[Rev. Douglas H. G. Sargent, in St. Luke's Redcliffe Square Monthly Review, London, England]

All spiritual success is dependent on prayer. There are limitless resources in God, whom we acknowledge every Sunday to be All-mighty. We need to be constantly in touch with Him. Our fellowship with one another is dependent on prayer, and perhaps we have scarcely realized that neglect of prayer is a sin. "God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you." Said Dr. Mott at the conference on the Mount of Olives: "He 'went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives.' What for?—to preserve vital contacts, to recharge the battery. If he found it desirable and necessary, what presumption and folly for us to assume we can do without it."

[Editorial in the Evening Democrat, Fort Madison, Iowa]

Some day we will realize that the mystery of life and death is not to be solved in a material way. Some people now realize, and others are coming to a realization, that life is not material and that death is to be destroyed—"the last enemy that shall be destroyed," we are told. ... The Bible gives a full and complete presentation of what life really is; and when men tire of fooling around with experiments, they can go to this Bible, which has been available for centuries, and become amazed at facts which they could have known throughout the ages had they been content to accept spiritual facts instead of material hypotheses.

[From an editorial in States, New Orleans, Louisiana]

While Christian people believe that God is able to save sinners to the uttermost, they still believe the sick can only find salvation from bodily ills in means that have no spiritual implication, and which are so varied and complicated that preserving health has become, itself, a wearisome malady. Paul's simple prescription for health, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind," has been lost sight of in experiments with change of climate, diet, exercise, rest, psychoanalysis, on down (or up) to Coué's little string with twenty knots tied in it, used ... for the repetition of "Day by day in every way I am getting better and better." Then if all these experiments fail, there is nothing left us but the strange conclusion that it is God's will for us to be sick, and to suffer what we would not inflict upon our own children. Is it any wonder that we are so slow to realize that "now are we the sons of God"? ... We have a wholesome, instinctive sympathy with the old saying that "a healthy cobbler is a better man than a sick king." That may be because Jesus so plainly taught that health is God's will for His children, and invariably proved what he taught. He not only healed all who came to him, but also gave his twelve disciples "power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases." When he appointed seventy others to go "into every city and place, whither he himself would come," he told them to heal the sick in those places, and to say to them, "The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you." And to show that understanding of the divine will gives power to heal both sin and sickness, Jesus first healed the palsied man of his sins, then healed his body.

That is the divine method for restoring health. And it is the only method which holds sin—all unspiritual, wrong living and thinking—to strict accountability for the ills "that flesh is heir to." For human consciousness must be retrieved from its sense of separation from God, "who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases," to establish a true sense of health in both physical and social bodies. If mortals are ever to put on immortality ... they must begin now, by discerning that life here is not separate from God in whom "we live, and move, and have our being." For Jesus said that to know God is life eternal. That knowledge is the tree whose leaves are "for the healing of the nations."

[W. Livingston Larned, in the Daily Reporter, White Plains, New York]

Back through the ages it has been the custom among many to sneer at the fundamental thought that there is any curative power in faith, spiritual faith. Religion might well clear up mortal man, and prepare him for his hereafter, but as a practical, usable force for material aid, here on earth, it could not be expected to take the place of medicine bottles or the surgeon's knife. ... This reasoning is not easy to understand. If prayer, faith, or religious fervor is efficacious in one regard, it should be in another. Its source, being divine, must be all-inclusive. ... Surely there is nothing to lead us to believe that faith in a divine power which will come to our rescue twenty per cent of the time for twenty per cent of our earthly requirements, should suddenly fail if we ask to be released from bodily ills. ...

That there are signs of a spiritual awakening, the world over, is not to be denied. Probably the most significant development comes from the one source which would, very naturally, give man a firmer hold on himself and these shadowy, wavering, uncertain precepts of his relative to faith-healing: the church itself. The candle burns dimly after these thousands of years, but any light at all is surely welcome. The general convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in session in Washington the other day, heard a report from a joint commission of bishops and deputies on this admittedly delicate subject. There was placed on the calendar for early consideration this fundamental thought: "Christian healing has passed beyond the stage of experiment and its value cannot be questioned." ... To quote again: "Throughout the world, spiritual healing is no longer the hope of a few but the belief and the practice of a large and rapidly increasing number of persons. Such healing is an experience of mankind that can no longer be questioned." A few years ago, such statements would have been widely heralded as rank and sinful heresy. The report contained this paragraph: "While faith in any supposed remedy produces some effect, vital faith in God, as revealed to Christ, is followed by results which are more sure, more lasting, and of a more evidently spiritual character." And the commission added: "The belief itself is deep, sincere, and helpful to those who hold it." ...

On the swift heels of a more liberal acceptance of this idea, comes evidence almost as surprising and as conclusive, from another source: three famous physicians signed the report. One of them is known to the entire world, Dr. Charles H. Mayo of Rochester, Minnesota. The Mayo brothers have always stood ... high in the eyes of the medical profession and in the consciousness of the public. Dr. Mayo has devoted his life to ministering to human sufferers. People who are victims of every known type of disease go to the Mayo brothers' celebrated institution for treatment. And this renowned specialist, steeped in the traditions of the laboratory and the operating room, and professionally inclined to a belief in medicine, is at last willing to say, in so many words: "Christian healing has passed beyond the stage of experiment and its value cannot be questioned. While faith in any supposed remedy produces some effect, vital faith in God, as revealed to Christ, is followed by results which are more sure, more lasting." Imagine one of the most illustrious and respected physicians our generation has known, signing his name to a declaration of that character! Obviously, the more he sees of medicine, the stronger his faith in God, as the greatest Healer of all. ...

"He sent his word, and healed them" is no mere idle thought, selected at random from the psalms. Here we find such a multitude of reassuring quotations. "O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me." That word "healed" is repeated over and over again, in Holy Script. Always it seems to be linked with prayer, with belief, with religion, with faith which knoweth no wavering nor doubt. There is a certain message of Matthew which has comforted thousands upon countless thousands who were willing to accept its meaning quite literally: "And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and he healed them." The parting injunction of Jesus should stand as a perpetual rebuke to those who doubt the efficacy of faith, and a sublime reassurance to those who put more trust in divinity than in a colored liquid made from mashing roots. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, 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. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son." But there was a proviso, always. Following the beautiful promise, "If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it," came the simple admonition, "If ye love me, keep my commandments."

[Prof. J. S. Haldane, as quoted in the Glasgow Herald, Scotland]

The subject of Prof. J. S. Haldane's Gifford lecture at Glasgow University yesterday was "The Unity of Experience." ... The conclusion forced upon him in the course of a life devoted to natural science was that the universe as it was assumed to be in physical science was only an ideal world, while the real universe was the spiritual universe in which spiritual values counted for everything.

The spiritual individual interests and values in this spiritual world turned out, when we examined them, to be not separable interests but one interest, with its values organically united with one another in time relations as well as space relations, and the perception of this was never far off. This perception guided us towards honest, diligent, unselfish, and charitable conduct, and was the motive impulse of all that we regarded as being best in our actions. It gave us width of intellectual vision, courage to act, courage to endure, and inspiration to carry forward what we had inherited from those before us. We lived, if we would only realize it, in the presence of and through the power of this spiritual reality. It was the inspiration of all the splendid and painstaking effort which had built up our language, our science, our institutions, our machinery of all sorts, and all that we called civilization.

[Rev. Dr. Randolph Ray, as quoted in the New York Times, New York]

We think of God as a kind of policeman looking after us, instead of the source of all our poise, joy, and peace. ... You and I make failures of the law because we have aped our ways after this one and that, and have not learned the law. Through all the closed windows that seem so hard to open, through all the vales of tears that seem so full of misery, Christ calls in tenderness and love to man in his eternal quest of God.