Article October 24, 1908 Issue

A careful reader of your symposium on the subject of...

Willard S. Mattox

New York American

A careful reader of your symposium on the subject of drugless healing of the sick, which appeared in a recent issue, must have noticed that nearly all of the contributors, every one of whom was a clergyman, took occasion to make some disparaging comment on Christian Science. To notice this is not to offer an argument in reply to the strictures put upon Christian Science. I merely call attention to this fact because it seems to me worthy of note that the advocates of the new religio-medical cult are divided in their zeal between a constructive expectation that they can heal the sick by means of hypnotic suggestion and a destructive desire to overthrow all that Christian Science is doing for the alleviation of suffering humanity. Whether a satisfactory building can be reared upon such a foundation remains to be seen.

Our critic is good enough to explain that what he calls "Christian psychology" differs in three ways from Christian Science. He first admits that there are diseases which his system cannot cure, but which must be left to the surgeon and physician. It is difficult to understand how he can make this admission at the outset of his career of healing and yet expect to be taken seriously when he claims that his method is the application of Christ to the mind and body of man, or that he is preaching a whole salvation. Christ, as conceived by this critic, has less potency in the healing of disease than has the surgeon and physician, who take precedence according to the bishop's estimate. Christian Science claims to be a reinstitution of apostolic healing, and there is no record that either Jesus or his disciples admitted that there were classes of disease which they could not heal through the power of God alone.

Apparently all of the advocates of the new movement to heal the sick by hypnotic suggestion do not agree on this question. In this same symposium another writer says. "Jesus didn't stop to ask for a physician's certificate. He wasn't concerned whether a disease was organic or a matter of nerves. He healed them all. He did more. He raised the dead." Now Jesus himself said, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." All of the comfort and hope and confident expectation are drained out of this prophecy by the timid conservation which admits that those who believe on him can only expect his name to be efficacious in the healing of minor diseases.

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