The lawyer quoted in yesterday's Eagle says: "It is the...

Brooklyn Eagle

The lawyer quoted in yesterday's Eagle says: "It is the duty of the community to prohibit the practice of medicine or healing by Christian Scientists and by all persons who are not properly qualified according to the common understanding."

Wisdom and absurdity are ingeniously entwined in this dictum. A Christian Scientist, or any other person not a regularly licensed physician, who prescribes medicine, should be put in jail. Such malpractice would be the false pretense of quackery—claiming to understand drugs without studying the science according to which they are to be administered to secure beneficial results. So, leaving out that part which is conceded by every conscientious person, the lawyer's claim may be more clearly and fairly set forth in this fashion: It is the duty of the community to prohibit healing by Christian Scientists, and by all persons who confine themselves to prayer, and are therefore not properly qualified according to the common understanding. But the first amendment of the Federal Constitution allows a man to pray. He may pray for health. And in the free exercise of the right to pray, also guaranteed by that amendment, it must be assumed that he may engage the services of another to help him—to teach him how to pray and to pray with him. "The laborer is worthy of his hire," therefore it is also just that the man who is being prayed for shall pay the man or woman who comes to him with this special knowledge in his need.

What is this common understanding, this standard, or unvarying principle, of which the critic writes? Will this common understanding come forward when a man is in an extremity and given up by the regular doctors, and tell him how much quinine and calomel he should take with his prayers? Can the critic, who is familiar with the common understanding, tell? Can the state tell? If no one can tell how much, who can tell why, at all, these or any of the fifty thousand preparatory drugs now on the market should be used? Who knows? What did men do before the principal by-products of the Standard Oil Company emerged from the tar-barrel to the drug-market? If there be those in this country who have no confidence in the tar-barrel and would walk by faith alone, without the drug-store's support, the Constitution of the United States declares they may enjoy that liberty. The rest of us, sitting in the seat of the scornful, may think they are fools, but that makes no difference. We must be fair. We must allow them to turn heavenward, that is, within themselves, while we hasten for our pills and the pacifying plaster. And why should the community prohibit the practice of healing by prayer without drugs, as the critic declares it to be its duty "above all"? If it be folly for the sick man to turn to one who brings him hope through prayer, the practice will die out quickly; but prohibition breeds martyrs, and their blood is prolific seed.

Prayer is high aspiration—it is the longing of a loving heart, knocking that it may receive. Belief in the efficacy of prayer and of pills is in the bone and marrow of all races. But armies of devoted men and women stand ready always to undergo any privation, to fight, if necessary, for the right to pray, while only a few will fight, and then usually through an attorney, for the right to take or sell rhubarb pills, massage, or "something just as good." This being so, shall we ever learn not to trouble men who pray? Getting right down to the truth of the matter, prayer is quite as legitimate as allopathy, homeopathy, osteopathy, hydrotherapy, X-rays, Turkish baths, or hot-water bags.

And why not? Why not respect the man who, to save wife, child, or himself, deserted by every other school of healing recognized by the community or state, turns direct to God with a minister or mediator who comes to him bringing the calm, sweet faith of the fathers of the church? And if, perchance, his reward is a restoration of the loved one, who shall say it is not a divinely natural effect instead of a coincidence? Where is the wise man who can say? If he be a Christian, what can the critic say? And if the loved one has been restored, shall that man not have the right to turn again in faith, when the emergency arrives? Or are we all so very sure, as the critic is, that the "common understanding" is the source of all power and wisdom, and therefore that the state should compel us to turn to it on our death-beds?

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