Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing - George Barton Cutten (list of ebook readers txt) 📗

Mrs. Eddy's doctrines are founded on a metaphysical theory known as subjective idealism, and advanced centuries before her birth. It posits the all-comprehensiveness of mind and the non-existence of matter. If bodies do not exist, diseases cannot exist, and must be only mental delusions. If the mind is freed of these delusions the disease is gone. This was Quimby's method of procedure already quoted. In Science and Health she says that the object of treatment is "to destroy the patient's belief in his physical condition." She also advises: "Mentally contradict every complaint of the body." She continues: "All disease is the result of education, and can carry its ill effects no further than mortal mind maps out the way. Destroy fear," she says, "and you end the fever." However, as with other healers, practice and theory are two different things. Listen further: "It would be foolish to venture beyond our present understanding, foolish to stop eating, until we gain more goodness and a clearer comprehension of the living God." Again: "Until the advancing age admits the efficacy and the supremacy of Mind, it is better to leave the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations to the fingers of the surgeon, while you confine yourself chiefly to mental reconstruction, and the prevention of inflammation and protracted confinement."205

With the exception of Christian Science, no modern religious movement has come so prominently before the public and gained so many adherents in a short time as the Christian Catholic Apostle Church of Zion, and both movements owe their popularity solely to their healing. John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907), the founder of this sect, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but in 1860, with his parents, he went to Australia, returning for two years to his native city for college study. In 1870 he was ordained to the Congregational ministry. He served three churches, and after some political activity was offered a portfolio in the Australian cabinet of Sir Henry Parks. In 1882 he went to Melbourne and established a large independent church, building a tabernacle for worship. About this time he became a firm believer in Divine Healing in direct answer to prayer. He arrived in San Francisco in 1888 and spent two years in organizing branches of the Divine Healing Association of which he was president. He went to Chicago in 1890 and continued there holding meetings for some years. In 1895 he broke away from the International Divine Healing Association, which he had been chiefly instrumental in organizing, and insisted that his followers should not remain in the churches. The following year the Christian Catholic Church was organized. Of this organization Mr. Dowie was known as General Overseer, then as Prophet, and in 1904 as First Apostle. He also proclaimed himself in general as the messenger of the Covenant and Elijah the Restorer. In 1900 Mr. Dowie said: "About twenty-two thousand have been baptized by triune immersion up to the present, and this includes practically all the members." This, however, was a great exaggeration. In 1901 the head-quarters of the church was moved to Zion City, forty-two miles north of Chicago. He preached the threefold gospel of Salvation, Healing, and Holy Living. Dowie differed from Christian Science in proclaiming the reality of disease, the distinctive feature of his doctrine being that all bodily ailment is the work of the Devil, and that Christ came to destroy the works of the Devil. His contempt for external means may be judged from the title of a pamphlet, Doctors, Drugs, and Devils; nevertheless, he used physicians at least to diagnose cases at different times, a licensed medical doctor, Speicher, being associated with him from the beginning of his work in Chicago. Dentists are a factor of Zion City, and it is said he also used an oculist. According to his doctrine there are four methods of cure: "The first is the direct prayer of faith; the second, intercessory prayer of two or more; the third, the anointing of the elders, with the prayer of faith; and the fourth, the laying on of hands of those who believe, and whom God has prepared and called to that ministry." In addition to this, teaching is the basis of all other methods. The first ten years of his healing he is said to have laid hands on eighteen thousand sick, and he declared that the greater part of them were fully healed. In some of his later years he said in an issue of his paper: "I pray and lay hands on seventy thousand people in a year." That would make one hundred and seventy-five thousand in two and a half years; but in the time preceding the statement he reported only seven hundred cures. Evidently very few were helped. However, in Shiloh Tabernacle at Zion City are exhibited on the walls crutches, canes, surgical instruments, trusses, and almost every form of apparatus used by the medical profession, presented by people who have now no further use for them on account of their being healed.206

Our study began with the mental therapeutics of over a millennium before the birth of Christ; let us now close with that of the twentieth century after, in giving some account of the so-called Emmanuel Movement. In 1905 there was formed in connection with Emmanuel Church, Boston, a tuberculosis class for the alleviation of unfortunates of this kind. In this experience it was found that certain psychic and social factors greatly aided in a cure, and in the following year, 1906, the work expanded into what has been called the "Emmanuel Movement." It is an attempt to combine the wisdom and efforts of the physician, the clergyman, the psychologist, and the sociologist, to combat conditions most frequently met in a large city. In the medical phase of the work mental healing has had a large place, and has been emphasized most in the popular presentation of the movement, and so far as the idea has spread, it has been almost wholly in connection with this aspect. What the future of this will be is uncertain, but it seems probable that its most valuable service will be in stimulating the physicians to take up the work which properly belongs to them—the work of therapeutics in all its branches, mental and physical.