faith-healing should be divorced from the medical profession. But none the less, even when the doctor administers drugs, he heals largely by suggestion; and this is no doubt the reason why drugs like dresses have their vogue, becoming suddenly fashionable and then losing their potency. Suggestion would also explain the success of homœopathy; and it is quite sufficient to account for the cures that seem to be worked by those graphically advertised patent medicines which disfigure our newspapers.

Nothing indeed illustrates the potency of suggestion more strikingly than its effect upon the action of drugs, and still more its power of causing breadpills or water to act like drugs, as in Durand's famous case, where an irresponsible house-surgeon tried an experiment on 100 patients in a hospital

"The house-surgeon administered to them such inert draughts as sugared water; then, full of alarm, he pretended to have made a mistake in inadvertently giving them an emetic, instead of syrup of gum. No fewer than 80 four-fifths - were unmistakably sick. How many of the rest suffered from nausea is not stated." 1

Normality of Mind-cure

66

Mind-cause and mind-cure are thus a recognised and undisputed force affecting normal healthyminded human beings. Let us be clear about this, because just as by a nervous person is commonly meant a person with weak nerves So a person susceptible to mind-cure is often regarded as a person with a weak mind. This was for some time

1 Dr. de Gros Durand, “Essais de Physiologie Philosophiques." D. Hack Tuke, Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body, 1884, I, p. 136.

the accepted view of the scientific pioneers: Charcot, for instance, and his school at La Salpétrière, as I have already said,1 thought that only hysterical persons could be hypnotised, till it was shown by the Nancy school that almost everybody can be brought under hypnotism. In the same way it is ordinary healthy-minded persons who are subject to mind-cure; and since women are often credited with a monopoly in this respect, it is necessary to emphasise the fact that men are susceptible to mindcure as well as women. Dr. Hack Tuke, in analysing the cases mentioned in his book, found that, in those where the sex was stated, 64 per cent. were males, and 36 per cent. females; and although he considered that the number of women might have exceeded that of the men, but for the fact that doctors would be more likely to notice and report the male cases, he concludes that "men are highly susceptible to mental impressions, and that, therefore, psycho-therapeutics are available for them as well as for women. It is not, as is so often intimated, only hysterical young ladies who come under the influence of this agency." 2

We may go a step farther and say that no medical authority would now deny the existence of spiritual healing. Of course, if a doctor believes neither in God nor the soul, he would not attribute the cause to the spiritual realm; but he would not deny the fact, he would only refer it to mental causes — in

1 See p. 33.

2 D. Hack Tuke, Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body. Appendix to 2nd ed., 1884, II, pp. 299-301. This is borne out by later writers: the difference between the sexes according to Liébeault is less than one per cent.

deed, this is what men like Charcot, Janet, Richet, Pitres, and the rest have for years been doing. They accepted the fact, but they endeavoured to attribute it to natural causes on the lower plane; this was their way with everything - Janet defined love as a form of mental disease, while Lombroso became famous even outside scientific circles by connecting genius with insanity. I shall speak about the religious element in mind-cure later on: meanwhile I for my part do not deny that religious healing is mental - I only deny the denial that it is anything more; and with this reservation I gladly accept the high testimony from the agnostic point of view of Dr. Maurice de Fleury in a book crowned both by the Académie Française, the Académie des Sciences, and the Académie de Médecine 1— and deservedly, since it has the distinction (less rare in France than in England) of being both science and literature

"La foi qui guérit n'est que suggestion: qu'importe, puisqu'elle guérit. Il n'est pas un de nous qui n'ait envoyé quelque malade à Lourdes et souhaité qu'elle en revienne bien portante."

In France, then, where they have in their midst the largest centre of religious healing in the world, it is possible for a doctor to claim that there are no doctors who have not made use of it.

Here is a cer

Here then is a common territory. tain area as to which there is no dispute. The possibility of religious healing is accepted by medical scientists, though naturally when they are un

1 La Médecine de l'Esprit. 7th Edition, 1905, p. 55.

believers they would interpret it according to their own categories, and call it mental — quite a good word which nobody need be afraid of.

Limitations in Mind-cure

The medical scientists would, of course, make strong limitations.

In the first place, those of them especially who are agnostics, lay great stress on the fact that all therapeutic miracles, being in their view mental, follow strictly the laws of nature and that nothing ever happens against those laws. One has never read, says Charcot,1 in the accounts of miraculous healing that an amputated limb has grown again; and Anatole France, in the Jardin d' Epicure, expresses the same thought in a more picturesque way,2 while Fleury points out that though a paralysis may be cured instantaneously at Lourdes the muscular atrophy takes some days to disappear.

3

Now, however much we may believe that such cures are due to spiritual forces, we may be sure that spiritual forces act through the mind, and we should not for a moment deny that they act naturally. That is, as I have elsewhere pointed out, the whole Christian philosophy of miracle; we require and we assert the principle that God acts through his own

1 La Foi qui guérit, 1897, p. 5.

2" Jusqu'ici les sépultures des saints, les fontaines et les grottes sacrées n'ont jamais agi que sur les malades attentes d'affections ou curables ou susceptibles de rémission instantanée. Le miracle n'entreprend rien contre la mécanique céleste."-Jardin d'Epicure, 1895, pp. 206-7. 3 La Médecine de l'Esprit, 1905, pp. 54-5.

laws; and if we read that an amputated limb had grown again we should at once discredit the whole source from which such a story had come. Charcot bears a high, unconscious testimony to the accuracy and good faith of ancient records of miraculous healing when he points out that they do not contain such occurrences. We know that grace can assist the undermind to succeed where otherwise it would have failed; but it cannot turn a man into an appletree or a cactus, it cannot act against the laws of nature, for the whole purpose of grace is to bring man into conformity with the whole law of God.

Thus all scientists, including the most religious, would make, and rightly make, the further limitation that only some bodily ills are curable by mental or spiritual means. And the most fanatical faithhealer would not deny this. He would admit, for instance, Charcot's contention that a man cannot by that faith grow a new leg—any more than he can add one cubit to his stature. This is impossible because it is against the laws whereby God causes us to be men: if we were lobsters, the feat would be too common to excite remark. But we are not: we have proceeded on other and higher lines of evolution; and if grace enabled us to act in this crustaceous manner, it would distort and degrade the laws of our humanity. Better far to hop about on crutches than to have the soul of a crab.

In the same way the extremest believer in faithhealing would admit that mind can neither replace a decayed tooth nor successfully fill the cavity; and I am told that those sects which are most scornful about material therapeutics make a wise and com