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WHAT SHALL MAKE US WHOLE? 
 
WHAT SHALL MAKE US 
 WHOLE ? 
 
 OR 
 
 THOUGHTS IN THE DIRECTION OF 
 
 MAN'S SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL 
 
 INTEGRITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 HELEN BIGELOW MERRIMAN. 
 
 « MAR 21 f888 r 
 
 / 8" 
 
 BOSTON: 
 CUPPLES AND HURD, 
 
 94 Boylston Street. 
 
 i 888. 
 

 Copyright, 7555, 
 
 By H. B. Merriman. 
 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
TO 
 
 &nttetta ©ettrute ^xzwtx. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 THIS essay was begun at the request 
 of a few friends, and without any- 
 thought of book-making. Its appearance 
 in the present form is not intended to 
 claim for it either completeness or per- 
 manent value. It is at best but a rough 
 and imperfect sketch of a spiritual pos- 
 sibility now coming into the field of hu- 
 man vision. It attempts only to fix a few 
 points and establish a few relative values, 
 in anticipation of the time when human 
 research and experience shall complete 
 the picture. 
 
 As the essence of a sketch is its group- 
 ing of details in order to handle them in 
 their larger relations, so in this essay meta- 
 physical terms are used with less regard 
 to the distinctions between them than to 
 their common aspect as expressing phases 
 of the universal life. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
WHAT SHALL MAKE US 
 WHOLE? 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 TWO men paint the same landscape. 
 One of them sees first the details, 
 — the flowers and rocks of the fore- 
 ground, the cattle, the individual trees; 
 these he represents one after another 
 with painstaking fidelity, and is surprised 
 to find that the sum of them does not 
 make a satisfactory picture. The other 
 notes first the contrast between land and 
 sky ; marks how the light falls broadly on 
 the meadow, sweeps up one hillside, leav- 
 
1 6 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 itual as well as the physical being of man, 
 and he will probably tell you that the spir- 
 itual is too vague an element to be ad- 
 mitted into his calculations in any practical 
 way. He agrees, perhaps, that man's men- 
 tal and spiritual condition must affect his 
 physical health ; but he feels that the spir- 
 itual realm is quite distinct from that in 
 which he labors, and that its laws, if it have 
 any, are too little understood to be relied 
 on in a practical emergency. And yet, if 
 God's will is the central controlling force 
 of the universe, which it must be if God 
 exists at all, man's relation to Him must 
 transcend and include all other relations 
 in which man stands, and must form not 
 only a factor, but the prime factor in all 
 life's problems. Any attempt to harmon- 
 ize life's discordant elements must surely 
 fail of complete success so long as this 
 prime factor is left out. The physician 
 confesses this when he uncovers his head 
 to the mystery of life and death, and owns 
 
Introduction. 17 
 
 that in this direction his art has limitations 
 which he can never hope to transcend. 
 
 Meanwhile some plain people, not over- 
 burdened with scientific knowledge, remem- 
 bering the miracles and mystic sayings of 
 Christ, deeply convinced of the reality of 
 unseen things, have here and there cher- 
 ished the belief that in some way disease 
 can be routed by spiritual weapons, and 
 man made in the end so perfectly whole 
 in body and spirit that disintegration and 
 death will have no hold upon him. To- 
 day these theories are set forth in a more 
 coherent form than ever before, under such 
 names as " Mental Healing " or " Mind 
 Cure," " Faith Cure," " Christian Science," 
 etc. 1 Faith is the essential element in them 
 all; but the more thoughtful class have, 
 
 1 These are all different phases of the same move- 
 ment. " Christian Science " tends to magnify the indi- 
 vidual. " Faith Cure " relies on God, without making 
 much effort to understand the methods of His working. 
 " Mind Cure " holds a wise course between the two, and 
 is by far the most promising for future usefulness. 
 2 
 
1 8 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 as a result of their faith, discerned certain 
 spiritual laws which give solidity to their 
 work, and go far to justify them in claim- 
 ing for the new practice the name of a 
 spiritual science. 
 
 Faith leads us to turn towards something 
 as yet unseen, but which we think may ex- 
 ist. If the thing is really there, it becomes 
 more and more apparent to us as we turn, 
 so that gradually our faith is merged in be- 
 lief and positive assurance. The mental 
 — or, better, spiritual ■ — healers, starting 
 with a profound faith that God is the great 
 Reality, and that man, in virtue of his re- 
 lation to God, is first and chiefly a spiritual 
 being to be influenced most potently from 
 the spiritual side, have had the courage 
 of their convictions, and by surrendering 
 themselves to this view of things and put- 
 ting it into practice down to the smallest 
 detail, they have achieved such success in 
 healing as in the minds of many abun- 
 dantly proves the Tightness of their as- 
 
Introduction. 19 
 
 sumption, and transfers their practice from 
 the uncertain realm of faith to the terra 
 firma of established principles. 
 
 The advance they have made is thus an 
 ethical, one might almost say biological, 
 rather than a merely intellectual one. The 
 propositions which the teachers of Mental 
 Healing advance with unquestioning faith, 
 and in unusual terminology, are none other 
 than the deepest spiritual truths of Chris- 
 tianity. These truths are unfolding to 
 man to-day in a thousand ways as never 
 before, leading many persons to believe 
 that we are on the verge of a new spirit- 
 ual era, a blossoming of the whole age, a 
 second coming of Christ in the hearts of 
 his people. The special credit due to the 
 Mind Cure is, that its disciples have dared 
 to insist that these deepest spiritual truths 
 shall become practical, operative, regnant, 
 here and now. 
 
 This is, after all, the greatest service that 
 can be done for mankind, — to bring truth 
 
20 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 out of the realm of the abstract, and 
 incorporate it with daily life. It always 
 requires great courage and faith to do this, 
 and never more than now, when science 
 has so exalted the truth of physical facts 
 that spiritual truth, which often revolution- 
 izes these facts, can scarcely get a hearing 
 in some quarters. 
 
 If the Mind Cure really heals the sick, it 
 will soon have followers enough, and win 
 its way in spite of all opposition; but in 
 these early days, when it is struggling for 
 recognition, it needs a word to show that 
 its basis is one on which all who recognize 
 the spiritual life can agree. The Church 
 should welcome it as helping men to re- 
 alize God so practically in all things as 
 to overcome the deep scepticism which 
 haunts even the most spiritual lives. If it 
 can be shown that God is so immediately 
 present in man and in matter that He can 
 be appealed to directly for all good ends ; 
 if His Spirit is a practical working force 
 
Introduction. 21 
 
 so close at hand that each of us may 
 use it with confidence in the small as 
 well as the large matters of daily life, on 
 the sole condition of a Tightness in such 
 use, which is but another name for right- 
 eousness, — if this can be proved true and 
 brought home to the experience of men, 
 it will do much to check the growth of 
 materialism which now threatens to take 
 on such alarming proportions. 
 
 Why do we say "it" and not "he," in 
 speaking of the Spirit? Simply because 
 the Church, although she has long taught 
 the divine personality of the Spirit, has 
 not succeeded in making man trust to its 
 help in the smaller details of life. Rever- 
 ence has held God at arm's length from 
 His world. The present need is to make 
 man conscious of the universality of Spirit; 
 and to achieve this we lay aside the pro- 
 noun " he " for the time being, though we 
 do not relinquish the idea which the per- 
 sonal pronoun implies, — for in man's liv- 
 
22 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 ing and personal relation to the universal 
 Deity lies his hope of being made finally 
 whole. 
 
 The following pages are an attempt to 
 set forth in familiar terms the philoso- 
 phy and practice of Mental Healing. It 
 should be said that although the names 
 " Mental Healing" and " Mind Cure" are in 
 such general use that it seems necessary 
 to employ them here, they are somewhat 
 misleading, because they give an impres- 
 sion that the cures are wrought either by 
 the influence of the mind over the body, 
 or by the influence of one human mind 
 over another; neither of which is wholly 
 true. The human mind — or better, spirit 
 — can achieve nothing that is good except 
 as that mind becomes the channel of the 
 infinite Spirit of God. As this truth is 
 more clearly recognized, we may hope that 
 the names now in use will give way to 
 more adequate ones, such as " Spiritual 
 Healing," " Spiritual Science," etc. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MENTAL 
 HEALING. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MENTAL 
 HEALING. 
 
 THE philosophy of Mental Healing is 
 the extremest idealism. Its leading 
 propositions may be thus stated. 
 
 God, the only Reality, forever creates, 
 from a necessity of His own being. The 
 material universe, culminating in man and 
 finding its true cause and explanation in 
 him, is but an expression of God's thought. 
 All created things below man move in 
 blind obedience to God's will as we know 
 it under the name of natural law. In man 
 we find a being endowed with the power 
 of choice, of dual action. He may turn 
 away from material things to recognize and 
 
26 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 believe in God, his source, or he may turn 
 away from God and believe in his own 
 foreshadowing, — that is, material things, 
 thereby endowing them with a delusive 
 appearance of reality. Reality, in the last 
 analysis, is the underived power to produce 
 effects, and can be predicated only of God. 
 Man's mistaken choice, whether caused by 
 ignorance or self-will, his tendency to look 
 away from God and put confidence in ma- 
 terial things, has been and is, the source 
 of all his sin and sickness. The whole 
 duty imposed on man by God is the duty 
 of turning to and recognizing Him. This 
 duty includes all others. Failure to per- 
 form it produces disorder, which, if we 
 accept it, becomes sin on the spiritual 
 plane, and sickness on the physical. 
 
 We become conscious of disorder only 
 when it causes us pain ; hence we are apt 
 to confound it with pain, which is a serious 
 mistake. Pain is man's perception of his 
 lack of conformity to God's idea of him. 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 27 
 
 It is a sign of life, — a sign that the Divine 
 idea is deeply implanted in man. We feel 
 pain spiritually just in proportion as the 
 ideal is revealed to us, and we become 
 aware how far we are from perfectly ex- 
 pressing it. This perception comes to us 
 slowly on the spiritual plane, because the 
 spiritual ideal is not distinct to the mass of 
 mankind and thoroughly accepted by them. 
 On the physical plane, however, the ideal 
 is clearer. The reason it hurts a man to 
 cut his finger is that his finger is meant to 
 be whole. The perfect ideal of our bodies 
 is so inborn in us, so much a part of our 
 life, that we are not conscious of it until it 
 is impaired in some way. It is a common 
 saying that only the sick know how to 
 appreciate health. 
 
 Pain is a sign of life, but also a sign that 
 life is not yet perfect. We are born with 
 this imperfection; and because the pro- 
 cess of driving it out by turning to God 
 for more perfect development involves an 
 
28 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 acceptance of pain, in other words a sacri- 
 fice, we, from a mistaken fear of pain, turn 
 away from God and thereby store up more 
 and more pain for ourselves in the greater 
 wrench with which we must turn back to 
 Him by and by. Thus, pain even unto 
 death has become necessary for man in 
 order to free him from his captivity to 
 material things, and prove to him that the 
 only reality is in God. Pain is the measure 
 of man's divergence from his true life, but 
 it is also the pledge of his return to it. 
 Because God and our perfection in Him 
 is the only reality, man is bound — tied 
 by cords which he may strain but cannot 
 break — to return and conform himself to 
 God at last. Man by his struggles makes 
 pain a devil to hold him captive through 
 fear, when it should be an angel to lead 
 him to God through faith. 
 
 If pain is not an essential part of sin and 
 sickness, what are these when considered 
 in themselves ? Merely disorder, — imper- 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 29 
 
 feet expression; bitter realities to us so 
 long as we accept them and let our fear 
 of pain hinder our turning from them to 
 God, but mere mal-adjustments, soon to 
 be remedied, if we face resolutely our 
 ideal, and accept with joy the healing pain 
 that comes w T ith the self-revelation involved 
 therein. The special point made by the 
 mental healers is, that this truth applies in 
 physical as well as in spiritual relations, 
 because all life is really one. In other 
 words, if man can be led to turn his whole 
 being towards God, he will be freed from 
 sickness as well as from sin; because all 
 material things, including every atom of 
 man's body, will then fall into harmony 
 and order, becoming, as they were meant 
 to be, truly expressive of God's thought. 
 If, on the other hand, man is not wholly 
 turned towards God; if, though believing 
 in the reality of the spiritual life, he still 
 doubts its power over the body, — still 
 doubts that spiritual life includes all other 
 
30 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 life, — then disease, the physical disorder 
 that exists in us all because we are not yet 
 purely expressive of God's thought, has 
 for him a reality which holds him in thrall 
 until he is led to turn away from it, and by 
 that turning destroy its existence for him- 
 self and for others. 
 
 A most important point is the question 
 of reality as related to man. The Real is 
 the royal, the ruling power. It is life, it 
 is God ; all else is negation and death. In 
 so far as man accepts God and becomes 
 like God, disorder ceases to rule, — that is, 
 to have a reality for him. Sin and sickness 
 may become unreal to man if he chooses 
 to make them so. Man stands between 
 two possible realities, — spirit and matter. 1 
 Either may become positive, or ruling, to 
 him according as he believes in it, and by 
 his belief becomes himself the complement 
 
 1 We say "matter," but we really mean that spirit of 
 negation and despair which is the only voice that speaks 
 to us through matter when we look at it apart from 
 God. 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 3 1 
 
 of it. Whichever he thus makes positive 
 and real to himself causes the other to 
 become negative and have but an inverted 
 existence for him. Man's freedom would 
 seem to make it a matter of indifference 
 which he should choose ; but in truth the 
 whole force of creation is set to make 
 him choose wisely and recognize spiritual 
 things. His only chance for health and 
 happiness, and for solving the problems of 
 existence, lies in his lending faith to, and 
 thereby making real to himself, the spiritual 
 life centring in God. Thus, man's " free 
 agency," in its right — and in the end only 
 possible — outworking, is seen to be iden- 
 tical with God's " sovereignty." In propor- 
 tion as man resolutely sets his being in the 
 direction of God, the natural life and all 
 material things have but a negative and 
 inverted existence for him; but — and this 
 is the strangest part of all — the natural 
 life and all material things when standing 
 in this negative and inverted relation to 
 
32 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 man are found to express a harmony, 
 beauty, and use that they had only hinted 
 at before. They become pure expressions 
 of God's thought, and therefore full of all 
 that is beautiful and wholesome. Being 
 no longer confounded with the thought 
 they were made to express, they become 
 immaterial in both senses of the word; 
 that is, they become un-material, transpar- 
 ent to the Divine idea, and immaterial in 
 the sense of unimportant, because, having 
 done their work and delivered their mes- 
 sage, they can be safely changed and trans- 
 muted, as we scatter the type with which 
 a sentence has been printed, in order to 
 use it again to print a different one. It is 
 along this line of thought that the believers 
 in the Mind Cure foresee for man an ulti- 
 mate spiritual control over all the forces of 
 Nature. We have only the smallest begin- 
 ning of it as yet ; but that we have any at 
 all is proof of the rest. Full control can- 
 not come to man until he understands and 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 33 
 
 accepts perfectly God's idea as expressed in 
 every material atom, — in other words, until 
 his will becomes completely identified with 
 God's will; because not until then can he 
 be sure of making no changes except such 
 as are perfectly in accord with that law or 
 being of God which is Life. 
 
 As soon as man is capable of perceiving 
 order and harmony (that is, as soon as 
 he rises above the brutes), he sees traces 
 of them in material things, and he also sees 
 infractions of them there resulting from 
 the interaction of forces not yet wholly 
 harmonized. It is natural for him to be- 
 lieve that the order, as well as the dis- 
 order, inhere in material things as such. 
 The great lesson for him to-day is that 
 he is the key of the situation; that in 
 him it lies to make more and more dis- 
 order by so believing in material things 
 that they become real, or ruling, to him, 
 or to bring order, harmony, and joy to 
 the whole world of Nature by making his 
 
 3 
 
34 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 life so tributary to God that through him 
 all Nature becomes obedient and finds a 
 voice to speak the word enshrined in it 
 from the beginning, namely, Eternal Life. 
 On man lies the responsibility; to him 
 is given the honor of thus turning the 
 creation right side out; of giving to each 
 form on earth its right explanation, and 
 thereby revealing that form to itself. 
 
 A deeper perception of the nature of 
 life produces a keener sense of the respon- 
 sibility and prerogative of man ; and con- 
 versely, in proportion as man shoulders 
 his responsibility and uses his preroga- 
 tive, the nature of life is unfolded to him. 
 Mental Healing has made an advance in 
 both these directions. It has dared as- 
 sume man's highest prerogative, — that of 
 bringing life to men from God, and has 
 gained a profound sense of what life 
 really is. 
 
 Life may be broadly defined as mutual 
 recognition. Life absolute exists only in 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 35 
 
 God, who is the source of all real life. 
 Man never truly lives till he recognizes 
 God. God does not wait for man's rec- 
 ognition in order to live, because with 
 Him this long delay which we call time 
 does not exist. The end and the begin- 
 ning — Alpha and Omega — are one in 
 mutual recognition in Him. Our perfec- 
 tion already exists in Him, and answers to 
 His thought and love. The whole healing 
 virtue of the Mind Cure lies in its abso- 
 lute faith in this great truth, — that man's 
 perfection is already complete in God. 
 
 Life is mutual recognition. Half-life, 
 or existence, results from cognition by a 
 higher type. The vegetable world exists 
 by virtue of cognition by the animal ; ani- 
 mals depend for cognition on man, and 
 are in a degree capable of re-cognizing 
 him and thereby attaining a more com- 
 plete life than is possible for the plant. 
 This process, whereby each grade of life 
 sustains the grades below itself, goes on 
 
36 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 unconsciously to us, because our belief in 
 material forms is so inborn that our life 
 flows out to them without our being aware 
 of it. It is not until we are startled into 
 questioning our relation to them, that we 
 begin to withdraw our confidence in their 
 apparent reality, which thereby receives 
 its first death-blow. We are in no way 
 to blame for the support that goes out 
 from us towards material things, nor do 
 we in any way suffer from it so long as 
 it is unconscious. It is only when our 
 confidence in them has been shaken by 
 intimations of our higher life, of the true 
 reality, that we become self-conscious, — 
 that is, aware of our lack of adjustment 
 to God the Real. Then the process of 
 detachment from material things must go 
 on more and more, and we involve our- 
 selves in much trouble and confusion if 
 we continue to allow any form or idea 
 below ourselves to rule us. Our whole 
 responsibility lies in recognizing God as 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 37 
 
 the real, the only ruling, positive force 
 of the universe. Man cannot make both 
 God and material things positive to him- 
 self at the same time; therefore, if he 
 makes God positive to himself, he turns 
 to material things as their master. Him- 
 self the positive pole to them, he forces 
 them into that negative attitude in which 
 their only true and indestructible reality 
 consists ; because then alone do they ex- 
 press the divine order, life being passed 
 on to them through man from God, in 
 due sequence. Man thus stands as an in- 
 telligent pivot upon whom, and by whose 
 aid, the whole creation is to turn to the 
 light. He has power to communicate life 
 to all lower forms just in proportion as 
 he receives life from God. If he looks at 
 a temptation with fear that he shall yield 
 to it, whether that temptation take the 
 form of a spiritual or a physical disorder; 
 if he doubts God's power in him to tri- 
 umph over it, then the temptation becomes 
 
38 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 the positive or ruling pole to him, and has 
 an existence in him which quickly devel- 
 ops into sin on the spiritual plane or into 
 sickness on the physical. If, on the other 
 hand, he refuses to recognize the tempta- 
 tion and turns from it to God, he draws 
 from Him who is forever the Great Posi- 
 tive, the great I AM, supplies of real life, 
 which passing through man drive out all 
 disorder by bringing both soul and body 
 to their right attitude at the negative pole. 
 This service one man can in a measure 
 do for another. We can make ourselves 
 mediums of the Divine life in each other's 
 behalf. We can receive so much of it 
 through our love for and belief in them, 
 as we see them in God y that we become 
 positive to them, and so pass along to 
 them the current of life in such manner 
 as to drive out their diseases and break 
 into their prison cells of discouragement 
 and despair. 
 
 It is on the perception of this power that 
 
The Philosophy of Mental Healing. 39 
 
 all Mental Healing is founded. Because all 
 life is one, every human being can, accord- 
 ing to his faith and knowledge, see for an- 
 other the ideal of that other, quarrying it 
 as it were out of the unseen, and bringing 
 it so close to the needy one that it con- 
 forms his feebleness to itself. We all do 
 this unconsciously for our friends when 
 we have faith in their best possibility. 
 Mental Healing goes one step farther, and 
 by grasping the reality of God so intensely 
 that all things are as nothing in compari- 
 son, it brings the Divine life so close to 
 human suffering as to reach the inmost 
 depths of the physical being and drive 
 out disease. 
 
 There is a dark side to all this which 
 one would willingly ignore, but which de- 
 mands a few words. A measure of con- 
 trol over natural forces and over feeble 
 human wills is sometimes attained by men 
 of great nervous energy, whose belief in 
 themselves is so positive as to force other 
 
40 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 elements into a negative attitude. Such 
 persons would be most effective for good 
 if they recognized the source of their 
 power as the Infinite Spirit of love and 
 wisdom, for then they could will only such 
 changes in others as tend to health and 
 blessedness. Failing in this recognition, 
 the work of human wills is not only dis- 
 orderly, but sometimes even malicious, 
 and may do much temporary mischief. 
 But it is not after all greatly to be feared, 
 because it is self-limited. It is mere re- 
 flex action stimulated by the forms and 
 influences of the external world, and, like 
 all idolatry, all imputing to the creature 
 the functions of the Creator, all making 
 real anything less than God, it is sure to 
 be overthrown and brought to nought, for 
 the very simple reason that the unconse- 
 crated human will soon becomes so out of 
 relation to the only source of real life 
 that its supply is cut off and its power 
 ceases. 
 
THE PRACTICE OF MENTAL 
 HEALING. 
 
THE PRACTICE OF MENTAL 
 HEALING. 
 
 HERE we come to facts and to methods. 
 There is one class of facts which is 
 ignored by those who have written about 
 Mental Healing, but which is most signifi- 
 cant. It is the almost universal testimony 
 of those who have been treated, that they 
 have received great benefit in moral and 
 spiritual directions, manifesting itself in 
 greater harmony of character and improved 
 intellectual soundness and balance. Nu- 
 merous persons have attended lectures on 
 Mental Healing whose physical condition 
 did not need improving, but who were in- 
 terested in the truth itself. These have 
 
44 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 found it a great inspiration and help ; and 
 it is worth while to make note of their ex- 
 perience as an offset to the stories, not 
 infrequently told, of the failures and mal- 
 practice of those who undertake to cure 
 by the new methods. Failures there cer- 
 tainly are, and ill-judged applications of 
 the truth, doubtless ; but let us remember 
 that the science is in its infancy, and has 
 yet much wisdom to learn. We may hope 
 that it will never have to give account for 
 worse misdeeds than already disfigure the 
 annals of medicine. 
 
 We have, said that the Mind Cure and 
 the Faith Cure are two different phases of 
 the same school. The Mind Cure is by no 
 means without the element of faith; but 
 it hopes, by making no demand for faith 
 at the outset, to reach many who might 
 otherwise be repelled by such a demand. 
 Those who seek its aid only because they 
 have exhausted all other means of help, or 
 those who come merely at the solicitation 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing.. 45 
 
 of friends, are successfully healed, as well 
 as those whose spiritual development has 
 already fitted them to receive the doctrines. 
 A mental attitude of resolute opposition 
 or contempt is a serious barrier to any 
 good work ; but if the attitude is merely 
 negative, the simple fact that a person 
 submits himself to an influence which uses 
 no material means, argues sufficient faith 
 on his part to render it possible for the 
 healer to make a beginning. Later, when 
 successive treatments have caused the seed 
 of right life which is in every human being 
 to germinate and put forth shoots, instruc- 
 tion is given, either individually or in 
 classes, and the patient is led, according 
 to his capacity, to recognize the Divine 
 Spirit that is working in him, and to trust 
 it and appeal to it independently of the 
 efforts of the healer. The great point 
 made by the Mind, as distinguished from 
 the Faith Cure, is that this awakening 
 of the patient's personal faith in unseen 
 
46 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 things is not attempted till it has been 
 proved to him, by his own experience, 
 that beneficent physical changes can be 
 wrought in him without visible or material 
 means. He is then prepared for faith ; not 
 prepared to receive the old theological dog- 
 mas, perhaps, but prepared to believe, and 
 put his trust in, an unseen benevolent 
 power. When once this growth of soul is 
 started, the man's allegiance is transferred 
 from the material to the spiritual pole of 
 life. This is the " change of heart," or 
 " new birth," which all true religion seeks 
 to bring about, and which, if our spiritual 
 senses were acute enough to discern it, 
 would appear as real and as startling as 
 if the person experiencing it were being 
 turned the other side out. The change 
 does show itself, even to our bodily eyes, 
 in the gracious smile and outreaching ex- 
 pression which replace the troubled and 
 gloomy looks that went before. Artists 
 have recognized the contrast from the days 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 47 
 
 of Da Vinci l to the present time, when 
 Vedder paints for us the hesitation of the 
 Soul between Doubt and Faith. In this 
 picture the head of Faith is a novel con- 
 ception, but quite in accord with the truth 
 we are trying to state. Faith has usually 
 been represented with upraised eyes, as 
 though spiritual realities could only be 
 discerned by turning away from the life 
 that now is. Vedder's Faith is of a more 
 robust type. It looks serenely out instead 
 of up ; daring to face all earthly pain and 
 confusion because of its utter reliance on 
 the Divine power which will, in the end, 
 reduce all things to order. 
 
 Now, if the change from doubt to faith, 
 which is the great thing to be desired for 
 us all, can be brought about by Mental 
 
 1 In the Sciarra Palace at Rome is a picture de- 
 signed by Da Vinci, but painted by Luini. It bears 
 the title "Vanity and Modesty," but is in fact a pro- 
 found study of two contrasted types, — the life that 
 centres wholly around self, and the life that reaches out 
 in care and thought for others, 
 
48 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 Healing, what are the methods whereby 
 it is accomplished? In what do the so- 
 called " treatments " consist? 
 
 It may boldly be asserted that the treat- 
 ments are prayer, and prayer in its most 
 prevailing form. Prayer may be best de- 
 fined as the effort of the human will to 
 place itself in perfect accord with the 
 Divine will. To achieve this we may pour 
 out our burdened hearts in specific peti- 
 tions and close them with the name of 
 Christ (which embodies for us the su- 
 preme sacrifice of the human will to the 
 Divine), thus signifying that if we have 
 not prayed aright we trust that God will 
 be wiser than our prayers. This is prayer 
 as most of us know it. An increased con- 
 sciousness of God in us and in all things 
 will, however, tend to simplify our prayers. 
 When we realize God as perfect wisdom 
 and perfect love, we shall see that He 
 needs neither instruction nor appeal ; that 
 on His part all is done even before we 
 
Vie Practice of Mental Healing. 49 
 
 ask it. Therefore prayer chiefly concerns 
 ourselves, and others like us in whom 
 ignorance, doubt, and self-will hinder the 
 workings of that perfect love and perfect 
 wisdom to which we appeal. Here prayer 
 has an immense field, in bringing us, and 
 our short-sighted plans and rebellious 
 wishes, into harmony with our highest and 
 best selves, — that is, God's idea of us. 
 This is exactly what the treatments of men- 
 tal healers accomplish. The person who 
 gives the treatment sets his whole soul to 
 the work, and sees with absolute convic- 
 tion the ideal perfection of the unconscious 
 individual before him ; sees it for the pa- 
 tient, — thus transferring his whole spirit- 
 ual energy to the case of another, to serve 
 that other's need in the true spirit of love. 
 Treatments like this may be given by any 
 one as soon as he has grasped the funda- 
 mental truth that God's will is perfect for 
 each and all. If he doubts this, and thinks 
 that the special case before him is an 
 4 
 
SO Wlnt shall Make us Whole? 
 
 exception, and that so much error and sick- 
 ness as the patient exhibits must argue a 
 very limited possibility for that patient, 
 the treatment will fall flat and powerless. 
 It is only the sublime faith that is almost 
 sight, a faith that dares take its stand in 
 the very heart of God, that can avail. 
 
 This central truth is in a way the sim- 
 plest truth, because faith is always a short 
 cut compared with knowledge. Treat- 
 ments given in this way are often very 
 effective, because if the centre is moved 
 the circumference is bound to follow. This 
 explains the success of many beginners. 
 Knowledge, however, is needed to compact 
 and define the steps up which faith hastens 
 with rapid flight. Those who are distin- 
 guished in Mental Healing learn by long 
 practice, and by trusting their spiritual 
 perceptions, to see how cause and effect 
 are related one to the other, and how the 
 special disease of the person under treat- 
 ment is caused by some special spiritual 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 5 1 
 
 incompleteness. They can therefore ad- 
 dress their treatment to the particular qual- 
 ity of soul which needs to be developed, 
 and thus be more effective than a person 
 who treats with less understanding. 
 
 All this seems perhaps somewhat re- 
 mote from the immediate question of 
 physical health, the search for which has 
 been the means of drawing so many to 
 what ere long they discovered to be a 
 higher spiritual life. But the question re- 
 mains, " Did they find the physical health 
 they sought ? " In many cases they have 
 found it, speedily and to a degree al- 
 most miraculous; in other cases the im- 
 provement has been slower, and some 
 have gone away disappointed. These 
 varying results are due to the varying ca- 
 pacity of individuals to be affected from 
 the spiritual side, to the variety of out- 
 side influences to which the patient is sub- 
 jected, and to the varying nature and cause 
 of the diseases treated. All persons can be 
 
52 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 affected by Mental Healing if they yield 
 themselves to it. fully and for a sufficient 
 length of time ; but those who have least 
 faith, or openness to spiritual things, are 
 the most difficult to reach, and these 
 are precisely the ones whose patience gives 
 out soonest, and who abandon the treat- 
 ment in disgust, saying, " I told you so ! " 
 Then, even those who are themselves will- 
 ing to believe are often held back and 
 seriously hindered by the atmosphere of 
 doubt and ridicule which they meet at 
 home. Possibly they are also continuing 
 some other form of treatment all the time 
 that they are receiving Mental Healing, 
 with the notion that safety lies in having 
 two strings to one's bow. This is a very 
 serious hindrance, and is forbidden for the 
 same reason that drugs are forbidden; 
 namely, that dependence on them or any 
 other material means leads the patient to 
 look in the wrong direction, and so defeats 
 the tremendous effort which is being made 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 53 
 
 by the healer to lift the unconscious soul 
 past the dead point and start all its ener- 
 gies in the direction of life and health. 
 
 In regard to the varying nature of dis- 
 ease, it is obvious that if the Mind Cure is 
 a genuine spiritual agent, it will reach most 
 easily the nervous system, which is the 
 most susceptible part of our organization. 
 It is the glory of Mental Healing that it 
 does reach and heal those nervous mala- 
 dies which have increased in number so 
 alarmingly of late years, and which so often 
 baffle a physician's skill. Even its oppo- 
 nents are forced to admit this. Functional 
 disease is treated with conspicuous success. 
 How, then, about organic disease? It is 
 harder to see how this can be cured ; but 
 according to our premises the centre will 
 move the circumference: therefore if the 
 currents of life can be set moving in the 
 right direction,, every particle of the human 
 frame is bound in time to be affected by 
 that rightness. If our philosophy be true, 
 
54 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 we must remember that diseased matter 
 has in itself no power of opposition ; that 
 a cancer, for instance, has no power to live 
 and grow in us except as by our recogni- 
 tion we make it positive to ourselves, there- 
 by imputing to it the reality that belongs 
 only to God. 
 
 Will broken bones set themselves at the 
 bidding of mental healers? They do not 
 claim this. They set no limit to the power 
 of the Spirit they invoke, because they 
 know that it is infinite; but they also 
 know that spirit can be brought to bear 
 upon matter only in proportion to man's 
 belief in spirit, and that is at present very 
 small. What Mental Healing can and does 
 do is to bring life to men from God. All 
 disorder that can be driven out of the 
 human system by a full current from the 
 true Source of being, will in time disappear 
 under the influence of Mental Healing, and 
 will disappear at a much faster rate when 
 the world's atmosphere is more largely 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 5 5 
 
 made up of belief in unseen things than it 
 is at present. What we should now con- 
 sider a miracle in the way of conforming 
 an undeveloped physical frame to its ideal 
 perfection will probably then be a common 
 occurrence. Restoration, however, whether 
 it be the reconstruction of lost limbs or the 
 complete rescue of man's body from its 
 apparent defeat by death, will require an 
 outpouring of life such as can only become 
 possible when the consciousness of man- 
 kind shall rest so habitually in the spiritual 
 realm that all physical expression — that is, 
 the body or any part of it — will be a mat- 
 ter of indifference, to be assumed or laid 
 aside at will. When that time comes, we 
 shall not fear being killed or maimed, be- 
 cause it will be impossible to do it. The 
 real life, which we shall then recognize in 
 our every fibre, cannot be touched by any 
 weapon of mortal warfare. 
 
 But it is unwise to speak too much in 
 this spirit of prophecy, lest it discourage 
 
56 What shall Make us Whole} 
 
 the timid faith of many who are quite will- 
 ing to believe in small things ; and that this 
 is but the day of small things we are ready 
 to admit. It is one of the chief dangers of 
 those who practise Mental Healing, that in 
 the atmosphere of that wonderful realm in 
 which many of their hours are spent, they 
 lose the sense of time and realize future 
 things so vividly as to dream them actually 
 present. For this cause they are apt to 
 make specific promises of cure and set 
 times for their fulfilment. Then, if from 
 obstacles that they had not reckoned on, 
 that fulfilment is delayed, the effect on the 
 patient's mind is discouraging. 
 
 As to the cause of disease. Broadly 
 speaking, disease is caused by sin or wrong- 
 ness of life; in other words, by inhar- 
 monious spiritual conditions. What, then, 
 explains the diseases of good persons, or 
 of children, idiots, and others who are not 
 responsible? The first answer to this is 
 the mighty truth that no one of us liveth 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. S7 
 
 or dieth to himself. This solidarity of the 
 race is forced upon our consciousness more 
 and more every day. Our thoughts, our 
 beliefs, our errors affect others often more 
 than they affect ourselves ; we suffer for the 
 sins of our ancestors, and our own sins 
 work woe for our children. It is easy to 
 see how this comes to pass in the direct 
 line of descent; but when the Mind Cure 
 makes the statement that the general be- 
 lief in a disease — scarlet fever, for instance 
 — is sufficient to produce that disease in a 
 baby, or sufficient to bring some serious 
 malady, not hereditary, to a person leading 
 a faithful and upright life, the statement 
 certainly calls for explanation. 
 
 Here we must go back to our philosophy. 
 God is One. All real life is One, because 
 life is God. Each human being is such in 
 virtue of his ability to accept or refuse that 
 Life. By accepting it he finds his true in- 
 dividuality, and discovers that by it he is 
 linked to all the rest of mankind, and is 
 
58 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 responsible for and to them in a way that 
 he never dreamed before. His life is so 
 bound up with that of every other human 
 creature, that when he believes in and ac- 
 cepts disease for himself he does it also for 
 the race, and thus the common conscious- 
 ness becomes the home of every recognized 
 malady. 
 
 If, then, in acting for ourselves we act for 
 all the rest of mankind, it only remains to 
 explain how we create disease for our- 
 selves. We do it by the human will when 
 that will acts independently of the Divine 
 will. Will may be defined as the force 
 proceeding from belief, and has a distinct 
 creative power. Man's will creates indi- 
 rectly by the use of material means, as 
 when he builds a house or ship ; but he has 
 a more direct power of creating which in- 
 heres in him because he is made in God's 
 image. This is something that he has not 
 yet begun to measure. The power of belief, 
 and will proceeding from belief, to create 
 
Tl)e Practice of Mental Healing. 59 
 
 and to destroy outside the realm of matter 
 will some day be understood as man's 
 highest attribute and deepest responsibil- 
 ity. At present the full knowledge of it is 
 withheld lest he should use his power im- 
 piously. So long as man's will works with 
 God's will he creates good and heavenly 
 things which endure. If he builds a house 
 on scientific principles, it stands, and its 
 drains do not breed disease; or, on a 
 higher plane, the man who wills only love 
 and truth to his neighbor, rears for himself 
 lasting monuments in the shape of noble 
 institutions and quickened lives. But if 
 he works only w T ith self-will, looking away 
 from God, he creates the evil things of 
 which hell is made. The falsely con- 
 structed railway bridge crushes in its pit 
 of death a thousand happy lives because it 
 w r as not built according to law; so on the 
 spiritual plane man's will, man's belief, if 
 it looks away from God, actually creates 
 disease. 
 
60 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 How can man will to create disease if he 
 does not wish to create it? He does not 
 will to create the disease, but he wills or 
 has willed, perhaps many generations 
 back, those evil deeds which produce dis- 
 ease. The seed thus sown, fostered by- 
 belief and fear, in time attains a spurious 
 entity, terribly real in appearance, but 
 which nevertheless depends wholly for its 
 life upon the recognition and belief of 
 man. 
 
 A few words about belief may help us 
 here. Belief may be defined as acceptance. 
 Acceptance by a human spirit of any sug- 
 gestion confirms and gives reality to that 
 suggestion which forthwith develops and 
 manifests itself in acts as if it had in itself 
 a propagating power. We know that the 
 suggestion would have had no such power 
 if it had fallen on deaf ears so that it could 
 not be accepted or believed in. In the 
 realm of ethics this is the simplest of 
 truths; why may it not also be true in 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 61 
 
 physical conditions? A man is threatened 
 with consumption, we will say; the idea of 
 consumption, which had never been in his 
 mind before, now confronts him at every 
 turn, because physical symptoms constantly 
 remind him of it. Is it too much to say 
 that his acceptance of or belief in this idea 
 has an actual power to confirm and develop 
 the idea, and consequently the disease also? 
 If our premises are true, and spirit rather 
 than matter is the real causing force, there 
 can be but one answer to this. For those 
 who do not accept our premises, the whole 
 argument falls to the ground. But it re- 
 mains for such persons to explain how phy- 
 sical changes can be brought about by the 
 Mind Cure treatments, which are purely 
 spiritual ; and that such changes are brought 
 about there is abundant evidence, of which 
 any one may satisfy himself. 
 
 In addition to the belief of the sick per- 
 son about his own disease, there is, as we 
 have said, a general human acceptance of 
 
62 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 disease in the abstract, as a sort of roaring 
 lion seeking whom he may devour, which 
 is a solid support and encouragement to it. 
 Then the belief of all the invalid's friends 
 about his disease helps greatly to give it 
 reality, especially if the disease can be 
 called hereditary in his family, so that the 
 acceptance of past generations rolls thun- 
 dering into his heart with a voice of fate- 
 ful prophecy. 
 
 The disease once accepted, fear comes 
 in as a most powerful agent in develop- 
 ing it. 
 
 What is fear? Nothing but the absence 
 of that absolute and enfolding peace which 
 is ours when we live wholly with the Divine 
 life and in conformity to its laws. Fear 
 may be, like most things, an angel or a 
 devil to us according as we use it from the 
 spiritual or the material pole of life. It 
 may be a warning note ; it may also be the 
 hot-bed of all evil growths. Just as pure 
 desire, the soul's passion for God and 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 63 
 
 righteousness, and for all things that min- 
 ister to that righteousness, has for its guar- 
 antee and seal that peace of which we have 
 just spoken, so evil desire, the lust for 
 things against the conscience, has for its 
 concomitant and undivorcible shadow fear, 
 which ever fosters lust and drives it for- 
 ward in its hideous course, closing up the 
 way behind and barring the pathway of 
 return. Thus fear has an actual fostering 
 power, and develops all evil growths just as 
 surely as peace, once tasted as the result 
 of pure living, produces a deathless thirst 
 for higher spiritual attainments, ever ap- 
 proved by deeper peace. 
 
 Now, if this be true of fear in ethical 
 relations, may we not extend the statement 
 to the physical realm, as we did the state- 
 ment about belief? A disease once started 
 is to the body what a sin is to the soul. 
 It is an inharmony, a wrong action, break- 
 ing up the peace which we feel when all 
 is well, and producing in its stead fear, 
 
64 What shall Make its Whole? 
 
 which, if indulged, has an undreamed-of 
 power to increase and develop the very- 
 thing it seems to dread. Thus, wrong 
 belief and fear are powerful enough in 
 the under world to give disease all the 
 entity it has, — the spurious entity of a 
 devil, — so that it actually has a sinister 
 power to fasten itself on an unconscious 
 person and grow in him to great stature, 
 unless checked by an influx of the true 
 life. Let us understand fear, and use it 
 aright. If we learn to think of it only as 
 we ought to think, — namely, as a note of 
 warning, — then it is transformed into one 
 of God's angels, who are charged to keep 
 us in all our ways. When we fear that a 
 disease has attacked us, instead of fearing 
 the disease itself, which is but to recognize 
 it and develop it with tenfold power, let 
 us so far as possible turn our thoughts 
 away from the physical manifestation called 
 disease, while we set our whole energy to 
 round out the incompleteness, to root out 
 
TJie Practice of Mental Healing. 65 
 
 the wrong feeling, thought, or habit, of 
 which the disease is but the outward sign. 
 Then fear becomes an angel of help, and 
 with God on our side we conquer and are 
 healed. And we conquer not only for 
 ourselves, but for our children, for our 
 race ; because every one who casts out and 
 conquers fear, so that it has no existence 
 for him except as a warning of moral or 
 spiritual danger, is henceforth freed from 
 disease, and his free and healthful life ex- 
 erts a powerful influence in destroying dis- 
 ease in his family and in those about him. 
 
 It may be objected, in this connection, 
 that there are many recorded instances in 
 which a bedridden invalid has recovered 
 the use of his limbs through fear of some 
 immediate catastrophe, — the house catch- 
 ing fire, for example, — and that therefore 
 fear is curative. We must here discriminate 
 between fear and fright. We have said 
 that fear is curative when rightly used. 
 If fear drives a man out of himself towards 
 5 
 
66 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 God, — that is, if it leads him to forsake 
 the wrong moral and physical conditions 
 which have induced it, — then it becomes 
 curative in the highest sense. The danger 
 is, however, that fear, instead of producing 
 this wholesome reaction, will only benumb 
 its victim, and draw him more and more 
 under the spell of some threatened evil. 
 The superiority of fright over fear as a 
 curative agent lies in its suddenness, which 
 drives the man out of himself before he 
 has time to fall under the paralyzing spell 
 of danger ; and whatever drives a man out 
 of himself, really drives him in the direc- 
 tion of God, though it may be long ere he 
 discovers this and manifests it by a more 
 faithful life. A good scare is often all that 
 is needed to bring about an absolute let- 
 ting go of the human will ; and this letting 
 go may start a man's life out of its physi- 
 cal prison and restore to him the use of 
 his limbs. When he recovers from his 
 fright and finds that he has once used his 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 67 
 
 limbs successfully, he is freed thenceforth 
 from the paralyzing fear of not being able 
 to move them, which had been his trouble 
 all along. 
 
 Until we can see the spiritual being of 
 man as plainly as we now see his material 
 form, we cannot tell precisely how a given 
 disease was produced in a given case ; but 
 of one thing we may be sure, — it has all 
 come about according to inevitable law. 
 
 Material processes of various degrees of 
 complication are required to effect various 
 material results. It is the same with spir- 
 itual processes, which must be more elabo- 
 rate and protracted to heal some maladies 
 than others; and this accounts for the 
 differing lengths of time and degrees of 
 success in the treatments of Mental Heal- 
 ing. Not until its practitioners can see and 
 measure all the influences involved, can- 
 they work with absolute certainty and 
 precision ; but that will come in time, and 
 meanwhile they have the key of the situa- 
 
68 What shall Make its Whole ? 
 
 tion, and can open many a hitherto locked 
 door. Some cases yield very quickly. 
 Sometimes in a well-balanced and healthy 
 physique the whole trouble, rheumatism, 
 dyspepsia, or whatever it may be, arises 
 from a suppressed grief, an unforgiving 
 spirit, a fault-finding temper, or some such 
 immediate cause. If these are removed, 
 the sickness disappears at once. In other 
 cases, where the cause is more remote, the 
 cure comes more slowly; but in all cases 
 the method of cure is the same. The 
 healer sets his whole being at work to 
 form a mental image of the patient as that 
 patient ought to be } — free from sin, free 
 from disease, in a state of complete devel- 
 opment and harmony. He holds this im- 
 age with great tenacity for a certain length 
 of time, usually about fifteen minutes, and 
 then the treatment is at an end. It may 
 seem incredible, but this mental image 
 has a vital power to conform the suffering, 
 imperfect body of the patient to itself; and 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 69 
 
 why? Only because it is really God's 
 thought of the man, perceived by the 
 faith of the healer, who thus performs 
 an office of atonement, by bringing God's 
 perfect thought and man's imperfect ex- 
 pression of it — namely, his sickly body — 
 together. It is a well-attested fact that 
 right vital action, both physical and spir- 
 itual, does develop in consequence of these 
 Mind Cure treatments. 
 
 Miss Frances Power Cobbe, in a recent 
 article in the " Contemporary Review," 
 entitled, " Faith healing and Fear killing," 
 says that the first question to be answered, 
 in any inquiry into the subject, is, whether 
 the healing virtue affects directly the body 
 of the patient, or whether it only affects 
 the patient's mind, which in its turn affects 
 the patient's body. The true answer to 
 this question is, that it affects both, for the 
 two are, according to the Mind Cure, really 
 one. The body is only the expression in 
 material terms of the informing mind, or 
 
70 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 spirit. The effect of Mental Healing is first 
 felt by the patient on the spiritual or on 
 the physical side of his being, according 
 as his consciousness habitually rests in 
 one or the other. Some persons are first 
 aware of an increased spiritual vitality, and 
 the physical symptoms are the last to 
 yield. With others the physical derange- 
 ment may be set right first, causing the 
 vital currents to flow outward with such 
 a fresh sense of freedom that they raise 
 the soul to new life and hope. 1 
 
 1 There is one point respecting Mental Healing which 
 is theologically of much interest. While it aims at 
 spiritual regeneration (and at physical regeneration only 
 through the spiritual), it works towards this end with- 
 out exciting the opposition of the patient. Religion, 
 with the same end in view, by presenting God as exter- 
 nal to the individual, rouses man's sense of all in 
 which he differs from the Divine idea. This sense, 
 known in religious parlance as " conviction of sin," pro- 
 duces a state of conflict or rebellion against God until 
 man, by surrendering his will to the Divine will, 
 finds peace. Mental Healing, on the other hand, assum- 
 ing that God is in every individual, addresses itself 
 silently to the Divine idea in each of its patients, and 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 71 
 
 " Absent Treatments " are a distinguish- 
 ing feature of Mental Healing. Acting on 
 the conviction that all real life is one in 
 God, and therefore independent of the con- 
 ditions of space, the healers frequently 
 treat persons who are separated from them 
 by thousands of miles. Results justify 
 their faith. Convincing testimony may be 
 had of the power of such treatments, which 
 are given sometimes with, and sometimes 
 without, the knowledge of the patient. 
 
 by developing that idea from within it fills them with 
 an impulse towards the best, and opens their eyes to 
 their highest possibility, without rousing opposition by 
 presenting that idea as external to themselves. The 
 whole difference between the Mind Cure position and 
 the old-fashioned theological position may be summed 
 up by saying that the former assumes God to be in 
 every man the rightful sovereign, and selfhood an 
 imprisoning wall built of human error which debars the 
 sovereign from his proper sway ; while the latter assumes 
 selfhood to be all there is of man, from centre to cir- 
 cumference, and by such assumption endows the un- 
 regenerate man with a reality, a power of opposition, 
 which in fact does not exist; though the power seems 
 real enough, and will continue to seem so, until, by with- 
 drawing our belief from it, we destroy its reality. 
 
*] 2 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 We have said that life is mutual recog- 
 nition ; or, expressing the same thought in 
 a less ideal form, life is the interaction of 
 two opposing currents. This may help us 
 to understand the subtle distinction be- 
 tween the Mind Cure and the Faith Cure. 
 Two elements must enter into the regen- 
 eration of a human being in order to fill 
 him with a higher life. One is the ideal 
 of that being, God's perfect thought of 
 him, towards which, through many vicis- 
 situdes, he is tending; the other is the 
 recognition and acceptance of that ideal 
 by the human being himself. One is the 
 Divine, — the positive current reaching 
 down to the human; the other is the nega- 
 tive, recipient, human current reaching up 
 to the Divine. The Mind Cure addresses 
 its work first to the former element, the 
 Faith Cure to the latter ; and as each cur- 
 rent involves the other, neither method 
 is quite independent of the other. 
 
 The Mind Cure uses all its power to lay 
 
The Practice of Mental Healing. 73 
 
 hold of and bring to bear in unseen ways 
 the Divine ideal of the patient, trusting to 
 the spiritual force of that ideal to conform 
 the patient, soul and body, to itself. Later 
 it imparts wisdom by instruction, and as- 
 sures its patients that their cure will not 
 be lasting except as they voluntarily open 
 their souls to make the Divine will and 
 goodness their own. If a man could trans- 
 gress all the laws of health, and then es- 
 cape the consequences merely by taking 
 fifteen minutes' treatment, he would not 
 grow to be a better man ; and we may ac- 
 cept it as the certainty of certainties that 
 the perfecting of every human soul is the 
 real and final cause of the whole mechan- 
 ism called matter. 
 
 The Faith Cure, on the other hand, uses 
 all its power to start the human, recipient 
 life-current out of its mortal prison, so 
 that meeting the ever-present Divine cur- 
 rent it enables that Divine current to enter 
 the sufferer and fill him with new life. 
 
74 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 To achieve this, it is not at first neces- 
 sary that the patient should form an intel- 
 ligent conception of the ideal ; and in fact 
 the Faith Cure helps chiefly those whose 
 hearts are more easily moved than their 
 heads. But it succeeds because things are 
 so linked together in the good providence 
 of God that anything which raises a man 
 out of himself brings him a little nearer 
 to his ideal perfection. Veneration for an 
 inanimate relic or for some professed mir- 
 acle-worker may achieve this, but there is 
 always an attendant risk. If the patient 
 grows in intelligence, he soon sees beyond 
 the object or person by whom his faith 
 was first aroused, and before he can trans- 
 fer his allegiance and veneration to some 
 higher and more worthy object there is 
 danger of his letting go and losing his 
 faith altogether. Safety lies in offering at 
 once to soul and body no less a reality 
 than God Himself. 
 
MENTAL HEALING AS RELATED 
 TO OTHER TRUTH. 
 
MENTAL HEALING AS RELATED 
 TO OTHER TRUTH. 
 
 THREE statements made by the teach- 
 ers of Mental Healing lay its doctrines 
 open to the charge of absurdity. These 
 are — I . That disease is not a reality ; 
 2. That all material remedies are useless 
 if not mischievous; 3. That sickness and 
 death are not the will of God. 
 
 Before attempting to answer these 
 charges separately, we may say in general 
 that the extreme position taken by the 
 doctrine of Mental Healing is no more ex- 
 treme than that taken by Religion, Science, 
 or any other great working hypothesis. 
 When we look at things simply as philoso- 
 
78 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 phers, we see more truths than are at 
 once available for practical use. A man 
 may have his hands too full of weapons 
 to go to war. When we are in the line of 
 achievement we must select some weapons 
 and discard others. Science, seeking facts 
 and working by analysis, feels that she 
 must stop her ears to the voice of the 
 Spirit, lest in the self-forgetfulness of lis- 
 tening she should overlook a single fact 
 or blunder in a single process. On the 
 other hand, Religion often slights or ig- 
 nores obvious facts, and in her determina- 
 tion to compass worthy ends is in danger 
 of leaving some most essential element out 
 of her problem. Science and Religion are 
 like two children set in a room to pick up 
 and re-string a thousand scattered pearls 
 which form a girdle. Science, kneeling 
 to the pearls, seeks them in every corner 
 with tireless persistence, and almost for- 
 gets the golden thread which alone can 
 hold them together after they are found, 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 79 
 
 so that chaos and dispersion cannot come 
 again. Her sister stands aloof grasping 
 the two ends of the golden thread, and is 
 in such haste to knot these together in a 
 perfect girdle again, that she makes light 
 of the importance of each separate individ- 
 ual pearl, and is restless and vexed when 
 Science tells her that the girdle cannot be 
 perfect so long as one pin-point of a pearl 
 is left out. 
 
 Now, it is evident that each of these 
 handmaidens of the Lord is shutting her 
 eyes to one class of facts, and that neither 
 will revolutionize the world without the 
 other's help. The philosophy of which 
 Mental Healing is the practical expression, 
 seems at first, when crudely stated, to be 
 at issue with both, but may end by recon- 
 ciling the two. When it says that disease 
 is unreal, man's body a shadow, and all 
 material remedies useless, Science, espe- 
 cially medical science which is occupied 
 with the needs of the body, feels that if 
 
80 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 this be true her whole occupation and 
 charter are taken away. When we are 
 told that sickness and death are not God's 
 will, Religion, which has won her high- 
 est triumphs by reconciling men to such 
 afflictions on the ground that they are 
 God's will, feels the very foundations trem- 
 bling beneath her feet. 
 
 Thus the new philosophy makes extreme 
 statements in two opposite directions ; but 
 does it not stretch forth a hand of sym- 
 pathy in two opposite directions also ? 
 Does not the assertion of the unreality 
 of all material things lie at the very heart 
 of a religion whose Founder said, " Who- 
 soever he be of you that forsaketh not all 
 that he hath, he cannot be my disciple "? 
 On the other hand, shall not Science, 
 whose watchword is evolution by the in- 
 evitable sequence of natural law, welcome 
 as an ally the voice which says that sick- 
 ness and death are not the will of God? 
 This means, in scientific parlance, that evo- 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 81 
 
 lution must go on until there is no more 
 work for it to do ; that the seal of Divine 
 approval cannot be finally set — in other 
 words, the process of evolution cannot 
 cease — until a creature is produced so per- 
 fectly fitted to all surrounding conditions 
 that he stands triumphant over sickness 
 and death. This will undoubtedly be 
 brought about by the " survival of the fit- 
 test ;" but we begin to see that because 
 man's spiritual environment is more con- 
 trolling than his physical one, earth's great 
 Survivor must be he who is fittest physi- 
 cally because he is fittest spiritually. He 
 alone can never be overthrown. He is the 
 Christ. 
 
 We will now take up the three objections 
 in detail, beginning with the statement 
 that disease is not a reality. The abstract 
 ground for saying this was explained in 
 an earlier chapter. It remains to consider 
 the practical outworking of the position. 
 A careful statement of the truth would 
 6 
 
82 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 be that disease has no reality, or power 
 to rule, and maintains itself in man in op- 
 position to the will or life of God, ex- 
 cept as man by his belief in and fear of 
 disease endows it with such power. The 
 great desideratum is to turn the patient 
 towards belief in life and away from belief 
 in death. By such turning he withdraws 
 the support of his vitality from the dis- 
 ease, which thenceforth is unreal and cannot 
 rule him. Until he does this, the disease is 
 real to him ; but no statement is too strong 
 which can, by breaking up his belief in its 
 reality, encourage him to face towards the 
 Source of all true life, and thereby prove 
 or make true that which before was only 
 a matter of faith; namely, the unreality 
 of the disease. It is to be observed that 
 this is no passive ignoring of the malady, 
 but an active and vigorous turning away 
 from it in full faith that the very act of 
 turning strikes a blow at its vitals. 
 
 To ignore a disease is not to cure it. 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 83 
 
 A superficial understanding of the state- 
 ment that disease is not a reality, might 
 lead a person to think that in case a serious 
 malady threatens us, all we have to do is to 
 ignore it resolutely and go on living just as 
 we did before, in unwholesome conditions 
 perhaps, or under some strain of over- 
 work. Such a course would be folly. Its 
 effect would be to encourage the disease 
 by opposition; for while the patient flat- 
 tered himself that he was ignoring his 
 complaint, he would really be opposing 
 his strength to it day by day in a losing 
 battle, and thereby developing the disease 
 and making it real. If with a better under- 
 standing he says bravely to himself, " This 
 disease has no reality which can for an 
 instant compare with the reality of God, 
 therefore I will turn my life wholly to Him, 
 make myself pliant in each detail and cir- 
 cumstance to His will, and seek from Him 
 in all right ways those currents of life 
 which shall drive out everything in me to 
 
84 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 which disease can cling, " then, though the 
 process may be long, the cure is already- 
 begun. 
 
 Secondly, the teachers of Mental Heal- 
 ing say that material remedies are useless 
 if not mischievous, and demand that those 
 who seek their treatment shall abandon the 
 use of medicine. This sounds like an un- 
 reasonable position until we realize how 
 great a risk a sick person runs of having 
 his life completely introverted by the aver- 
 age medical treatment. The doctor says 
 to one threatened with disease, " You must 
 give up your plan of life and devote your- 
 self to your health. You must seek ex- 
 actly the right climate, travelling from 
 place to place in pursuit of it if necessary. 
 You must take this mixture to relieve 
 one symptom, and that mixture to relieve 
 another," and so on, till the man's whole 
 attention is turned away from his study, 
 business, or whatever was drawing him 
 in a healthy manner out of himself, and is 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 85 
 
 turned in upon his own body and his own 
 sensations. The effect of this cannot but 
 be bad, and the more remedies are multi- 
 plied the worse it becomes. Unquestiona- 
 bly change of climate is often beneficial, and 
 remedies have their use, but the one thing 
 absolutely indispensable is to keep the 
 patient's life flowing outward in a strong 
 current, — for on such right direction of his 
 vital forces the whole question of recovery 
 hangs. This is the sine qua non, it is life 
 itself; and every material remedy, every 
 change in outward circumstance, should 
 wait humbly at the gate until its assistance 
 is summoned by this Divine force. Many 
 of our best physicians realize this truth, 
 and are working to-day in the spirit of the 
 Mind Cure without being aware of it. 
 
 No doubt drugs produce powerful and, 
 where rightly applied, beneficent effects; 
 but these touch the circumference rather 
 than the centre of life in man. The new 
 practice, in its effort to move men from the 
 
86 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 centre, forbids the use of all material means 
 of cure, and takes thereby a position, which 
 if logically extended, would forbid also the 
 use of food. An extreme statement seems 
 to be the necessary weapon of the reformer. 
 When Mental Healing shall have estab- 
 lished its point that man must be moved 
 first and chiefly from the spiritual side 
 even in physical matters, we shall find 
 that the Divine Spirit, instead of dispens- 
 ing with material means, is our one un- 
 erring guide to the wise use of such 
 means; teaching man to master them in- 
 stead of letting them master him, which 
 ;s the danger to-day. 
 
 Multiplication of remedies, like speciali- 
 zation of practice, is part of the mod- 
 ern tendency, which is in all directions 
 to analyze, to discriminate, to subdivide. 
 Persons occupied in this way think they 
 are adding greatly to the sum of hu- 
 man knowledge, and that by each hair- 
 splitting they are securing a new unit. 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 87 
 
 This is a mistake. Subdivision never makes 
 more, but less. It makes more things, 
 perhaps, but less life, — and life is what 
 men need. Specialization and analysis are 
 good ; but if we carry them too far we get 
 the parts so out of relation to the whole that 
 they are cut off and have no life in them- 
 selves. The more we can conscientiously 
 group things together, overlooking minor 
 differences, the better we see them in 
 that relation to the whole which alone 
 gives life to the parts; for be it said, in 
 every language and in every place where 
 a voice can be heard, no part, 710 thing has 
 any life in and of itself. Life is God, the 
 centre, dominating the whole ; to look for 
 it elsewhere is the most fatal of mistakes, 
 and the degrees of this mistake sum up all 
 the sin and suffering on earth. 
 
 Thirdly, sickness and death are not 
 God's will for man. This strikes harshly 
 on the ear of one who is just able to bear 
 a crippling infirmity or a great bereave- 
 
88 What shall Make us Whole ? 
 
 ment by accepting it as the will of God. 
 Truly, it is the will of God on a certain 
 plane; but because the condition of life 
 is growth, we must never rest satisfied on 
 any one plane of existence. God's will is 
 always the highest thing we can conceive 
 of, and as by our faith in it we bring that 
 highest thing to pass, our vision opens 
 to new spheres of life ; thus God's will, 
 the Ideal, moves on, drawing us ever to 
 higher ends. The fatal mistake made by 
 man's faithlessness is that of arresting God's 
 will at any point and declaring such and 
 such a thing to be final. Perfection alone 
 can be final, because perfection is God. 
 Christians will agree that sickness and 
 death are not God's final will; but they 
 are slow to realize how immediate is the 
 duty imposed on man of bringing this final 
 will to pass here and now. The material 
 depths which faith can reach and regener- 
 ate are exactly in proportion to the heights 
 it climbs ; and a new plane of development, 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 89 
 
 a new possibility for man, is opening to 
 us to-day, the outcome of which will be 
 a human body so perfect in every atom 
 and fibre as to be a worthy "temple of 
 the Holy Ghost." But this cannot come 
 so long as we sit down under suffering, 
 accepting it as God's will. Not that we 
 are to maintain towards it an attitude of 
 rebellion; but rather that we are to see 
 beyond it to the perfect life that God's 
 will holds for us all, and in the strength 
 of that vision to pass fearlessly through 
 pain to joy. 
 
 The question of planes and stages of 
 development is a very important one, be- 
 cause most of our bad reasoning comes 
 from mixing up these planes. What seems 
 an obvious truth on one plane may change 
 its guise completely when we reach the 
 next, and yet be fundamentally the same 
 truth on both. A careful study of these 
 planes will help us to understand both why 
 persons of low moral development often 
 
90 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 have good health, and also why persons of 
 lovely and spiritual character are frequently 
 invalids, — questions which puzzle us if we 
 accept literally the truth that body and 
 spirit are one, and are ruled by the same 
 laws. 
 
 A man who lives wholly on the material 
 or lowest plane may have good health for 
 a time, because he is as undisturbed in the 
 currents of his being as the animals are. 
 He does not yet feel the discrepancy be- 
 tween his actual life and his ideal possibil- 
 ity. But this cannot last; he is made in 
 the image of God, and to that image he is 
 linked by desire. In his ignorance he fan- 
 cies that desire can be satisfied by appro- 
 priating its object; so he steals from others 
 money, life, or virtue, and his thirst is still 
 unquenched. Such a course is sure to 
 breed physical as well as social derange- 
 ment, till the man's career is checked. His 
 body is detained in prison perhaps for 
 some infraction of law, and much more 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 91 
 
 surely his life is imprisoned in his body, 
 because instead of flowing healthily out- 
 ward in love to God and man, it has all 
 along been drawing inward towards him- 
 self. Because life is essentially the inter- 
 action of two currents, this drawing in 
 cannot go on beyond a certain point ; and 
 unless the man learns that the secret of 
 desire is to give rather than to receive, — in 
 other words, that he can receive only by 
 giving, — he goes on wrapping himself up 
 tighter and tighter, until his imprisoned life 
 works serious physical disturbance and his 
 health is wrecked. By his mistaken idea 
 of the meaning of desire he has made pain 
 necessary for himself. 
 
 When suffering has taught him to aban- 
 don his evil practices, he enters on the next 
 plane of existence with impaired physical 
 vigor, but with a new understanding of the 
 meaning of life. This may be only nega- 
 tive ; it may debar him from the old paths 
 without giving him any appetite for the 
 
92 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 new; he may merely say to himself that 
 wrong-doing does not pay, but even this is 
 a gain. 
 
 The lesson that life must flow outward 
 is now repeated in a different form. The 
 man is no longer in danger of having his 
 life introverted by gross sin, but by his 
 struggle against the physical limitations 
 which his own errors have imposed on 
 him. He beats the prison bars for years 
 perhaps, until he learns to accept suffering 
 as God's will. Then peace comes, and he 
 grows upwards, bearing his pain cheerfully, 
 and looking forward to the day when death 
 shall give him freedom. This is the plane 
 on which most Christian lives are lived. 
 
 On the first or physical plane God's will 
 for the man appeared to him under the 
 guise of pain, that he might cease from sin 
 and enter the moral plane. On the second 
 or moral plane it appears still under the 
 guise of pain, that he may detach himself 
 from his body more and more, and rise 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 93 
 
 to the spiritual plane. Now another plane 
 opens on which man may rise so high 
 above his body as to identify himself with 
 tlie will or life of God. When he does 
 this perfectly, all physical disturbance will 
 be rectified by the power of that life in 
 him, and his body will be regenerated as 
 well as his soul. If persons of spiritual 
 character have not hitherto had good 
 health, it is simply because their faith has 
 not reached high enough to bring down to 
 them such fulness of life as shall inundate, 
 cleanse, and break through all the physical 
 as well as moral stagnant places in their 
 being. 
 
 The way out of our troubles may be 
 through pain; but if we cease from making 
 more pain for ourselves by our struggles, 
 and accept what remains as simply curative, 
 we pass through it swiftly and cheerfully, 
 and by each victory we diminish the need 
 of it for ourselves and for others. The 
 body need not in the end be sacrificed to 
 
94 What shall Make us Whole} 
 
 the spirit. So long as it imprisons the 
 spirit it must be crushed, blasted even, by 
 the fearful dynamics of affliction and dis- 
 ease; but when it is once in its proper 
 place, at the feet of the spirit, obedient in 
 every atom and fibre to the highest law, 
 then we shall see the dawning of a heavenly 
 day when healthy bodies and healthy 
 spirits shall be inseparable, and when our 
 young people, wisely instructed and care- 
 fully nurtured, shall blossom from one 
 stage of life's beauty to the next without 
 a struggle. 
 
 Is death to be conquered? In the end, 
 yes. Living in that faith, we see the veil 
 between the two worlds grow thinner and 
 more transparent. As we abide in and 
 recognize only those things which belong 
 to the life of God, our spiritual senses un- 
 fold, and we find ourselves in a vast realm 
 which is the eternal home of all that con- 
 forms to its laws, regardless of time, space, 
 or material circumstance. Not one true, 
 
Mental Healing as to other Truth. 95 
 
 pure, or loving thought has ever been lost 
 since the world began, or ever can be lost, 
 because these are of God, the only Reality. 
 Just so far as our beloved who have passed 
 from sight have embodied these thoughts 
 they are indestructible, and await our rec- 
 ognition in that kingdom of heaven which 
 is so near to each one of us that we may 
 enter it at any moment if we will, and live 
 evermore to the music of its harmonies. 
 
CONCLUSION. 
 
CONCLUSION. 
 
 WE begin to see that the human will, 
 or spirit, is the great channel 
 through which the Divine Spirit is to 
 regenerate and harmonize the world of 
 Nature. That this may come to pass, 
 man's will must become both consecrated 
 and enlightened. Religion calls us to the 
 first duty, Science to the second. They 
 are equally necessary, and neither can dis- 
 pense with the other's help even in its own 
 domain. A religious man may devote his 
 life to helping his fellows, but he cannot do 
 this with success, in fact he cannot remain 
 long enough in this world to do it at all, ex- 
 cept as he understands external conditions. 
 
ioo What shall Make us Whole} 
 
 On the other hand, spiritual truth, which 
 alone can reconcile all the facts of life, be- 
 comes the property of man only as a result 
 of the surrender or consecration of the 
 human will. 
 
 We have said that life is the interaction of 
 two currents, — the human will reaching up 
 to the Divine, and the Divine will reaching 
 down to the human ; and that because the 
 Divine will is the master force, the human 
 will must make itself the passive or recep- 
 tive pole in this interchange if life is to 
 stand on its right basis. It is the same 
 with the appropriation of truth. Man's 
 energy can accumulate facts to an indefi- 
 nite extent; but if he would perceive the 
 relation between these facts, which is truth 
 in its high sense, he must make himself 
 ardently passive (if we may use such a 
 phrase) to the impress of that truth, hush- 
 ing his own personality lest some prejudice 
 should bias his conclusions. This prin- 
 ciple is well recognized by Science in her 
 
Conclusion. 101 
 
 own domain. It is the scientific con- 
 science, the faith that in one who is willing 
 to see the truth there is something so at- 
 tuned to, so made after the pattern of the 
 truth itself, that one will recognize and 
 receive the other. We may call this fac- 
 ulty by no higher names than candor and 
 sound judgment; but it is in reality noth- 
 ing less than God in us recognizing and ac- 
 cepting the Infinite God, who will stand 
 revealed as such when both religious and 
 scientific thinkers extend the area of their 
 acceptance to take in all facts, physical and 
 spiritual, as belonging to one universal 
 life. 
 
 It requires much faith thus to see life 
 whole, to bring both classes of facts into 
 our field of vision at once, and see them 
 ruled by the same laws and bound together 
 by the same principles, because the balance 
 of human belief is still so heavy on the 
 material side. Even the most spiritual 
 lives accord to unseen realities a confidence 
 
102 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 which differs widely from the easy uncon- 
 scious reliance with which they handle 
 dress, food, and other practical problems. 
 This is not strange : we are just emerging 
 from matter; we have been surrounded 
 by material forms from our earliest years. 
 No wonder our life flows out to them. It 
 is not cause for blame, it is simply the fact. 
 But now, if instead of drawing a hard and 
 fast line between material and spiritual 
 things, so called, we can have faith enough 
 to try the experiment of accepting them 
 both together, the scientific conscience 
 will itself oblige us to transfer the centre 
 of our lives from self to God. 
 
 By the very act of opening ourselves to 
 spiritual truth we break down the narrow 
 limits of selfhood and become conscious of 
 the universal Life. The inflow of this life 
 fills us with a sense of harmony; and why? 
 Because being the universal life it holds all 
 things in right relation one to another, and 
 by virtue of that right relation, when ac- 
 
Conclusion. 103 
 
 cepted by us, tends to make whole or bring 
 into order the individual and ultimately 
 the race. We all recognize order as the 
 arrangement of details in obedience to a 
 central plan, so that one idea, one life, per- 
 vades the whole ; conversely, it is only by 
 being brought into such order that a mass 
 of details becomes a whole, moved by 
 one impulse. In proportion as man be- 
 comes individually whole (that is, orderly 
 in his physical structure and working) and 
 part of a greater whole (that is, in his 
 right place and relation to all other be- 
 ings which compose that whole), in that 
 proportion he becomes conscious of the 
 universal life whose laws produce this 
 wholeness and order, and in its organic 
 centre he recognizes God. 
 
 When this practical — not merely intel- 
 lectual — recognition of God becomes the 
 common experience, material things will 
 grow transparent to the Spirit in ways that 
 we cannot dream of now, but we may be 
 
104 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 sure that they will " make all things new." 
 We need dread no catastrophes in those 
 days ; they will be of the past. The vio- 
 lent wrenching from man of his material 
 possessions is only needed, only caused in 
 fact, by his clinging to them overmuch. 
 As a picture that we have outgrown is 
 first seldom looked at, then relegated to an 
 attic and at last to a dust-heap, so we shall 
 grow indifferent to, lay aside, and uncon- 
 sciously leave behind our mortality and all 
 that belongs to it as we step forward to 
 better things. Thus death will be dissolved 
 in life. 
 
 The leaders in Mental Healing, like the 
 prophets of old, have seen this day from 
 afar, and are trying to bring its laws and 
 conditions into immediate effect for the 
 help of man. The results they have to 
 show are impressive, less by reason of their 
 extent — though this is considerable — than 
 by reason of their extraordinary harmoniz- 
 ing of man's physical with his spiritual 
 
Conclusion. 105 
 
 nature. This is what we should expect 
 if the true divine order has been found, 
 and the central force touched which moves 
 all things together, both spiritual and 
 physical. 
 
 Harm has been done in some cases 
 because extremists in the new practice 
 have not added patience and knowledge 
 to their faith. In their eagerness to bring 
 their idealism to bear they have ignored 
 the actual, and have been unmindful of 
 the supreme delicacy and difficulty of the 
 task of adjusting details in that border- 
 land where the ideal and the actual meet. 
 Some unwise ones have insisted, for ex- 
 ample, that an aged woman, dying of a 
 terrible disease, should abandon all the 
 palliatives that were making her last hours 
 endurable, and trust herself wholly to 
 faith in the hope of a cure. Speedy and 
 suffering death ensued. The patient was 
 too far gone; she had too slight a hold 
 on the physical to make it possible for 
 
106 What shall Make us Whole! 
 
 her life to flow much longer through 
 its channels. The healers should have 
 recognized this, and realized that a course 
 which might safely and wisely be pre- 
 scribed for a person of average, though 
 disordered, vitality, may be ruinous if 
 applied to a case like the one we have 
 mentioned. The breath that fans a vig- 
 orous flame into greater activity may 
 suffice to extinguish a feeble one. Un- 
 doubtedly the woman might have been 
 cured by a miracle; but to achieve this, 
 the miracle-worker must have had wisdom 
 in proportion to his faith. Christ, the 
 great miracle-worker, was himself the 
 Truth, the Wisdom. We are only begin- 
 ning to assimilate it. 
 
 Such abuse of the principles of Mental 
 Healing is sure to bring its own punish- 
 ment. In time, these blots on the record 
 of the new practice will disappear, and 
 men will own that it is doing a real ser- 
 vice and is making a bold advance into 
 
Conclusion. 107 
 
 the very heart of Christianity, forcing it 
 to yield its deepest secrets for the heal- 
 ing of the nations. Homoeopathy has made 
 a step in the same direction; it counsels 
 the introduction of poisons in infinitesimal 
 doses into the human system in the faith 
 that the disorder they cause will rouse 
 the inherent order or wholeness of the 
 physical organism to assert its integrity by 
 driving out the intruder and everything 
 that resembles him. This is a spiritual 
 advance of no small magnitude, because 
 it acknowledges and relies on the reactive 
 power of a Divine life-principle in man. 
 But so long as homoeopathy uses any 
 material means at all, it hesitates on the 
 brink of that absolute faith in the Divine 
 life-principle which sees in it a first cause, 
 active instead of reactive; and thus by 
 supreme trust in it brings the vital power 
 immediately to bear. Mental Healing has 
 dared to do this, and should enjoy the 
 credit due to its courage. 
 
108 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 Blending the spiritual and physical in 
 one life does not do away with duty, but 
 transfigures duty by an ever-present sense 
 of heavenly aid. When we practically 
 treat the physical as included in the 
 spiritual life, several things follow in our 
 experience. 
 
 1. If God is in and of us, if His con- 
 ception is the secret of our individuality, 
 then that individuality may be trusted 
 and revered. We may train and develop 
 instead of suppressing it, and thereby 
 " hitch our wagon to a star." 
 
 2. There is a star for each one of us, — 
 an ideal perfection to be made actual 
 by our acceptance. Armed with this cer- 
 tainty we can bring the ideal treatment 
 to bear both on moral and physical per- 
 versity, — seeing through the evil mani- 
 festation, whether it be wilfulness or bodily 
 pain, to the perfect wholeness that God's 
 will holds for the erring one here and 
 now. God's will is timeless. His perfec- 
 
Conclusion. 109 
 
 tion, and man's perfection in Him, is an 
 eternal present. Time is only the delay of 
 our wills in accepting, and space only the 
 separation of our wills in existing apart 
 from, that omnipresence, or all-presentness, 
 of God. 
 
 3. When the two lives become one 
 in our experience, we find that in oblit- 
 erating the line between them we have 
 struck a mighty blow at the fear of death ; 
 and that death has been a limit, a place 
 of parting to us, only because we have, 
 by maintaining this line, insisted upon 
 making it so. In one sense death — the 
 Cross — will always remain, because it is in 
 its essence the passing from a lower truth 
 to a higher one. 1 In this we shall ever 
 rejoice, as those who have learned the 
 true meaning of the Cross now rejoice to 
 accept it and pass through it continually to 
 larger life. But as the two worlds become 
 
 1 Death is the supreme physical expression of this 
 truth of the Cross. 
 
no What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 more and more one to us, our common 
 assurance of the supreme reality of that 
 which is now unseen will remove all un- 
 certainty, all terror, from the step that 
 carries us from one world to the other. 
 We shall then see in death and the Cross 
 only a wide-open, sunny portal through 
 which all may throng joyously to seek 
 supplies of life. 
 
 Christ is the personal embodiment of 
 this future for man. He is the turning 
 from ourselves to God. No man ever 
 stepped forth out of himself to a higher 
 thought, but by that step he embodied 
 himself in the Christ. There is no other 
 way. Christ is part of the constitution 
 and course of Nature, the eternal move- 
 ment from the human to the Divine. 
 Between our isolated, stunted selves and 
 the great ocean of God's life stands the 
 Cross. If we turn away, it looms terrible 
 with fear; if we press it joyfully to our 
 hearts, we pass through it to peace and 
 
Conclusion. 1 1 1 
 
 infinite life, and the crucified Christ be- 
 comes the crowned Christ for us. Stand- 
 ing then in Christ, our eyes open on the 
 vastness of God, and we see the ideal 
 beauty and glory of every created form. 
 No longer doubting, we grasp the ideal 
 for ourselves and for all about us, becom- 
 ing in our measure the Christ for them 
 and revealing them to themselves. 
 
 But what of the historic Christ? Let 
 us think of Him as the personal manifes- 
 tation of the universal Deity in relation 
 to this planet; the Soul of the whole 
 earth ; the Eternal Word which embodied 
 God's thought of this world and its des- 
 tinies. It was then all Christ from the 
 beginning, both the mass of matter, and 
 the possibilities of spiritual life to be 
 evolved therefrom. Christ, the soul of 
 mankind, was the forming principle, but 
 was not manifested or individualized; just 
 as when a child is born, his soul is the 
 principle which forms him and determines 
 
H2 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 his aspect and his destinies, and yet it is 
 long before he comes to himself and learns 
 to rule by his soul, and bring his body 
 into subjection. So the world waited long, 
 and the struggle was fierce, with here and 
 there a piling up of monstrous evil, and 
 here and there a foreshadowing of the 
 spiritual birth to come, till the day dawned 
 when out of the lowest came the highest, 
 and from a manger the first perfect Man 
 arose and reached to Heaven. Then the 
 soul of mankind was freed, and the way 
 opened to the Infinite. 
 
 If this was what happened when Christ 
 was born, we should expect to see, as 
 indeed we find, the Soul of mankind, 
 Christ Jesus, leading a perfect life, in 
 which spirit, for the first time triumphant 
 over matter, could move it at will. It was 
 a perfect life in its obedience to God, but 
 it was a maimed life so far as the flesh 
 was concerned ; in other words, it was in- 
 complete. Therefore it passed through 
 
Conclusion. 113 
 
 the gates of death and became invisible 
 to mortal eyes. But it has been growing 
 ever since, and bringing human conditions 
 more and more into harmony with itself. 
 Centuries have been needed, and more 
 may yet go by, before that life reaches 
 its full growth and stature. Not till every 
 human being realizes that he is part of 
 the life of Christ, and that his fealty and 
 that of all his fellows is the necessary 
 condition of its completeness, will Christ 
 return visibly to earth, shining from the 
 east unto the west in the wide glory of a 
 perfected humanity. In some hearts He 
 already reigns supreme, and to their loy- 
 alty is granted a vision of the joyous time 
 to come when physical science shall bring 
 as her tribute such a thorough comprehen- 
 sion of material laws and conditions, that 
 disease and accident shall be held at bay; 
 when art and music shall scorn to paint 
 and sing anything less than the higher 
 harmonies ; when every human being shall 
 8 
 
U4 What shall Make us Whole? 
 
 respect his own individuality as divine, and 
 his body as a temple of the Holy Ghost, 
 and yet shall be so conscious of his vital 
 relation to all others in the great body of 
 Christ, and so filled with loyal obedience 
 to the Head, that his right shall never be 
 allowed to work another's wrong. Then 
 life shall flow in a full current through all 
 the mighty form of the God-man, Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 This day may be very far off, but its 
 coming is certain; and while we wait we 
 work for it and welcome every helpful 
 influence. If in the search for health man 
 finds that the Spirit of God can and does 
 move matter when its power is invoked 
 in accordance with the high and holy con- 
 ditions it imposes, then there will come 
 to him an ever-increasing confidence in 
 that Spirit, and great discoveries will be 
 made about the working of its laws. They 
 will become so well understood a science, 
 that we shall depend on them as simply 
 
Conclusion. 1 1 5 
 
 as we now depend on the law of gravita- 
 tion, and we shall handle the Bread of 
 Life with as much naturalness as we now 
 handle the daily bread upon our tables. 
 Then will Christ keep His ancient promise, 
 and drink the wine of His life new with 
 us in the kingdom of God. 
 
 University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 
 
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