to a dentist. "Potent as is the influence of mind on body," he writes, "and many as are the miracle- like cures which may be worked, all are in functional dis- orders, and we know only too well that nowadays the prayer of faith neither sets a broken thigh nor checks an epidemic of typhoid fever." 86 That is to say, directly, by its own power. It may do either, indirectly, through the gracious answer of the Almighty God who has infinite re- sources at His disposal ; who, as the old writer to whom we listened at the beginning of this lecture told us, creates physicians and medicines and gives them their skill and efficacy, that He, the Lord, may be honored in His marvel-
230 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
lous works. But Mrs. Eddy had no Lord to pray to, and no faith in which to appear before Him, and no hope in His almighty succor. Let us be thankful that she at least had a dentist.87
NOTES
NOTES TO LECTURE I
THE CESSATION OF THE CHARISMATA
i. W. Yorke Fausset, for example, unduly restricts the number of our Lord's miracles, speaking of the "severe economy with which He exercised such supernatural, or extranatural, powers." (Medi- cine and the Modern Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, pp.
175 ff.)
2. XapffffiaTa, or more rarely xvsu[j.<rrcx<£, I Cor. 12 : 1, or 86^on:a, Eph. 4 : 8.
3. Charismata: it is a distinctively Pauline term, occurring elsewhere than in Paul's writings only once in Philo {Be Alleg. Leg., 2 : 75) and once in the First Epistle of Peter (4 : 10), an epistle which, both in doctrine and language, is of quite Pauline character.
4. Cf. C. F. G. Heinrici, Das erste Sendschreiben des Apostel Paulus an die Korinther, 1880, p. 452: " Mosheim says that Paul sketches in this section a kind of Church Directory. That goes too far: but it at least contains the outlines of a Directory of Wor- ship in his community, for which it was at once made clear that in all matters which concern the value and effect of the worship- ping assemblages, caprice and confusion are excluded." W. Bous- set, Kyrios Christos, 1913, p. 106, describes very vividly, though on the naturalistic hypothesis explained in note 6 below, what their assemblies were for the Christians of the Apostolic times. "Here in the assemblies of the fellowship," he writes, "there arose for the believers in Christ the consciousness of their unity and peculiar sociological individuality. Scattered during the day in pursuit of their daily callings, subject in an alien world to derision and scorn, they came together in the evening (no doubt as often as pos- sible) for the common sacred meal. They then experienced the miracle of fellowship, the glow of the enthusiasm of a common faith and a common hope, when the Spirit flamed up and encom- passed them with a miracle -filled world: prophets and tongues, visionaries and ecstatics began to speak, psalms, hymns, and spiri- tual songs soared through the room, the forces of brotherly charity awoke in an unsuspected fashion, an unheard of new life pulsated
233
234 NOTES TO LECTURE I
through the crowd of Christians. And over this whole surging enthusiasm the Lord Jesus reigned as the head of His community, immediately present in His power with a tangibility and a certainty which takes the breath away."