Article June 24, 1911 Issue

The truth is that there is nothing whatever hypnotic...

Frederick Dixon—London, Eng.

Saturday Review

The truth is that there is nothing whatever hypnotic about Christian Science treatment. It is based simply, as it professes, on the teaching of the Bible, and to give it effect it is necessary to endeavor, in the words of one of the greatest of Christian writers, to let that Mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. It was the Mind of Christ, and not any human personality, which healed the sick in the first century, and it is the Mind of Christ which is capable of healing the sick in the twentieth.

Suggestion is simply the attempt of one human mind to dominate another. It is as old as the human mind itself. It was quite well known in the first century by its earlier names, such as magic, dealings with familiar spirits, necromancy, "et hoc genus omne." The Jews, when they wished to discredit Jesus, fell back on this very means in the accusation that he cast out devils through Beelzebub. Jesus' reply settled the question of Christian healing once and for all. He declared that a house divided against a house could not stand; in other words, that a man who believed it was possible for the human mind to suggest healing, believed that it was also possible for the human mind to suggest sickness; and therein lies the real danger of hypnotism. Jesus, however, was never satisfied with a mere negation; he went on, as he always did, to affirm the absolute. He declared that if he by the Spirit of God cast out devils, then the kingdom of God never yet came upon men. The kingdom of God never yet came upon anybody, and never will, through mental suggestion from a mind filled with a belief in good and evil. The kingdom of God comes upon a man exactly in proportion as he gains the Mind that was in Christ Jesus.

Your correspondent takes certain cases given by a critic in a recent book, cases given without a shadow of proof, without any means of identification, and in defiance of every law of evidence usually adopted. In the few cases in which it has been possible to test them, they have not been found to be particularly reliable, and I have shown elsewhere repeatedly that this critic has been misinformed in the cases which I have been able to trace. Suppose, however, that they had all of them been true, suppose that Christian Science had failed in every one of them; what does it prove, except that Christian Scientists are perpetually dealing with cases which come to them after every medical means has been tried in vain, and that they are not always successful in curing them. Anybody who had the time to collect the information might, by a careful reading of the newspapers, without going any further, collect a series of cases against the medical profession which would reduce anything in this critic's instances to the merest shadow. To take one single instance, it is only a few months since this critic declared openly that "there is such a mania for the removal of the appendix on the part of all classes, and such desperate anxiety on the part of many surgeons to meet their patients half way, that nothing except the intervention of criminal law will prove effective in reducing the wholesale slaughter."

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

The truth is that there is nothing whatever hypnotic...

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access