Modern Religious Cults and Movements

plies an informing mass of detail. Medical Science and Psychology have been slow to take into account the facts thus submitted, but they have of late made amends for thei

st, the action or reaction of mind upon body; second, the control of mental attitudes by the comp

sand Years of M

Faith and M

ntal and even spiritual approaches to physical conditions. We have here to fall back upon facts rather than upon a definite knowledge of what happens in the shadowy border-land across which the mind takes over and organizes and acts upon what is presented to it by the afferent nervous system. Nothing, for example, could be really more profound than the d

ions are established in the harmonious co?peration of physical processes, its superstructure rises through mental attitudes into what, for want of a more clearly defined word, we call spiritual states. Two orders meet and merge within us. Above a world of idea, insight, desire and subordination of means to ends, the whole driven by the will and saturat

motional Reactions

These experiments have been carried on with an almost incredible patience and attention to detail under the most difficult circumstances, and their conclusions seem final. Professor Walter B. Cannon of Harvard University has recently put

Hunger, Fear and Rage," quo

, taken by an animal and so deflected as not to pass into the digestive tract at all stimulates the gastric flow quite as much as if it were actually received into the stomach. On the other hand unhappy emotional disturbance greatly retards the digestive processes. Pain, for example, results in pr

rom long continued or over-taxing exertion of any sort. Under the influence of fatigue the power of the muscles to respond to any kind of stimulus is greatly reduced. (It is interesting to note, however, that muscular fibre detached from the living organism and mechanically stretched and relaxed shows after a period the same decrease in contractability under stimulation.) On the other hand any increase in adrenal secretion results in renewed sensitiveness to stimulat

annon in the fo

.[11] Coagulation is also hastened by heightened emotion; a wound does not bleed so freely when the wounded one is angry or excited. A soldier, then, in the stress of combat is not only rendered insensible to fatigue and capable of abnormal

ever, that this effect

both physical and mental, upon which we may draw in times of stress and under emotional excitement.[12] Such emotionally induced chemical actions and reactions as have been indicated release these stored energ

nomena of religious frenzy such as the ceremonial dances of savages, the "Danse Macabre" of the Middle Ages

Two

subtle forms, mobilizing all its forces for the contests which the emotion anticipates, or indeed which the emotion itself calls out. And if all this seems unduly technical it is only to bear out with something like a scientific accura

modification in the balance of the physical registers automatically an equally unhappy modification in the balance of the psychic. Most of us, as we come to know ourselves better, recognize marked alterations even in spiritual states which we

lenge of

cessful in dealing with disease on the basis of a philosophy which makes everything, or nearly everything, of the body and nothing or next to nothing of the mind, that medicine was in danger of becoming more sheerly materialistic than almost any other of our sciences; Physics and Chemistry had their backg

power of commanding suggestion as really for the time being to focus consciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A new set of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon nor

ciousness, which is thus laid bare, open to the influence of external stimuli or suggestions.... In hypnotic trance ... we have direct access to man's organic consciousness and through it to organic life itself."... If we broaden this last sentence to include not only organic consciousness but the deeper strata of personality in which not only individual but perhaps racial experience is bedded, we hav

irection. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though those messages of the afferent nerves cease to have any effect upon the subject, the imaginings of the subject carried back along outgoing lines produce the most unexpected results in physical states. If a postage stamp be pl

el. To be taken with caution. See Jacoby

tion Affects

the two schools. Medical Science is quite willing to admit that while functional action may thus be modified no real organic changes can be produced. There is a border-land so much s

turbed physical organism is to correct itself, the whole process probably goes on more quickly as it certainly goes on with less discomfort if attention is withdrawn.[15] The assumption of health is a tremendous health-giving force and if the condition to be remedied is really due to a mental complex which needs only some strong exertion of the will or readjustment o

not be directly due to suggestion but to processes released by suggestion. Organic change may certainly be checked and the effect of it overco

ith to Change M

-prevailing power whose word is law and we could really be persuaded that such a power had really intervened-even if it actually had not-on our behalf and brought its supernatural resource to bear upon our troubled case, then we should have a confidence more potent in the immediate transformation of mental attitudes than anything

can be secured. This is rather an achievement of faith than reason but the Christian Church generally has held such a faith-a faith sustained by the testimony which favours it and unaffected by the testimony which challenges it. The scientific temper which seeks economy in all its explanations and asks only for a cause sufficient for the effect and which is, moreover, constantly trying to relate the unknown to the known, takes another line and finds in faith healing just one more illust

conscious help us here. We do know that a great deal may really take place in personality of which consciousness takes no account. Consciousness in its most active phases is alert, purposeful and preoccupied with the immediate concern of the moment. Consciousness heeds commands and takes account of such conditions as strongly assert th

ell, becomes an incalculable force in shaping the ends of life. We have here, then, well attested truths or laws-it is difficult to know what to call them-which help us to understand the bases of faith healing or mental healing by suggestion. Now directly we turn to such records as remain to us we find that such forces as these have been in action from the very beginning. All disease was in early times referred generally to spirit possession. If only the evil spirit could be exorcised the patient would get well and the priest was, of course, the proper person to undertake this. Religion

the Earliest Expl

r sixteenth centuries; and the third from perhaps the sixteenth century on. The second period, he adds, was by far the most sterile and stationary of the three "largely due to the prohibitive attitude of the Church. The science of Me

any real knowledge was his own effort he peopled his world with forces more or less like himself, except that they were invisible, who operated practically the whole of natural phenomena. There was a spirit for every place and every happening; spirits for fields and hearths, thresholds and

ir temporary abode uncomfortable for the demon as remedial for the patient and, indeed, the curious and loathsome things which have been used for medicines might well disgust even a malevolent demo

gs of Scient

r than the body. There were, however, gleams of scientific light through all this murky region. The Egyptians knew something of anatomy though they made a most capricious use of it and there must have been some knowledge of hygienic methods; the prohibitions of Leviticus, for example, and

qualled. He seems to have been abstemious in eating; he practiced the most strenuous physical exercises; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and so created a civilization in which health very largely took care of itself. An examination of what records remain to us hardly sustains the accepted opinion that the Greeks had made substantial adv

w strongly supported by a scholar's research see Singer's

strengthens the soul, but the well regulated soul, by its authoritative power, maintains the body in perfect health." Whether the best classic civilization made, consciously, its own this very noble insight of Plato, the best classic civilization did secure the sound mind and t

roaching medicine from the scientific rather than the religious or traditional point of view. Even though his science was a poor enough thing, his doc

the Early and

inextricably interwoven with accounts of the healing power of the founder of Christianity. All the later attitude of Christianity toward disease must be considered in the light of this fact. We owe to Christianity the first real hospitals, the first really compassion

ual values. The body was at best but the tabernacle of the soul and the soul being the chief concern, whatever happened to the body was of little importance. The body was not only underestimated, it was scorned and abused, starved and scourged; it was the seat of unholy influences and impulses;

fere, therefore, was in some way to defeat the justice of God. Pestilences were inscrutable providences; they were the wra

hough intangible, was the desire of the Church to have the whole of life under its own direct control. It instinctively feared methods of thought or processes of investigation not directly a part of its own imperial administration of life. Some subtle distrust of the human reason went along with all this. As a result the Church, in the main, threw herself against the more independent pro

and S

in ways upon which it is not necessary to enlarge. The Gospels themselves lent their mighty sanction to this persuasion and there was nothing in the temper of the Church for more than a thousand years afterward to greatly modify it. Indeed the temper of the Churc

ver have carried them through without the protection of Charles V whose physician he was. He was finally driven out, a wanderer in quest of truth, was shipwrecked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in the prime of his life and strength "he was lost to the world." But he had, none the less, won his fight and the opposition of the Church to the scientific study of anatomy was gradually withdrawn. But every marked advance in medical science had really to fight the battle over again. The Sorbonne condemned inoculation, vaccination had slowly to fight its way and even the discovery of anesthetic, perhaps the great

testimony to the power of mind over body. Since the Church believed in demon possession it sought to cure by exorcism and there are in the ritual of the Church, as the ritual has finally taken form, offices growing out of this long, long battle against evil spirits which have now l

d its own peculiar power over some bodily region or over some particular disease. And so the faithful were guarded by a legion of protecting influences against everything from coughs to sudden death. There is almost an unimaginable range of relics. Parts of the true Cross possessed supreme value. St. Louis of France was brought back almost from death to life by the touch of the sacred wood. The bones and hairs of saints, rings which they had worn and all such things as these had value and to prove that the value was not resident in the relic but in the faith with whi

there each year." Charcot, it is worth noting, had confidence enough not in the shrine but in the healing power of faith to send fifty or sixty patients to Lourdes every year. His patients were, of course, the mentally and nervously unbalanced. The French governme

e King's Touch: The R

used. Birth girdles worn by women in childbirth eased their pain. A circular piece of copper guarded against cholera. A coral was a good guard against the evil eye and sail-cloth from a shipwrecked vessel tied to the right arm was a preventive as well as a cure for epilep

actice began with these two for they, more than any kings of their time or most kings since, were really men of rare and saintly character. Curiously but naturally enough the English have denied any real power in this region to French kings and the French have claimed a monopoly for their own sovereigns. The belief in the king's touch persisted long and seems toward the end to have had no connection w

r the king's use in that office and these touching pieces are still in existence. William III refused to take this particular power seriously. "God give you better health and more sense," he said as he once touched a pa

is well enough established, though there can be in the nature of things no finality in the estimate of his real efficacy. George Fox performed some cures; John Wesley also. In the seventeenth century one Valentine Greatrakes seems to have been the center