Article October 15, 1910 Issue

With respect to the discussion on faith-healing, reported...

Frederick Dixon—London.

Christian Commonwealth

With respect to the discussion on faith-healing, reported in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal, and referred to in a late issue, will you permit me to point out that, with all due respect to the writers in question, there is a distinct absence of logic in their views. Dr. Henry T. Butlin, who is certainly one of the most eminent medical men of the day, admitted that an occasional case of organic disease may be healed by faith; but if an occasional case can be healed, logically every case can be healed, and the only question at issue is the amount of faith requisite. Dr. Osler, on the other hand, insisted that Christian Science healing was entirely confined to functional disease. His only ground for this statement was, however, the fact that he had personally not come across a case of organic disease which had been so healed. Now, talking personally to an eminent doctor some time ago with respect to the healing of cancer, he told me, quite plainly and without any equivocation at all, that no case of malignant cancer could be healed by Christian Science treatment, and that if any such case appeared to have been healed, it was not malignant cancer but there had been a mistake in the diagnosis. Could any argument possibly be more hopeless than this?

The deduction, then, which emerges from these somewhat contradictory statements amounts to this, that it is admitted that Christian Science does heal functional disease, and that organic disease can be healed by faith. If the Gospel record is true, Jesus healed organic, functional, and nervous disease indiscriminately, and declared quite plainly that those who believed in him should be able to repeat this healing.

The miracles of Jesus were nothing but his demonstrations of his faith in, and understanding of, things unseen. There was nothing whatever supernatural about them. They were the divinely natural effects of his knowledge of divine law and spiritual causation; and simply by making use of this knowledge he healed the sick and raised the dead and stilled the tempest, proving, in the face of a doubting world, that those who knew the truth were freed by that knowledge from the fetters of materialistic ignorance.

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