and the consummation. These other values are those of truth, beauty, and goodness. In a psychotherapeutic sense, religious value is of first importance on account of its affective elements. Religious emotions are the strongest man feels. Any religious faith or practice which stirs up profoundly the emotions, if it have more or less cognitive direction, will prove a strong psychotherapeutic agent. As between a low type of religious faith and a high one, it will depend, to a considerable extent, upon the strength of emotions aroused and ideas associated with them. The low type may abound with healing power, while the high may not. If the emphasis is on intellectual definition and expression, healing will not have a prominent part, although there is nothing inherently against the possibility of a harmonious union of the intellectual and the affective, and there is evidence that this happy combination is becoming a more frequent type than it has been in the past. It has the promise of a more perfect development of man on all lines. While it is possible for a philosophical type of healing to exist, it will not have as wide and effective appeal as a religious one for the reason that the affective elements in it are not as likely to be recognized and employed as in a religious type.

Jesus' healing was the natural outcome of his nature. The intense love and compassion of his heart toward men drew them to him and aroused in them those deep affective responses which open the whole gamut of the psychical life and very powerfully stimulate the nervous and vital forces of the human organism, calling into play the latent power which is never suspected by the subject and those who know him. Hence the aspect of miraculous power attributed to them.

But the place he assigned to these works is secondary. He deplored the nonacceptance of him by his fellow countrymen and lamented the fact that they were ever seeking signs. It grieved him to think that they would not accept him on account of his nature, revealed especially in his teaching and life. While we may not, in the whole light of his wonderful person and of Christian history, accept his works as proof of the truths he taught and of the unique nature he claimed for himself, we do say that if we accept him and his teaching on their inherent merits, we most readily see how his healing works grew out of the same and are credentials of a valid though subordinate kind.

For an answer to the question whether there is justification for the spread of that type of psychotherapy known as religious healing, or whether psychotherapy should be limited to scientifically trained men, we must ask the reader to wait until a later chapter. There are a number of questions that must be answered before we are in position to answer this one. But we are now prepared to state that there is and ought to be, in the right and natural order of things, a religious psychotherapy, and it will be our purpose in our later discussion to show particularly what is its scope and how it should be handled.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGIOUS REALITY IN SOME TYPES OF HEALING

IF the question of reality is basal in the sphere of psychotherapy in its larger aspects, it is natural that any Christian system should seek to define clearly what it understands as reality. It is made the fundamental fact of their systems. In them we find the most positive and unequivocal expressions of the validity of religious reality. Such expressions are indigenous to the Christian system in any of its aspects.

Denny, in his Jesus and the Gospel, page 128, says:

"The greater they [the moral phenomena of Christianity] are, the more valuable in their spiritual contents, the more decisive in the history of humanity, so much the more inevitable must it seem that what lies behind them is not an illusion or a morbid experience misunderstood, but the highest reality and truth which have ever told with regenerating power on the life of man.'

This positive expression is seen in some of the systems of Christian healing. We first consider the Emmanuel Movement.

Worcester, in Religion and Medicine, says:

"It is not long ago that religion was regarded as a predisposing cause of melancholia, hysteria, insanity, but to-day we know that the type of character created by Christ, calm, loving, patient, unselfish, fearless, trusting, is the type best able to resist every form of

nervous disease and moral evil. Therefore it is that we offer this religion to those who seek our aid, seldom without success. In fact the willingness of even worldlyminded and apparently irreligious men and women to accept the character and teachings of Christ and to live by them, has been one of the happiest experiences we have been permitted to enjoy. Again and again have I heard a man who had not thought seriously of religion for years exclaim, 'I don't know whether I am going to recover my health, and the curious thing is I don't care nearly as much as I did. But if I live, I am going to be a better man than I have been in the past.'

"As a matter of fact, we possess in our religion the greatest of all therapeutic agents, if only we deal with it sincerely. The thoughts of a loving God within us, above us, and about us, who desires our peace, our happiness, and salvation, and who has better means than ours to remove our anguish, which He incessantly employs, is a consolation greater than our greatest need. A letter from a woman in intensely nervous condition caused by long insomnia and use of alcohol and morphia stated, 'I am astonished at the power which is doing this re-creating for me because I am perfectly conscious that it is in no wise my will. You must certainly set free some inspired spring of action. I feel no struggle, only a simple process of accomplishment.'

999

"The majority of patients either never had faith in religion or had lost it. Our first duty is to create faith, and the higher degree of faith we create, the better the result."

"One of the greatest pleasures of my life has been to discover how exquisitely the religion of Christ is adapted to the sick, especially to moral and nervous sufferers.”

"Only Christ is strong enough to save the world to-day, but to do this He must be allowed to free Himself from the iron fetters with which human tradition has bound Him. He must be permitted to confront humanity with all His divine reasonableness, His pity, His sense of God's nearness,

Alfred Farlow, in an article "One Mind or Minds Many," in speaking authoritatively for Christian Science, says:

"How continuous meditation on the supremacy of God heals the sick and overcomes sin may not be apparent to the casual observer, but it will surely become clear to the Christian who puts the practice to a test. It may be well to note here that thinking of God, as a matter of course, means and necessitates a consciousness of what God is, a realization of His various characteristics and attributes, and His relation to man and the universe. If such meditation is comprehensive, it must of necessity take in the very nature and essence of Deity. Among the myriad ideas which it includes, we might mention that it would embrace a consciousness that God is infinite Mind, eternal Life, immutable Truth, unchanging Love; that He is the only cause, the beginning and the end, the foundation of being, the ultimate sustenance, the author and the finisher of all things, that He is all in all; that since He is the only cause, that which He creates is the only effect; that the discords, abnormalities, evils, which appear to exist, being no part of the very good things which God created have only a mythical existence; they are but counterfeits of the real and spiritual creations, and that notwithstanding the fact that they appear to exist in erring, mortal experience and therefore must be grappled with and overcome through divine power; they belong only to erring mortal sense experience, which Solomon denominated 'the error of life.""

"Christian Science contributes very largely towards one's faith in God, by enlarging one's understanding of Him. Our confidence increases as our acquaintance enlarges. If we know only a little about God, we may have a small faith. If we have a misapprehension of God and look upon Him as the author of discord and calamity, we may dread Him rather than trust Him. The understanding that God is love, that He is infinite