Modern Religious Cults and Movements

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Gaius Glenn Atkins

_Modern Religious Cults and Movements_

Dr. Atkins has written a noteworthy and valuable book dealing with thenew cults some of which have been much to the fore for a couple ofdecades past, such as: Faith Healing; Christian Science; New Thought;Theosophy and Spiritualism, etc. $2. 50

_The Undiscovered Country_

Dr. Atkins' work, throughout, is marked by clarity of presentation, polished diction and forceful phrasing. A firm grasp of the elementaltruths of Christian belief together with an unusual ability to interpretmundane experiences in terms of spiritual reality. $1. 50

_Jerusalem: Past and Present_

"One of the books that will help to relieve us of the restless cravingfor excitement, and to make clear that we can read history truly only aswe read it as 'His Story'--and that we attain our best only as the hopeof the soul is realized by citizenship in 'the City of God. '"--_BaptistWorld. _ $1. 25

_Pilgrims of the Lonely Road_

"A very unusual group of studies of the great mystics, and shows realinsight into the deeper experience of the religious life. "--_ChristianWork. _ $2. 00

_A Rendezvous with Life_

"Life is represented as a journey, with various 'inns' along the waysuch as Day's End, Week's End, Month's End, Year's End--all suggestiveof certain experiences and duties. " Paper, 25 cts. 

Modern Religious Cults and Movements

By

GAIUS GLENN ATKINS, D. D. , L. H. D. 

_Minister of the First Congregational Church, Detroit, Mich. 

Author of "Pilgrims of the Lonely Road, " "The Undiscovered Country, "etc. _

New York Chicago

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1923, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth AvenueChicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster SquareEdinburgh: 75 Princes Street

_To E. M. C. _

_Whose constant friendship through changing years has been like the fireupon his hearthstone, a glowing gift and a grateful memory_

Introduction

The last thirty years, though as dates go this is only an approximation, have witnessed a marked development of religious cults and movementslargely outside the lines of historic Catholicism and Protestantism. Oneof these cults is strongly organized and has for twenty years grown morerapidly in proportion than most of the Christian communions. Theinfluence of others, more loosely organized, is far reaching. Some ofthem attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of scienceand philosophy, and, generally, they represent the free movement of whatone may call the creative religious consciousness of our time. 

There is, of course, a great and constantly growing literature dealingwith particular cults, but there has been as yet apparently no attemptto inquire whether there may not be a few unexpectedly simple centersaround which, in spite of their superficial differences, they reallyorganize themselves. 

What follows is an endeavour in these directions. It is really a verygreat task and can at the best be only tentatively done. Whoeverundertakes it may well begin by confessing his own limitations. Contemporaneous appraisals of movements upon whose tides we ourselvesare borne are subject to constant revision. One's own prejudices, nomatter how strongly one may deal with them, colour one's conclusions, particularly in the region of religion. The really vast subject matteralso imposes its own limitations upon even the most sincere studentunless he has specialized for a lifetime in his theme; even then hewould need to ask the charity of his readers. 

Ground has been broken for such an endeavour in many differentdirections. Broadly considered, William James' "Varieties of ReligiousExperience" was perhaps the pioneer work. Professor James' suggestiveanalyses recognize the greatly divergent forms religious experience maytake and establish their right to be taken seriously as valid facts forthe investigator. The whole tendency of organized Christianity--andProtestantism more largely than Catholicism--has been to narrowreligious experience to accepted forms, but religion itself is impatientof forms. It has its border-lands, shadowy regions which lie between theacceptance of what Sabatier calls "the religions of authority" on theone hand and the conventional types of piety or practical goodness onthe other. Those who find their religion in such regions--one mightperhaps call them the border-land people--discover the authority fortheir faith in philosophies which, for the most part, have not thesanction of the schools and the demonstration of the reality of theirfaith in personal experience for which there is very little proof excepttheir own testimony--and their testimony itself is often confusedenough. 

But James made no attempt to relate his governing conceptions toparticular organizations and movements save in the most general way. His fundamentals, the distinction he draws between the "once-born" andthe "twice-born, " between the religion of healthy-mindedness and theneed of the sick soul, the psychological bases which he supplies forconversation and the rarer religious experiences are immenselyilluminating, but all this is only the nebulæ out of which religions areorganized into systems; the systems still remain to be considered. 

There has been of late a new interest in Mysticism, itself a border-landword, strangely difficult of definition yet meaning generally thepersuasion that through certain spiritual disciplines--commonly calledthe mystic way--we may come into a first-hand knowledge of God and thespiritual order, in no sense dependent upon reason or sense testimony. Some modern movements are akin to mysticism but they cannot all befairly included in any history of mysticism. Neither can they beincluded in any history of Christianity; some of them completely ignorethe Christian religion; some of them press less central aspects of itout of all proportion; one of them undertakes to recast Christianity inits own moulds but certainly gives it a quality in so dealing with itwhich cannot be supported by any critical examination of the Gospels orconsidered as the logical development of Christian dogma. Here arereally new adventures in religion with new gospels, new prophets and newcreeds. They need to be twice approached, once through an examination ofthose things which are fundamental in religion itself, for they havebehind them the power of what one may call the religious urge, and theywill ultimately stand as they meet, with a measure of finality, thoseneeds of the soul of which religion has always been the expression, orfall as they fail to meet them. But since some limitation or other inthe types of Christianity which are dominant amongst us has given themtheir opportunity they must also be approached through someconsideration of the Christianity against which they have reacted. Unsatisfied needs of the inner life have unlocked the doors throughwhich they have made their abundant entry. Since they also reflect, asreligion always reflects, contemporaneous movements in Philosophy, Science, Ethics and Social Relationship, they cannot be understoodwithout some consideration of the forces under whose strong impactinherited faiths have, during the last half century, been slowlybreaking down, and in answer to whose suggestions faith has been takinga new form. 

A rewarding approach, then, to Modern Religious Cults and Movements mustnecessarily move along a wide front, and a certain amount of patienceand faith is asked of the reader in the opening chapters of this book:patience enough to follow through the discussion of general principles, and faith enough to believe that such a discussion will in the endcontribute to the practical understanding of movements with which we areall more or less familiar, and by which we are all more or lessaffected. 

G. G. A. 

_Detroit, Michigan. _

Contents

I. FORMS AND BACKGROUNDS OF INHERITED CHRISTIANITY 13

Certain Qualities Common to All Religions--ChristianityHistorically Organized Around aTranscendent God and a Fallen Humanity--TheIncarnation; the Cross the Supreme Symbol ofWestern Theology--The Catholic Belief inthe Authority of an Inerrant Church--TheProtestant Church Made Faith the Key toSalvation--Protestantism and an Infallibly InspiredBible--The Strength and Weakness ofThis Position--Evangelical Protestantism theOutcome--Individual Experience of the Believerthe Keystone of Evangelical Protestantism--Readjustmentof Both Catholic andProtestant Systems Inevitable. 

II. NEW FORCES AND OLD FAITHS 46

The Far-reaching Readjustments of ChristianFaith in the Last Fifty Years--The Reaction ofEvolution Upon Religion--The Reaction ofBiblical Criticism Upon Faith--The AverageMan Loses His Bearings--The New Psychology--TheInfluence of Philosophy and theSocial Situation--An Age of Confusion--TheLure of the Short Cut--Popular Education--TheChurches Lose Authority--Efforts at Reconstruction--AnAge of Doubt and a Twilight-Zonein History--The Hunger of theSoul and the Need for Faith--Modern ReligiousCults and Movements: Their ThreeCenters About Which They Have OrganizedThemselves. 

III. FAITH HEALING IN GENERAL 82

The Bases of Faith and Mental Healing--Cannon'sStudy of Emotional Reactions--TheTwo Doors--The Challenge of Hypnotism--ChangedAttention Affects Physical States--ThePower of Faith to Change Mental Attitudes--DemonPossession--The Beginnings ofScientific Medicine--The Attitude of the Earlyand Medieval Church--Saints and Shrines--Magic, Charms, and the King's Touch: TheRise of the Faith Healer. 

IV. THE APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MARY BAKER EDDY 108

Mesmerism--The Scientific Investigation ofMesmerism--Mesmerism in America; PhineasQuimby an Important Link in a Long Chain--Quimbyis Led to Define Sickness as WrongBelief--Quimby Develops His Theories--MaryBaker Eddy Comes Under His Influence--OutstandingEvents of Her Life: HerEarly Girlhood--Her Education: Shaping Influences--HerUnhappy Fortunes. She isCured by Quimby--An Unacknowledged Debt--SheDevelops Quimby's Teachings--Beginsto Teach and to Heal--Early Phases ofChristian Science--She Writes "Science andHealth" and Completes the Organization ofHer Church. 

V. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A PHILOSOPHY 136

Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, aReligion and a System of Healing--ThePhilosophic Bases of Christian Science--ItUndertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil--ContrastedSolutions--The Divine Mind andMortal Mind--The Essential Limitations ofMrs. Eddy's System--Experience and Life--Sense-Testimony--TheInescapable Reality of Shadowed Experience. 

VI. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A THEOLOGY 163

Science and Health Offered as a Key to theScriptures--It Ignores All Recognized Canonsof Biblical Interpretation--Its Conception ofGod--Mrs. Eddy's Interpretation of JesusChrist--Christian Science His Second Coming--ChristianScience, the Incarnation and theAtonement--Sin an Error of Mortal Mind--TheSacraments Disappear--The Real Powerof Christian Science. 

VII. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A SYSTEM OF HEALING AND A RELIGION 185

Christian Science the Application of Philosophyand Theology to Bodily Healing--Loosenessof Christian Science Diagnosis--ThePower of Mental Environment--ChristianScience Definition of Disease--Has a RichField to Work--A Strongly-Drawn Systemof Psycho-therapy--A System of Suggestion--Affectedby Our Growing Understandingof the Range of Suggestion--Strongest inTeaching That God Has Meaning for theWhole of Life--Exalts the Power of Mind;the Processes--Is Not Big Enough for theWhole of Experience. 

VIII. NEW THOUGHT 210

New Thought Difficult to Define--"The Rediscoveryof the Inner Life"--Spinoza's Quest--KantReaffirms the Creative Power of Mind--Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism--TheReactions Against Them--New EnglandTranscendentalism--New Thought TakesForm--Its Creeds--The Range of the Movement--TheKey-Words of New Thought--ItsField of Real Usefulness--Its Gospel of GettingOn--The Limitations and Dangers of ItsPositions--Tends to Become a Universal andLoosely-Defined Religion. 

IX. THE RETURN OF THE EAST UPON WEST. THEOSOPHY AND KINDRED CULTS 245

Historic Forces Carried Early ChristianityWest and Not East--The West Rediscoversthe East; the East Returns Upon the West--Chesterton'sTwo Saints--Why the WestQuestions the East--Pantheism and Its Problems--Howthe One Becomes the Many--Evolutionand Involution--Theosophy Undertakesto Offer Deliverance--But BecomesDeeply Entangled Itself--The West Looks toPersonal Immortality--The East Balances theAccounts of Life in a Series of Reincarnations--TheosophyProduces a Distinct Type of Character--A "Tour de Force"of the Imagination--A Bridge of Clouds--The Difficultiesof Reincarnation--Immortality Nobler, Juster andSimpler--Pantheism at Its Best--and Its Worst. 

X. SPIRITUALISM 284

The Genesis of Modern Spiritualism--ItCrosses to Europe--The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship--TheSociety for Psychical Research Begins Its Work--ConfrontsDifficulties--William James Enters the Field--TheLimitations of Psychical Investigation--The Societyfor Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing toSpiritism--The Very Small Number of DependableMediums--Spiritism a Question of Testimony andInterpretation--Possible Explanations of SpiritisticPhenomena--Myers' Theory of Mediumship--Telepathy--Controls--TheDilemma of Spiritism--The Influence of Spiritism--The RealAlternative to Spiritism--The Investigations of ÉmileBoirac--Geley's Conclusions--The Meaning of Spiritism forFaith. 

XI. MINOR CULTS: THE MEANING OF THE CULTS FOR THE CHURCH 326

Border-land Cults--Bahaism--The Bab andHis Successors--The Temple of Unity--GeneralConclusions--The Cults Are Aspects ofthe Creative Religious Consciousness of theAge--Their Parallels in the Past--The HealingCults Likely to be Adversely Influenced bythe Scientific Organization of Psycho-therapy--NewThought Will Become Old Thought--PossibleAbsorption of the Cults by a WideningHistoric Christianity--Christianity Influencedby the Cults--Medical Science and theHealing Cults--A Neglected Force--Time andthe Corrections of Truth. 

I

THE FORMS AND BACKGROUNDS OF INHERITED CHRISTIANITY

Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is thedecade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do. It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on theoutposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three andBarrack Room Ballads--too far away for their guns to be heard in thestreets of capital cities, but lending a touch of colour to newspaperhead-lines and supplying new material for rising young writers. It wasthe decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and triumphantIndustrialism and, among the more open-minded, of triumphant Evolution. Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure of its formulæ, sureof its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man'shand against particularly luminous horizons, but there was everywhere ageneral agreement that they would be dissolved by the force of benigndevelopment. The world seemed particularly well in hand. 

The churches generally shared this confidence. Catholicism andProtestantism had reached a tacit working agreement as to their spheresof influence and were even beginning to fraternize a little. Thedivisive force of Protestantism seemed to have spent itself. SinceAlexander Campbell--dead now for a decade and a half--no Protestant sectof any importance had been established. The older denominations hadachieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolutionand Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversyand though these controversies were severe enough they produced noschisms in the churches themselves. A few religious leaders were urginga more thoroughgoing social interpretation and application of theteachings of Jesus; such as these were really looked upon with moresuspicion than the propagandists of a liberal theology. 

We see now with almost tragic clearness that, beneath the surface of thewhole interrelated order of that tranquil afternoon of the Victorianepoch, there were forces in action working toward such a challenge ofthe accepted and inherited as cultures and civilizations are asked tomeet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as theyhave issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancientorders and new alignments along every front of human interest. It willbe the task of the historians of the future who will have the necessarymaterial in hand to follow these immense reactions in their variousfields and they will find their real point of departure not in dates butin the human attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show ofbeing final--and were not final at all. 

Just there also is the real point of departure for a study like this. Wemay date the rise of modern religious cults and movements from the lastdecades of the nineteenth century, but they are really reactions notagainst a time but a temper, an understanding of religion and a group ofreligious validations which had been built up through an immense labourof travailing generations and which toward the end of the last centurywere in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a thousandyears (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is asked towait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to begin, then, with a state of mind which for want of a better name I venture tocall the representative orthodox religious consciousness of the end ofthe nineteenth century. That this consciousness is Christian is ofcourse assumed. It is Protestant rather than Catholic, for Protestantismhas supplied the larger number of followers to the newer religiousmovements. 

To begin with, this representative religious consciousness was by nomeans simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the modernmind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the whole ofour inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of allthe contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is andthat the inherited elements in it far outweigh more recentcontributions. The religious mind is an equally complex and deep-rootedinheritance and can best be approached by a consideration of the basesof religion. 

_Certain Qualities Common to All Religions_

We are but pilgrims down roads which space and time supply; we cannotaccount for ourselves in terms of what we know to be less thanourselves, nor can we face the shadow which falls deeply across the endof our way without dreaming, at least, of that which lies beyond. Whence? Whither? and Why? are insurgent questions; they are voices outof the depths. A very great development of intelligence was demandedbefore such questions really took definite shape, but they are implicitin even the most rudimentary forms of religion, nor do we outgrow themthrough any achievement of Science or development of Philosophy. Theybecome thereby, if anything, more insistent. Our widening horizons ofknowledge are always swept by a vaster circumference of mystery intowhich faith must write a meaning and beyond which faith must discern adestiny. 

Religion begins, therefore, in our need so to interpret the powermanifest in the universe[1] as to come into some satisfying relationshiptherewith. It goes on to supply an answer to the dominantquestions--Whence? Whither? Why? It fulfills itself in worship andcommunion with what is worshipped. Such worship has addressed itself tovast ranges of objects, fulfilled itself in an almost unbelievablevariety of rites. And yet in every kind of worship there has been someaspiration toward an ideal excellence and some endeavour, moreover, ofthose who worship to come into a real relation with what is worshipped. It would need a detailed treatment, here impossible, to back up sogeneral a statement with the facts which prove it, but the facts arebeyond dispute. It would be equally difficult to analyze the elements inhuman nature which lead us to seek such communion. The essentialloneliness of the soul, our sense of divided and warring powers and thegeneral emotional instability of personality without fitting objects offaith and devotion, all contribute to the incurable religiosity of humannature. 

[Footnote 1: I have taken as a working definition of Religion a phrasequoted by Ward Fowler in the introduction to his Gifford Lectures on"The Religious Experience of the Roman People. " "Religion is theeffective desire to be in right relationship to the power manifestingitself in the Universe. " This is only a formula but it lends itself tovital interpretations and is a better approach to modern cults, many ofwhich are just that endeavour, than those definitions of religion justnow current which define it as a system of values or a process ofevaluation. ]

The value which religion has for those who hold it is perhaps as largelytested by its power to give them a real sense of communion with God asby any other single thing, but this by no means exhausts the value ofreligion for life. All religions must, in one way or another, meet theneed of the will for guidance and the need of the ethical sense forright standards. Religion has always had an ethical content, simpleenough to begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things werepermitted, certain things prohibited as part of a cult. Thesepermissions and prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we maytrace behind taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean analways emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamentalrelationship between religion and ethics. Religion from the very firstfelt itself to be the more august force and through its superiorauthority gave direction and quality to the conduct of its devotees. Itwas long enough before all this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon onthe Mount and the latter chapters of Paul's great letters to hischurches and our present system of Christian ethics, but we discover thebeginning of the lordship of religion over conduct even in the mostprimitive cults. 

We shall find as we go on that this particular aspect of religion isless marked in modern religious cults and movements than either thequest for a new understanding of God or new answers to the three greatquestions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God. Theyaccept, for the most part, the generally held standards of Christianconduct, but even so, they are beginning to develop their own ethicalstandards and to react upon the conduct of those who hold them. 

As has been intimated, however, the appeal of religion goes far deeperthan all this. If it did no more than seek to define for us the "powernot ourselves" everywhere made manifest, if it did no more than answerthe haunting questions: Whence? and Whither? and Why?, if it did no morethan offer the emotional life a satisfying object of worship andcommunion with the Divine, supplying at the same time ethical standardsand guiding and strengthening the will in its endeavour after goodness, it would have done us an immense service. But one may well wonderwhether if religion did no more than this it would have maintaineditself as it has and renew through the changing generations itscompelling appeal. More strong than any purely intellectual curiosityas to a first cause or controlling power, more haunting than any wonderas to the source and destiny of life, more persistent than anyloneliness of the questing soul is our dissatisfaction with ourselves, our consciousness of tragic moral fault, our need of forgiveness anddeliverance. This longing for deliverance has taken many forms. 

Henry Osborn Taylor in a fine passage has shown us how manifold are theroads men have travelled in their quest for salvation. [2] "For one manshall find his peace in action, another in the rejection of action, evenin the seeming destruction of desire; another shall have peace andfreedom through intellectual inquiry, while another must obey his God orlove his God and may stand in very conscious need of divine salvation. The adjustment sought by Confucius was very different from that whichdrew the mind of Plato or led Augustine to the City of God. Often quitedifferent motives may inspire the reasonings which incidentally bringmen to like conclusions. .. . The life adjustment of the early Greekphilosophers had to do with scientific curiosity. .. . They were not likeGotama seeking relief from the tedious impermanence of personalexperience any more than they were seeking to insure their own eternalwelfare in and through the love of God, the motive around which surgedthe Christian yearning for salvation. Evidently every religion is ameans of adjustment or deliverance. "

[Footnote 2: "Deliverance, " pp. 4 and 5. ]

Professor James in his chapter on The Sick Souls deals most suggestivelywith these driving longings and all the later analyses of the psychologyof conversion begin with the stress of the divided self. The deeperteaching of the New Testament roots itself in this soil. The literatureof confession is rich in classic illustrations of all this, told as onlySt. Augustine more than a thousand years ago or Tolstoy yesterday cantell it. No need to quote them here; they are easily accessible forthose who would find for their own longings immortal voices and betaught with what searching self-analysis those who have come out ofdarkness into light have dealt with their own sick souls. 

Every religion has in some fashion or other offered deliverance to itsdevotees through sacrifice or spiritual discipline, or the assurancethat their sins were atoned for and their deliverance assured throughthe sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not onlythe sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. Wehave great need to be delivered not only from our divided selves butfrom the burdens and perplexities of life. Religion must offer someexplanation of the general problem of sorrow and evil; it must, aboveall, justify the ways of God with men. 

Generally speaking, religion is very greatly dependent upon its power soto interpret the hard things of life to those who bear them that theymay still believe in the Divine love and justice. The generality ofdoubt is not philosophical but practical. We break with God more oftenthan for any other reason because we believe that He has not kept faithwith us. Some of the more strongly held modern cults have found theiropportunity in the evident deficiency of the traditional explanation ofpain and sorrow. Religion has really a strong hold on the average lifeonly as it meets the more shadowed side of experience with theaffirmation of an all-conquering love and justice in which we may rest. 

Broadly considered, then, the elements common to all religions are suchas these: a satisfying interpretation of the power manifest in theuniverse, the need of the mind for an answer to the questions Whence?and Whither? and Why?, the need of the emotional life for such peace asmay come from the consciousness of being in right relationship andsatisfying communion with God, the need of the will and ethical sensefor guidance, and a need including all this and something beside forspiritual deliverance. The representative religious consciousness of theend of the nineteenth century in which we find our point of departurefor the religious reactions of the last generation naturally includedall this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. The intellectuallycurious were more concerned with science and political economies thanthe nature or genesis of religion, while the truly devout, who are notgenerally given to the critical analysis of their faith, accepted it asa Divine revelation needing no accounting for outside their Bible. Moreover such things as these were not then and never can be heldabstractly. They were articulate in creeds and organized in churchesand invested with the august sanction of authority, and mediated throughold, old processes of religious development. 

_Christianity Historically Organized Around the Conception of aTranscendent God and a Fallen Humanity_

For in its historic development religion has naturally taken distinctlydivergent forms, conditioned by race, environment, the action andreaction of massed experience and by the temper and insight of a fewsupremely great religious leaders. But centrally, the whole developmentof any religion has been controlled by its conception of God and, in themain, three different conceptions of God give colour and character tothe outstanding historic religions. Pantheistic religions have thoughtof God as just the whole of all that is; they widen the universe to themeasure of the Divine, or narrow the Divine to the operations of theuniverse. Pantheism saturates its whole vague content with a mysticalquality of thought, and colours what it sees with its own emotions. Thereligions of the Divine Immanence conceive God as pervading andsustaining all that is and revealing Himself thereby, though notnecessarily confined therein. The religions of the Divine Transcendencehave believed in a God who is apart from all that is, who neither beginsnor ends in His universe, and from whom we are profoundly separated notonly by our littlenesses but by our sin. 

All this is a bare statement of what is almost infinitely richer as ithas been felt and proclaimed by the devout and we shall see as we go onhow the newer religious movements take also their colour and characterfrom a new emphasis upon the nature of God, or else a return tounderstandings of Him and feelings about Him which have been lost out inthe development of Christianity. 

Historically Christian theology, particularly in the West, has centeredaround the conception of a Transcendent God. As far as doctrine goesChristianity took over a great inheritance from the Jew, for arrestinglyenough the Jew, though he belongs to the East, had never anything incommon with Eastern Pantheism. On the contrary we find his prophets andlawgivers battling with all their force against such aspects ofPantheism as they found about them. The God of the Old Testament isalways immeasurably above those who worshipped Him in righteousness andpower; He is their God and they are His chosen people, but there isnever any identification of their will with His except in the raremoments of their perfect obedience. 

True enough, through the insight of the prophets and particularly theexperience of psalmists, this conception of the Apart-God becameincreasingly rich in the persuasion of His unfailing care for Hischildren. None the less, the Hebrew God is a Transcendent God andChristianity inherits from that. Christianity took over what Judaismrefused--Jesus Christ and His Gospel. But out of the immeasurable wealthof His teaching apostolic thinking naturally appropriated and made mostof what was nearest in line with the prophets and the lawgivers of theirrace. Judaism refused Christ but the Twelve Apostles were Jews and thegreatest of the group--St. Paul--was a Jewish Rabbi before he became aChristian teacher. He had been nurtured and matured in the schools ofhis people and though he was reborn, in renunciations and obediencesdistinctly Christian, there were in his very soul inherited rigiditiesof form in conformity to which he recast his faith. 

More distinctly than he himself could ever have known, he particularizedthe Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doubtless his own experience was the deeperdirecting force in all this. Theologies always, to begin with, are themolten outpouring of some transforming experience and they are always, to begin with, fluid and glowing. 

Such glowing experiences as these are hard to communicate; they, too, soon harden down and we inherit, as cold and rigid form, what was tobegin with the flaming outcome of experience. St. Paul's own struggleand the bitterness of a divided self which issued in his conversionnaturally gave content to all his after teaching. He worked out hissystem strangely apart from the other group of disciples; he hadprobably never heard a word of Christ's teaching directly from Christ'slips; he naturally fell back, therefore, upon his Jewish inheritance andwidened that system of sacrifices and atonements until he found thereinnot only a place for the Cross but the necessity for it. He made much, therefore, of the sense of alienation from God, of sin and humanhelplessness, of the need and possibility of redemption. 

_The Incarnation as the Bridge Between God and Man; the Cross as theInstrument of Man's Redemption. The Cross the Supreme Symbol of WesternTheology_

Here, then, are the two speculative backgrounds of historicChristianity, --God's apartness from man in an inconceivable immensity oflonely goodness, man's alienation from God in a helpless fallen estate. For the bridging of the gulf between God and His world Christianityoffers the incarnation; for the saving of man from his lost estateChristianity offers the Cross. The incarnation is the reëntry of Godinto a world from which, indeed, according to the Christian way ofthinking, He has never been entirely separate, but from which He has, none the less, been so remote that if ever it were to be rescued fromits ruined condition there was needed a new revelation of God inhumanity; and the Atonement is just the saving operation of God thusincarnated. 

Eastern Christianity has made most of the incarnation. The great Greektheologies were built around that. They exhausted the resources of alanguage particularly fitted for subtle definition in their endeavour toexplain the mystery of it, and, after more than a century of bitterdebate about the nature and person of Christ, contented themselves withaffirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeedmaking clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they sosought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. Butthough their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid uponit, they did, nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God asone come into human life and sharing it and using it, without whichthere would have been in all the faith and thinking of the West for morethan a thousand years an unbridged and unbridgeable gulf between God andman. 

Indeed, when we turn back again to the great Greek symbols with thatconception of the immanence of God which the truer insights of our owntime have done so much to supply, we find these old forms and phrasesunexpectedly hospitable to our own interpretations. If the WesternChurch had been more strongly influenced by the philosophical insight ofthe early Eastern Church, Western Christendom might have been saved froma good deal of that theological hardness from which great numbers arejust now reacting. 

But Western Christendom took the Cross for the central symbol of itsfaith. What would have happened to Western Christendom without Augustinewe do not know, and it is idle to try to guess, but Europe in itsreligious thinking followed for a thousand years the direction he gaveit. His theology is only the travail of his soul, glowing and molten. His Confessions reveal to us more clearly than any other record we havePaganism becoming Christian. In the travail of his spirit we seesomething vaster than his own conversion, we see the formulation of newspiritual experiences, the birth of new spiritual relationships, thegrowth of new moral orders and consecrations. He bridges for us thepassages between Paganism and Christianity. He reveals what rebirthmeant for men to whom it was no convention but an agonizing recasting ofboth the inner and outer life. He shows us what it meant to put asidethe inheritances and relationships of an immemorial order and to standas a little child untaught, undisciplined and unperfect in the presenceof the new. The spiritual attitude which Augustine attained was to befor long the dominant spiritual attitude of Europe, was to governmedieval conceptions, inspire medieval actions, colour with its flamethe mystic brooding of the medieval mind. 

In the end the sovereignty of God became for Augustine supreme and overagainst this he set with strong finality man's hopeless fallen state. Hewas doubtless in debt to St. Paul for these governing conceptions butthey took new character as they passed through the alembic of his ownexperience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerningthe redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unitywith God. They do not hesitate to designate this unity to be as adeification . .. They dwell on the idea that we become partakers of theDivine nature. "[3] The emphasis here is not so much upon sin to beatoned for or punishment to be avoided, as reconciliation to beachieved. 

[Footnote 3: Fisher, "History of Christian Doctrine, " p. 162. ]

After Augustine the interpretations of the Cross take a new direction. Now men are thereby not so much to be made partakers of the divinenature as to be saved from hell. The explanations of the way in whichthis salvation is really achieved change with the changing centuries butthrough shifting theologies there is one constant. All men are lost andforedoomed to an eternal punishment from which they are saved only inthat Christ suffered for them and they, through their faith andobedience, have availed themselves of His vicarious death. The varyingtheological interpretations are themselves greatly significant as ifhere were something whose meanings no single explanation could exalt, something to be felt rather than understood. The Cross so seen is thesymbol at once of love and need, of moral defeat and moral discipline, of suffering helplessness and overcoming goodness. We cannot overstatethe influence of this faith upon the better part of Westerncivilization. 

It has kept us greatly humble, purged us of our pride and thrown us backin a helplessness which is, after all, the true secret of our strength, upon the saving mercy of God. The story of it, simply told, has movedthe hard or bitter or the careless as nothing else can do. Itsassurances of deliverance have given new hope to the hopeless and apower not their own to the powerless. It has exalted as the very messageof God the patient enduring of unmerited suffering; it has taught us howthere is no deliverance save as the good suffer for the bad and thestrong put their strength at the service of the weak; it has taught usthat the greatest sin is the sin against love and the really enduringvictories for any better cause are won only as through the appeal of amuch enduring unselfishness new tempers are created and new forces arereleased. Nor is there any sign yet that its empire has begun to come toan end. 

_The Catholic Church Offered Deliverance in Obedience to the Authorityof an Inerrant Church_

Nevertheless the preaching of the Cross has not commonly taken suchforms as these; it has been rather the appeal of the Church to theindividual to escape his sinful and hopeless estate either through anobedient self-identification with the Church's discipline and anunquestioning acceptance of the Church's authority, or else through anintellectual acceptance of the scheme of redemption and a moralsurrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through theone or the other of which Christianity has been made real to theindividual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the earlyformative period of the Church it was a matter between the individualand his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the PaulineEpistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought andmethod of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairlyinterprets St. Paul. Faith--a big enough word, standing for bothintellectual acceptance and a kind of mystic receptivity to the love andgoodness and justice of God revealed in the Cross of Christ--is the keyto salvation and the condition of Christian character. It is also thatthrough which religion becomes real to the individual. But since allthis lays upon the individual a burden hard enough to be borne (as weshall see when we come back to Protestantism itself) the Church, as herorganization became more definite and her authority more stronglyestablished, took the responsibility of the whole matter upon herself. She herself would become responsible for the outcome if only they wereteachable and obedient. 

The Catholic Church offered to its communicants an assured security, theproof of which was not in the fluctuating states of their own souls butin the august authority of the Church to which they belonged. As long, therefore, as they remained in obedient communion with their Churchtheir souls were secure. The Church offered them its confessional fortheir unburdening and its absolutions for their assurance, itssacraments for their strengthening and its penances for their disciplineand restoration. It took from them in spiritual regions and maybe inother regions too, the responsibility for the conduct of their own livesand asked of the faithful only that they believe and obey. The Church, as it were, "stepped down" religion to humanity. It did all this with amarvellous understanding of human nature and in answer to necessitieswhich were, to begin with, essential to the discipline of childlikepeoples who would otherwise have been brought face to face with truthstoo great for them, or dismissed to a freedom for which they were notready. 

It was and is a marvellous system; there has never been anything like itand if it should wholly fail from amongst us there will never beanything like it again. And yet we see that all this vast spiritualedifice, like the arches of its own great cathedrals, locks up upon asingle keystone. The keystone of the arch of Catholic certainty is theacceptance of the authority of the Church conditioned by belief in thedivine character of that authority. If anything should shake theCatholic's belief in the authority of his Church and the efficacy of hersacraments then he is left strangely unsheltered. Strongly articulatedas this system is, it has not been untouched by time and change. Tocontinue our figure, one great wing of the medieval structure fell awayin the Protestant Reformation and what was left, though extensive andsolid enough, is still like its great cathedrals--yielding to time andchange. The impressive force and unity of contemporaneous Catholicismmay lead us perhaps to underestimate the number of those in the Catholicline who, having for one reason or another lost faith in their Church, are now open to the appeal of the newer movements. For example, thelargest non-Catholic religious group of Poles in Detroit areRussellites. There are on good authority between three and four thousandof them. 

_The Protestant Church Made Faith the Key to Salvation with Conversionthe Test for the Individual of the Reality of His Religious Experience_

If religion has been made real to the Catholic through the mediation ofhis Church, Protestantism, seeking to recreate the apostolic Church, hasmade the reality of religion a matter between the individual and hisGod. And yet Protestantism has never dared commit itself to so simple aphrasing of religion as this, nor to go on without authorities of itsown. Protestantism generally has substituted for the inclusive authorityof the Catholic Church the authority of its own creeds and fundamentallythe authority of the Bible. As far as creeds go Protestantism carriedover the content of Latin Christianity more largely than we havegenerally recognized. Luther was in direct line with Augustine asAugustine was in direct line with St. Paul, and Luther's fundamentaldoctrine--justification by faith--was not so much a rewriting of ancientcreeds as a new way of validating their meaning for the individual. Faith, in our common use of the term, has hardened down into anintellectual acceptance of Protestant theologies, but certainly for St. Paul and probably for Luther it was far more vital than this and farmore simple. It was rather a resting upon a delivering power, theassurance of whose desire and willingness to deliver was found in theNew Testament. It was an end to struggle, a spiritual victory wonthrough surrender. 

The Latin Catholic system had come to impose upon such tempers asLuther's an unendurable amount of strain; it was too complex, toodemanding, and it failed to carry with it necessary elements of mentaland spiritual consent. (St. Paul had the same experience with his ownJudaism. ) What Luther sought was a peace-bringing rightness with God. Hewas typically and creatively one of William James' "divided souls" andhe found the solution for his fears, his struggles and his doubts insimply taking for granted that a fight which he was not able to win forhimself had been won for him in the transaction on the Cross. He hadnothing, therefore, to do but to accept the peace thus made possible andthereafter to be spiritually at rest. 

Now since the whole of the meaning of the Cross for Christianity fromSt. Paul until our own time is involved in this bare statement and sinceour theologies have never been able to explain this whole great matterin any doctrinal form which has secured universal consent, we mustsimply fall back upon the statement of the fact and recognize that hereis something to be defined in terms of experience and not of doctrine. The validating experience has come generally to be known as conversion, and conversion has played a great part in evangelical Protestantism eversince the Reformation. It has become, indeed, the one way in whichreligion has been made real to most members of evangelical churches. Sosweeping a statement must be somewhat qualified, for conversion is farolder than Luther;[4] it is not confined to Protestantism and theProtestant churches themselves have not agreed in their emphasis uponit. Yet we are probably on safe ground in saying that religion hasbecome real to the average member of the average Protestant Church moredistinctly through conversion than anything else. 

[Footnote 4: But rather in the discipline of the Mystic as an enrichmentof the spiritual life than as a door to the Communion of the Church. ]

Conversion has of late come up for a pretty thoroughgoing examination bythe psychologists, and their conclusions are so generally familiar asto need no restatement here. William James, in a rather informalparagraph quoted from one of his letters, states the psychologist'spoint of view more simply and vividly than either he or his discipleshave defined their position in their more formal works. "In the case ofconversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may besupernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks, but I am surethat in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new powergained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflictof two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneouslydivided, but in which, after the conversion crisis, the higher loves andpowers come definitely to gain the upper hand and expel the forces whichup to that time had kept them down to the position of mere grumblers andprotesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view willcover an enormous number of cases psychologically and leaves all thereligious importance to the result which it has on any other theory. "[5]

[Footnote 5: Letters of William James, Vol. II, p. 57. ]

In Luther, Augustine and St. Paul, and a great fellowship beside, thisstress of the divided self was both immediate and intense. Such as thesethrough the consciousness of very real fault--and this is true ofAugustine and St. Paul--or through a rare spiritual sensitiveness and anunusual force of aspiration--and this is true of many others--did notneed any conviction of sin urged upon them from the outside. They hadconviction enough of their own. But all these have been men and womenapart, intensely devout by nature, committed by temperament to greattravail of soul and concerned, above all, for their own spiritualdeliverance. But their spiritual sensitiveness is by no means universal, their sense of struggle not a normal experience for another type ofpersonality. The demand, therefore, that all religious experience becast in their particular mould, and that religion be made real to everyone through the same travail of soul in which it was made real to them, carries with it two very great dangers: first, that some semblance ofstruggle should be created which does not come vitally out ofexperience; and second, that the resultant peace should be artificialrather than true, and therefore, should not only quickly lose its forcebut really result in reactions which would leave the soul of the one somisled, or better perhaps, so mishandled, emptier of any real sense ofthe reality of religion than to begin with. 

_Protestantism Found Its Authority in an Infallibly Inspired Bible_

Now this is too largely what has happened in evangelical Protestantism. The "twice-born" have been set up as the standard for us all; they havedemanded of their disciples the same experience as those through whichthey themselves have passed. Since this type of religious experience hasalways been the more ardent and vivid, since the churches in which leasthas been made of it have generally tended to fall away into routine andsome want of real power, we have had, particularly since JonathanEdwards in America and the Wesleys in England, a recurrent insistenceupon it as the orthodox type of religious experience. Partly throughinheritance and partly in answer to its own genius Protestantism hasbuilt up a system of theology tending to reproduce the sequence ofconviction of sin, aspiration, repentance, and conversion by doctrinalpressure from the outside. The foundations of it all are in the NewTestament and somewhat in the Old, but what has been built upon thesefoundations has been either too extended or too one-sided. In order toinclude in one general sense of condemnation strong enough to create anadequate desire for salvation, all sorts and conditions of people, theology has not only charged us up with our own sins which are always asad enough account, but it has charged us up with ancestral and imputedsins. 

This line of theology has been far too rigid, far too insistent uponwhat one may call the facts of theology, and far too blind to the factsof life. It has made much of sin in the abstract and sometimes far toolittle of concrete sin; it has made more of human depravity than socialjustice; it has failed to make allowance for varieties of temper andcondition; it is partly responsible for the widespread reaction of thecults and movements of our own time. 

Since so strongly an articulate system as this needed something tosustain it, Protestantism has constantly supported itself in theauthority of the Old and New Testaments. It displaced one authority byanother, the authority of the Church by the authority of the Book, andin order to secure for this authority an ultimate and unquestioned powerit affirmed as the beginning and the end of its use of the Scripturestheir infallibility. The growth of Protestant teaching about the Biblehas necessarily been complicated but we must recognize that Protestanttheology and Protestant tradition have given the Bible what one may callread-in values. 

At any rate after affirming the infallibility of the text Protestantismhas turned back to the text for the proof of its teaching and so builtup its really very great interrelated system in which, as has alreadybeen said, the power of religion over the life of its followers and thereality of religion in the experiences of its followers locked up onjust such things as these: First, the experiences of conversions;second, conversion secured through the processes of Protestantindoctrination, backed up by the fervent appeal of the Protestantministry and the pressure of Protestant Church life; and third, all thissupported by an appeal to the authority of the Bible with a proof-textfor every statement. 

All this is, of course, to deal coldly and analytically with somethingwhich, as it has worked out in religious life, has been neither cold noranalytical. Underneath it all have been great necessities of the souland issuing out of it all have been aspirations and devoutnesses andspiritual victories and new understandings of God and a wealth of loveand goodness which are a part of the imperishable treasures of humanityfor three centuries. This faith and experience have voiced themselvesin moving hymns, built themselves into rare and continuing fellowships, gone abroad in missionary passion, spent themselves for a better worldand looked unafraid even into the face of death, sure of life and peacebeyond. But behind the great realities of our inherited religious lifeone may discover assumptions and processes less sure. 

_The Strength and Weakness of This Position_

Once more, this inherited faith in the Bible and the systems which havegrown out of it have been conditioned by scientific and philosophicunderstandings. The Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of theBible assumed its authority not only in the region of religion but inscience and history as well. The inherited theologies really went out oftheir way to give the incidental the same value as the essential. Therewas no place in them for growth, correction, further revelation. Thisstatement may be challenged, it certainly needs to be qualified, forwhen the time for adjustment and the need of adjustment really did comethe process of adjustment began to be carried through, but only at verygreat cost and only really by slowly building new foundations under theold. In fact the new is not in many ways the old at all, though this isto anticipate. 

It is directly to the point here that the whole scheme of religion as ithas come down to us on the Protestant side till within the last fiftyyears was at once compactly interwrought, strongly supported andunexpectedly vulnerable. The integrity of any one part of its linedepended upon the integrity of every other part; its gospel went backto the Fall of Man and depended, therefore, upon the Biblical theory ofthe Creation and subsequent human history. If anything should challengethe scientific or historical accuracy of the book of Genesis, thedoctrine of original sin would have either to be discarded or recast. Ifthe doctrine of original sin were discarded or recast, the acceptedinterpretations of the Atonement went with it. With these changed orweakened the evangelical appeal must either be given new character orlose force. A system which began with the Fall on one side went on toheaven and hell on the other and even heaven and hell were moredependent upon ancient conceptions of the physical structure of theworld and the skies above it than the Church was willing to recognize. The doctrine of eternal punishment particularly was open to ethicalchallenge. 

_Evangelical Protestantism the Outcome of the Whole Process_

Of course all this is rather an extreme statement of the situation fiftyyears ago. The churches did not all agree in insisting upon aconversion; some evangelic churches were beginning to place theiremphasis upon Christian nurture; they sought what is secured for theemotionally twice-born through guided growth and a larger dependenceupon normal spiritual conditions, though they were at least one withtheir brethren in believing that those who come into Christiandiscipleship must in the end be greatly changed and conscious of thechange; they too must possess as an assurance of the reality of theirreligious life a sense of peace and spiritual well-being. 

The high Anglican Church approached the Latin Catholic Church in itsinsistence upon sacramental regeneration. This wing of the Churchbelieved and believes still that baptism truly administered and the HolyCommunion also administered in proper form and accepted in due obedienceby priests belonging to some true succession, possess a mystic savingpower. Just why all this should be so they are perhaps not able toexplain to the satisfaction of any one save those who, for one reason oranother, believe it already. But those who cannot understandsacramentarianism may dismiss it far too easily, for though there behere danger of a mechanical formulism, the sacraments themselves maybecome part of a spiritual discipline through which the lives of men andwomen are so profoundly changed as in the most clear case of conversion, manifesting often a spiritual beauty not to be found in any otherconception of Christian discipleship. Our differences here are not sogreat as we suppose them. 

There have always been liberal reactions within the Church herself, tending either toward relaxation of discipline or the more rational andsimple statements of doctrine. What has been so far said would not betrue of Unitarianism and Universalism in the last century. But thesemovements have been somehow wanting in driving power, and so, when allthese qualifications are made, evangelical Protestantism has resulted ina pretty clearly recognizable type. The representative members of therepresentative evangelical churches all had a religious experience; someof them had been converted after much waiting at the anxious seat, orlong kneeling at the altar rail; others of them had been brought throughChristian teaching to the confession of their faith, but all of themwere thereby reborn. They were the product of a theology which taughtthem their lost estate, offered them for their acceptance a mediatorialand atoning Christ, assured them that through their faith theirsalvation would be assured, and counselled them to look to their owninner lives for the issue of all this in a distinct sense of spiritualpeace and well-being. If they doubted or questioned they were answeredwith proof-texts; for their spiritual sustenance they were given theservices of their churches where preaching was generally central, andexhorted to grow in grace and knowledge through prayer and much readingof their Bible. 

_The Individual Experience of the Believer the Keystone of EvangelicalProtestantism. Its Openness to Disturbing Forces_

Now fine and good as all this was it was, as the event proved, not bigenough to answer all the needs of the soul, nor strong enough to meetthe challenge of forces which were a half century ago shaping themselvestoward the almost entire recasting of great regions of human thought. Itwas, to begin with, unexpectedly weak in itself. EvangelicalProtestantism, as has been noted, throws upon the members of Protestantchurches a larger burden of individual responsibility than does theCatholic Church. The typical evangelical Protestant has had little tosustain him in his religious life save his sense of reconciliation withGod, from whom possibly he never vitally thought himself to have beenestranged, and a consequent spiritual peace. 

His church promises him nothing except teaching, inspiration, comradeship, an occasion for the confession of his faith and someopportunity for service. His ministers are only such as he; they mayexhort but they dare not absolve. He is greatly dependent, then, for hissense of the reality of religion upon his own spiritual states. If he isspiritually sensitive and not too much troubled by doubt, if hepossesses a considerable capacity for religious understanding, if hisBible is still for him the authoritative word of God, if his churchmeets his normal religious needs with a reasonable degree of adequacy, if he is resolute in purpose and if he has no excessively tryingexperiences in the face of which his faith breaks down, and if the caresof this world, the deceitfulness of riches, or the strain of poverty donot too much distract him (and this is a long and formidable list ofifs) then he is faithful in his church relationships and personallydevout. He grows in grace and knowledge and the outcome of it all is areligious character admirable in manifold ways, steadfast and truthfulin good works. 

 * * * * *

The fact that in spite of all hindrances the Protestant churches do goon, registering from decade to decade a varying statistical growth witha strongly organized life and a great body of communicants who find inthe religious life thus secured to them the true secret of interiorpeace and their true source of power, is itself a testimony to themassive reality of the whole system. And yet the keystone of the greatstructure is just the individual experience of the individual believer, conditioned upon his longing for deliverance and his personal assurancethat he has found, through his faith in his church's gospel, what heseeks. 

If anything should shake the Protestant's confidence in his creed or hisBible, or if his own inner experiences should somehow fail in theirsense of sustaining reality, then all the structure of his religionbegins to weaken. 

If one may use and press a suggestive figure, here is a religiousstructure very much like Gothic architecture; its converging arches offaith and knowledge lock up upon their keystones and the thrust of thewhole great structure has been met and conquered by flying buttresses. In other words, sustaining forces of accredited beliefs about science, history and human nature have been a necessary part of the entire systemand the temple of faith thus sustained may be weakened either throughsome failure in the keystone of it which is inner experience, or theflying buttresses of it which are these accepted systems of science, history, philosophy and psychology. 

_Readjustment of Both Catholic and Protestant Systems Inevitable_

Out of such elements as these, then, through such inheritances anddisciplines the representative religious consciousness of AmericanProtestantism of the end of the nineteenth century had been created. Itrooted itself in elements common to all religion, it inheritedpractically the whole content of the Old Testament, it invested Hebraicsystems of sacrifice with typical meanings and Jewish prophecy with amystic authority. It was in debt to St. Paul and Augustine for itstheology. Its cosmogony was 4, 000 years old and practically uninfluencedby modern science, or else at odds with it. It was uncritical in itsacceptance of the supernatural and trained on the whole to find its mainline of evidence for the reality of religion in the supernatural. Itmade more of the scheme of deliverance which St. Paul found in theCrucifixion of Jesus than the ethics of the Gospels. It was mystic inits emphasis upon an inner testimony to the realities it offered. Forthe Protestant it locked up unexpectedly upon the infallible authorityof the Bible and for the Catholic upon the inerrancy of the Church. Itwas out of the current of the modern temper in science and philosophygenerally. Its conceptions of the probable fate of the world were Jewishand of the future life were medieval, and perhaps the strangest thing init all was the general unconsciousness of its dependence uponassumptions open to challenge at almost every point and the process ofprofound readjustment upon the threshold of which it stood. 

It is almost impossible to disentangle the action of the two sets ofstrain which have within the last half century been brought to bear uponit. Each has reacted upon the other. Perhaps the best thing to do is toconsider the forces which for the last two generations have beenchallenging and reshaping inherited faiths, and then to consider theoutcome of it all in the outstanding religious attitudes of our owntime. 

II

NEW FORCES AND OLD FAITHS

Within the last fifty years particularly the fundamentals of theChristian faith have not only come up for reëxamination but have beencompelled to adapt themselves to facts and forces which have gonefarther toward recasting them than anything for a millennium and a halfbefore. The Reformation went deep but it did not go to the bottom. Thereare differences enough in all reason between Protestantism andCatholicism, but their identities are deeper still. The world of MartinLuther and John Calvin was not essentially different in its outlook uponlife from the world of Augustine and Athanasius. The world of JonathanEdwards was much the same as the world of John Calvin and the world of1850 apparently much the same as the world of Jonathan Edwards. Therewas, of course, an immense difference in the mechanism with which menwere working but an unexpectedly small difference in their ruling ideas. 

_The Readjustments of Christian Faith More Far-reaching in the LastFifty Years Than for a Thousand Years Before; Science Releases theChallenging Forces_

We should not, of course, underestimate the contribution of theReformation to the breaking up of the old order. It left the theologiesmore substantially unchanged than Protestantism has usually supposed, but it did mark the rise of changed attitudes toward authority. Thereformers themselves did not accept without protest the spirit theyreleased. They imposed new authorities and obediences upon theirchurches; they distrusted individual initiative in spiritual things andthe more democratic forms of church organization. John Calvin sought inhis Institutes to vindicate the law-abiding character of his new gospel;Luther turned bitterly against the German peasants in their demand for amost moderate measure of social justice; the Anglican leaders exiled thePilgrims; the Puritan drove the Quaker out of Boston through aninstinctive distrust of inward illumination as a safe guide for faithand religious enthusiasm as a sound basis for a new commonwealth. Butthe spirit was out of the bottle and could not be put back. 

The right of the individual to make his own religious inquiries andreach his own religious conclusions was little in evidence for almosttwo hundred years after the Reformation, partly because the reactions ofthe post-Reformation period made the faithful generally content to restin what had already been secured, partly because traditional authoritywas still strong, and very greatly because there was neither in history, philosophy nor science new material upon which the mind might exerciseitself. We may take 1859, almost exactly two hundred years after thefinal readjustments of the Reformation period, as the point of departurefor the forces which have so greatly modified our outlook upon ourworld and our understanding of ourselves; not that the date isclean-cut, for we see now how many things had already begun to changebefore Darwin and the Origin of Species. 

Darwin's great achievement is to have suggested the formula in whichscience and history have alike been restated. He had no thought at allthat what he was doing would reach so far or change so much. He simplysupposed himself, through patient and exhaustive study, to haveaccounted for the rich variety of life without the supposition of aspecial creation for each form. But the time was ripe and longing forwhat he supplied and his hypothesis was quickly taken and applied inalmost every field of thought. Nor does it greatly matter that Darwinismhas been and may be still greatly modified. We have come under the spellof evolution. Our universe is no longer a static thing; it is growingand changing. Our imaginations are impressed by long sequences ofchange, each one of them minute in itself but in the mass capable ofaccounting for immense transformations. Darwin's initiative released thescientific temper which has been the outstanding characteristic of ourown age. The physicist, the chemist and the biologist re-related theirdiscoveries in the light of his governing principle and supplied animmense body of fact for further consideration. Geology was reborn, therecords of the rocks came to have a new meaning, every broken fossilform became a word, maybe a paragraph, for the retelling of the past ofthe earth. 

Astronomy supplied cosmic backgrounds for terrestrial evolution andPhysics became a kind of court of appeal for both. The physicistproclaimed the conservation of energy, reduced seeming solidities tounderlying force and resolved force itself into ultimate and tenuousunities. The processes thus discovered and related seemed to beself-sufficient. No need to bring in anything from the outside; unbrokenlaw, unfailing sequence were everywhere in evidence. Where knowledgefailed speculation bridged the gap. One might begin with a nebula and goon in unbroken sequence to Plato or Shakespeare without asking foreither material, law or force which was not in the nebula to begin with. Man himself took his own place in the majestic procession; he, too, wassimply the culmination of a long ascent, with the roots of his beingmore deeply in the dust than he had ever dreamed and compelled toconfess himself akin to what he had aforetime scorned. 

_The Reaction of Evolution Upon Religion_

All our old chronologies became incidental in a range of time beforewhich even imagination grew dizzy. We found fragments of the skulls ofour ancestors in ancient glacial drifts and the traditional 6, 000 yearssince creation hardly showed on the dial upon which Geology recorded itsconclusions. There is no need to follow in detail how all this reactedupon religion. The accepted religious scheme of things was anintricately interlocking system irresistible in its logic as long as thesystem remained unchallenged in its crucial points. If these shouldbegin to be doubted then the Christian appeal would have lost, for thetime at least, a most considerable measure of its force. The inner peacewhich we have already seen to be the keystone of the Protestant archgrew in part out of the sense of a universal condemnation from which thebeliever was happily saved; this in turn was conditioned by theunquestioned acceptance of the Genesis narrative. We can see clearlyenough now that Christianity, and Protestant Christianity especially, really depended upon something deeper than all this. Still for the timebeing all these things were locked up together and once the acceptedfoundations of theology began to be questioned far-reaching adjustmentswere inevitable and the time of readjustment was bound to be marked bygreat restlessness and confusion. 

The evolutionary hypothesis profoundly affected man's thought abouthimself. It challenged even more sharply his thought about God. Atheism, materialism and agnosticism are an old, old trinity, but they had up toour own time been at the mercy of more positive attitudes through theirinability to really answer those insurgent questions: Whence? Whither?and Why? Creation had plainly enough demanded a creator. When Napoleonstilled a group of debating officers in Egypt by pointing with aNapoleonic gesture to the stars and saying, "Gentlemen, who made allthese?" his answer had been final. Paley's old-fashioned turnip-facedwatch with its analogies in the mechanism of creation had supplied anirresistible argument for a creation according to design and a designingcreator. But now all this was changed. If Napoleon could have riddenout from his august tomb, reassembled his officers from the dust oftheir battlefields and resumed the old debate, the officers would havebeen apparently in the position to answer--"Sire, they made themselves. "Our universe seemed to be sufficient unto itself. 

We have reacted against all this and rediscovered God, if indeed we hadever lost Him, but this ought not to blind those who have accomplishedthe great transition to the confusion of faith which followed thepopularization of the great scientific generalizations, nor ought it toblind us to the fact that much of this confusion still persists. Christian theism was more sharply challenged by materialism andagnosticism than by a frankly confessed atheism. Materialism was themore aggressive; it built up its own great system, posited matter andforce as the ultimate realities, and then showed to its own satisfactionhow everything that is is just the result of their action andinteraction. Nor did materialism pause upon the threshold of the soulitself. Consciousness, so conceived, was a by-product of the higherorganization of matter, and we ourselves a spray flung up out of theinfinite ocean of being to sparkle for a moment in the light and thenfall back again into the depths out of which we had been borne. 

Those who so defined us made us bond-servants of matter and force frombirth to death though they drew back a little from the consequences oftheir own creeds and sought to save a place for moral freedom andresponsibility and a defensible altruism. It is doubtful if theysucceeded. Materialism affected greatly the practical conduct of life. It offered its own characteristic values; possession and pleasure becameinevitably enough the end of action, and action itself, directed towardsuch ends, became the main business of life. Science offered sofascinating a field for thought as to absorb the general intellectualenergy of the generation under the spell of it; the practicalapplication of science to mechanism and industry with the consequentincrease in luxury and convenience, absorbed the force of practical men. 

It naturally went hard with religion in a world so preoccupied. Itsfoundations were assailed, its premises questioned, its conclusionsdenied, its interests challenged. The fact that religion came through itat all is a testimony both to the unconquerable force of faith and theunquenchable need of the soul for something greater than the scientificgospel revealed or the achievements of science supplied. 

_The Reaction of Biblical Criticism Upon Faith_

The first front along which the older faith met the impact of new forceswas scientific; the second drive was at a more narrow but, as far asreligion goes, an even more strategic front. The Bible had to submit tothose processes of inquiry and criticism which had so greatly alteredthe scientific outlook. The Old and New Testaments, as has been said, supplied really the basal authority for the whole Protestant order, andspeaking merely as a historian one is well within the facts when onesays that even before the enlightenment of the last two generations thetraditional way of thinking about the Bible had not proved satisfactory. The more free-minded were conscious of its contradictions; they couldnot reconcile its earlier and later moral idealisms; they found in it asmuch to perplex as to help them. Some of them, therefore, disowned italtogether and because it was tied up in one bundle with religion, asthey knew religion, they disowned religion at the same time. Others whoaccepted its authority but were unsatisfied with current interpretationsof it sought escape in allegorical uses of it. (We shall find this to beone of the distinct elements in Christian Science. ) But after all it didanswer the insistent questions, Whence? and Whither? and Why? as nothingelse answered them. Therefore, in spite of challenge and derelict faithand capricious interpretations and forced harmonies it still held itsown. Directly science began to offer its own answers to Whence? andWhither? and Why? curiosity found an alternative. Science had its ownbook of genesis, its own hypothesis as to the creation of man, its ownconclusions as to his ascent. These had a marvellously emancipating andstimulating power; they opened, as has been said, vast horizons; theyaffected philosophy; they gave a new content to poetry, for the poetheard in the silences of the night:

 "Æonian music measuring out The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance-- The blows of Death. "

The challenge of science to the book of Genesis specifically and to themiraculous narratives with which both the Old and the New Testaments areveined more generally, doubtless stimulated Biblical criticism, but thetime was ripe for that also. The beginnings of it antedate thescientific Renaissance, but the freer spirit of the period offeredcriticism its opportunity, the scientific temper supplied the method andthe work began. 

Inherited faith has been more directly affected by Biblical criticismthan by the result of scientific investigation and the generalizationsbased thereon. The Bible had been the average man's authority in scienceand history as well as faith. That statement naturally needs somequalification, for before evolution took the field it was possible notonly to reconcile a fair knowledge of the natural sciences with theBible, but even, as in the argument for design, to make themcontributory to Bible teaching. But evolution changed all that and itwas really through the impact of the more sweeping scientificconclusions upon his Bible that the average man felt their shock uponhis faith. If he had been asked merely to harmonize the genesis of thenew science with the genesis of the Old Testament he would have hadenough to occupy his attention, though perhaps he might have managed it. The massive mind of Gladstone accomplished just that to its own entiresatisfaction. 

But the matter went deeper. A wealth of slowly accumulated knowledge wasbrought to bear upon the Scriptures and a critical acumen began tofollow these old narratives to their sources. There is no need here tofollow through the results in detail. They[6] were seen to have beendrawn from many sources, in some cases so put together that the jointsand seams were plainly discernible. One wonders how they had so longescaped observation. The Bible was seen to contain contributory elementsfrom general ancient cultures; its cosmogony the generally acceptedcosmogony of the time and the region; its codes akin to other and oldercodes. It contained fragments of old songs and the old lore of thecommon folk. It was seen to record indisputably long processes of moralgrowth and spiritual insight. Its prophets spoke out of their time andfor their time. It was plainly enough no longer an infallible dictationto writers who were only the automatic pens of God, it was a growthrooted deep in the soil out of which it grew and the souls of those whocreated it. The fibres of its main roots went off into the darkness of aculture too long lost ever to be quite completely understood. It was nolonger ultimate science or unchallenged history. 

[Footnote 6: The Old Testament narratives particularly. The results ofNew Testament criticism have not yet fully reached the popular mind. ]

We have come far enough now to see that nothing really worth while hasbeen lost in this process of re-interpretation, and much has beengained. If, as the French say in one of their luminous proverbs, tounderstand is to pardon, to understand is also to be delivered fromdoubts and forced apologies and misleading harmonies and the necessityof defending the indefensible. In our use of the Bible, as in everyother region of life, the truth has made us free. It possessesstill--the Bible--the truth and revelation and meaning for life italways possessed. We are gradually realizing this and gaining in therealization. But the Bible has been compelled to meet the challenge ofan immensely expanded scientific and historical knowledge. We have hadto test its supposed authority as to beginnings by Astronomy, Geologyand Biology; we have had to test its history by the methods andconclusions of modern historical investigation. The element of thesupernatural running through both the Old and New Testaments has beencompelled to take into account that emphasis upon law and orderedprocess which is, perhaps more than any other single thing, thecontribution of science to the discipline of contemporaneous thought. 

_The Average Man Loses His Bearings_

The whole process has been difficult and unsettling. There was and isstill a want of finality in the conclusions of Biblical scholars. Itneeded and needs still more study than the average man is able to giveto understand their conclusions; it needed and it needs still a deal ofpatient, hard, clear-visioned thinking to win from the newerinterpretations of the Bible that understanding and acceptance of itsvalue which went with the inherited faith. The more liberal-mindedreligious teachers doubtless very greatly overestimate the penetrationof popular thought already accomplished, by what seems to them afamiliar commonplace. The New Testament is still, even for the scholar, a challenging problem. Conclusions are being bitterly contested andwhere the specialist is himself in doubt the average man is naturally inutter confusion. The more conservative communions neither accept norteach the results of the higher criticism, and so it reaches the body oftheir communicants only as rumour and a half-understood menace to thetruth. 

Religion is naturally the most conservative thing in the world and evenwhen we think ourselves to have utterly changed our point of viewsomething deeper than mere intellectual acceptance protests and will notbe dismissed. We pathetically cling to that to which we, at the sametime, say good-bye. The average man somewhat affected by the modernscientific spirit is greatly perplexed by the miraculous elements in theBible and yet he still believes the Bible the word of God with anauthority nothing else possesses. In fact, by a contradiction easyenough to understand, what puzzles him most seems to him the clearestevidence of the supernatural character of the narrative itself. Hisreligion is not so much the interpretation of what he does understand asthe explanation of what he does not understand. If he gives up thesupernatural his faith goes with it, and yet the other side of him--thescientifically tempered side--balks at the supernatural. 

It is hard to know what to do with such a temper. Indeed, just thisconfused temper of believing and doubting, with miracles for the stormcenter, has offered a rich field for those interpretations of themiraculous, particularly in the New Testament, in terms of faith andmental healing, to which Christian Science and New Thought are so muchgiven. We may conclude in a sentence by saying that since theinfallibility of the Bible was one of the flying buttresses which upheldthe inherited structure of religion, those changes and confusions whichhave grown out of two generations of Biblical criticism have greatlyaffected the popular faith. 

_The New Psychology Both a Constructive and Disturbing Influence_

A third influence tending to break up the stability of the old order hasbeen the new psychology. So general a statement as this needs also to bequalified, for, suggestively enough, the new psychology has not so muchpreceded as followed the modern multiplication of what, using James'phrase, we may call the "Varieties of Religious Experience. " It hasbeen, in part, a widening of our conclusions as to the mind and itsprocesses to make room for the puzzling play of personality which hasrevealed itself in many of these experiences. Hypnotism necessarilyantedated the interest of psychology in the hypnotic state; it compelledpsychology to take account of it and for the explaining of hypnotismpsychology has been compelled to make a new study of personality and itsmore obscure states. The psychologists have been far more hospitable tothe phenomena of mental healing than have the faculties of medicine. They took them seriously before the average doctor would even admit thatthey existed. Their study led them to a pretty thoroughgoingconsideration of the power of suggestion upon bodily states, andeventually to formulate, as they have been able, both the laws ofsuggestion and the secret of its power. Telepathy and psychic phenomenagenerally have also offered a rich field to the student of the abnormaland psychology has broadened its investigations to include all theseconditions. That is to say, the border-land phenomena of consciousnessas stressed and manifested in the more bizarre cults have reallysupplied the material upon which the new psychology has been working, and the psychologist to-day is seriously trying to explain a good manythings which his predecessors, with their hard and fast analyses of themind and its laws, refused to take seriously. 

They concede that a complete psychology must have a place in it for theabnormal as well as the normal, and for the exceptional as well as forthe staid and universally accepted. Those who have been fathering newreligions and seeking to make the abnormal normal have been quick toavail themselves of the suggestions and permissions in the newpsychology. Once we have crossed the old and clearly defined frontiers, almost anything seems possible. Personality, we are now taught, iscomplex, far-reaching, and is really, like a floating iceberg, morelargely below the sea level of consciousness than above it. How far itextends and what connections it makes in these its hidden depths, no oneof us may know. Normal consciousness, to change the figure, is just onebrilliantly illuminated center in a world of shadow deepening intodarkness. The light grows more murky, the shadows more insistent, as wepass down, or out, or back from that illumined center. We cannot tellhow much of the shadow is really a part of us, nor do we dare to bedogmatic about what may, or may not, there be taking place. 

Indeed, we may fill the shadows with almost anything which caprice ordesire may suggest. Our curiously inventive minds have always loved tofill in our ignorances with their creations. We formerly had theshadowed backgrounds of the universe to populate with the creatures ofour fear or fancy, but now, strangely enough, since science has let inits light upon the universe psychology has given us the subconscious asa region not yet subdued to law or shot through with light. And theprophets of new cults and border-land movements have taken advantage ofthis. "Since there is, " they say in substance, "so much in life of whichwe are not really conscious, and since there are hints within us ofstrange powers, how can we set limits to what we may either be or do, and may not one man's caprice be as reasonable as another man's reason?"

The popularization of the new psychology has thus created a soil finelyreceptive to the unusual. Without understanding what has beenaccomplished in the way of investigation, and with little accurateknowledge of what has actually been tested out, there is amongst us awidespread feeling that almost anything is possible. Here also we mayend in a sentence by saying that present-day psychology with its widesweep of law, its recognition of the abnormal, its acceptance of andinsistence upon the power of suggestion, its recognition of thesubconscious and its tendency to assign thereto a great force ofpersonal action, has broken down old certainties and given a free fieldto imagination. It has, more positively, taught us how to apply the lawsof mental action to the more fruitful conduct of life, and so suppliedthe basis for the cults which make much of efficiency andself-development. It has also lent new meaning to religion all along theline. 

_The Influence of Philosophy and the Social Situation_

How far contemporaneous philosophy has affected inherited faith orsupplied a basis for new religious development, is more difficult tosay. Beyond debate philosophic materialism has greatly influenced thereligious attitude of multitudes of people just as the reactions againstit have supplied the basis for new religious movements. Pragmatism, affirming that whatever works is true, has tended to supply aphilosophic justification for whatever seems to work, whether it be trueor not, and it has beside tended to give us a world where little islandsof understandings have taken, as it were, the place of a continuouscontinent of truth. The tendencies of the leaders of new cults have beento take the material which science and psychology have supplied andbuild them into philosophies of their own; they have not generally beenable or willing to test themselves by the conclusions of moredisciplined thinkers. 

New Thought has undoubtedly been affected by the olderidealisms--Berkeley's for example--while James and Royce have suppliedcongenial material. The movements are generally selective. New Thoughtuses James' applied psychology and possibly Royce's Absolute, but doesnot consistently confine itself to any one system. Philosophy also hasbeen itself of late working in a pretty rarified region. Its problemshave not been the problems of the common mind. It has been trying tofind out how we know, to relate the inner and the outer world, and ingeneral to account for things which the average man takes for granted, and in the understanding of which he is more hindered than helped by thecurrent philosophy of the schools. It takes philosophy a good while toreach the man in the street, and even then its conclusions have to bemuch popularized and made specific before they mean much for him. Weshall know better fifty years from now what philosophy is doing forreligion and life than we know to-day. There are, however, as has beensaid, aspects of philosophy which religion generally is beginning totake into account. 

The failure of Christianity to create for itself a distinctly Christianenvironment has also had much to do with dissolving old religiousstabilities. Strongly felt social injustices are releasing forces ofdiscontent and creating a fertile soil for revolutionary experiment, though it must be said that modern religious cults and movements havenot gained so much from this particular form of discontent as have thosemovements which look toward radical social readjustment. But the wholesituation has created a shaken state of public opinion. The fiercenessof modern competition, industrially and economically, finally carriedthrough to the tragic competition of a world war, has put our tempers onedge. The extremes of wealth and poverty and the baffling fluctuationsin modern industry have brought the existing order into disrepute. Thevery great number of the socially unfit and the grievous number ofsocial misfits, along with crime and poverty and the deposit of humansediment in our cities, not only trouble men of good will but create ahuman element easily misled. Such conditions as these are in suchpainful contrast with the ideals of the Gospel, the spirit ofChristianity and even the potential productive force of modern societyas to lead many to believe that something is radically wrong. Many arepersuaded that Christianity as now organized and led is sociallysterile; they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of themhave become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disownedreligion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical woulddethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of ourvocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associateditself with the new religious movement, but here at least has been adisintegrating force. 

_An Age of Confusion_

In such ways as these, then, the accepted religious order identifiedwith historic Catholicism and Protestantism has in the last fifty yearsbeen greatly altered. Science, Biblical criticism, psychology andphilosophy, and social unrest have all had their share in making peopleimpatient of the inherited order, or doubtful or defiant of it. We havebeen asked to relate our old creeds and confidences to new insights andunderstandings. The old answers to the questions Whence? and Whither?and Why? have been challenged by new answers; our horizons have beenpushed back in every direction and a strange sense of mystery both inpersonality and the external order has perplexed and stimulated us. Along with all this and in no little way growing out of it, has goneimpatience of discipline and an undue haste to gain the various goods oflife. 

Evolution misled us, to begin with. If the longing for deliverance beone of the driving forces in religious life, then the vaster scientificconclusions of the latter part of the nineteenth century offered a newdefinition of deliverance. It was not, after all, so much in the travailof the soul as in a serene and effortless self-commitment to a power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, that we were to be saved. We had only to push out upon tides which asked of us neither rudder noroar, to be brought to our appointed havens. How greatly we have beendisillusioned in all this and how bitterly we have been taught that lifeis not so much a drifting with the tide as making brave headway againstit, we all know well enough to-day. Somewhere back of a vast deal inthese modern religious cults and movements, is the smug optimism, nowtaking one form and now another, which was the misleading bequest ofthe nineteenth century to the twentieth. 

The great scientific discoveries and their application to the mechanismof life led the nineteenth century to believe that nothing wasimpossible. Everything we touched became plastic beneath our touch savepossibly ourselves; there seemed to be no limit to what man might do andhe consequently assumed that there was no limit to what he might become. He disassociated his hopes from both his disciplines and experiences;everything seemed not only possible but easily possible. A generalrestlessness of temper, due in part to the breaking up of the inheritedorder, in part to the ferment of new ideas and in part to a generalrelaxing of discipline, began to manifest itself. 

The demoralizing influence of migratory populations ought not to beoverlooked in this connection. In all the Western nations there has beenan outstanding growth of industrial city populations due to changingeconomic conditions. The steadying influences of old environments havebeen lost, the influence of the new environment is too stimulating atits best and demoralizing at its worst. Our cities are not kind to homelife; too often they do not supply a proper physical setting for it. Thespecialization of hard driven industries takes the creative joy out ofwork and leads to an excess of highly commercialized pleasure. Theresult is the modern city worker, never living long enough in one placeto create for himself a normal social environment, always anxious abouthis economic future, restless, too largely alternating betweenstrenuous work and highly coloured pleasure and much open, throughtemperament and circumstance, to the appeal of whatever promises him anew experience or a new freedom. 

_The Lure of the Short Cut_

Dean Inge in a recent study of the contribution of the Greek temper toreligion has drawn a strong, though deeply shadowed picture of thedisorganization of modern life through such influences as these. "Theindustrial revolution has generated a new type of barbarism, with noroots in the past. For the second time in the history of Western Europe, continuity is in danger of being lost. A generation is growing up, notuneducated, but educated in a system which has little connection withEuropean culture in its historical development. The Classics are nottaught; the Bible is not taught; history is not taught to any effect. What is even more serious, there are no social traditions. The moderntownsman is _déraciné_: he has forgotten the habits and sentiments ofthe village from which his forefathers came. An unnatural and unhealthymode of life, cut off from the sweet and humanizing influences ofnature, has produced an unnatural and unhealthy mentality, to which weshall find no parallels in the past. Its chief characteristic isprofound secularity or materialism. The typical town artisan has noreligion and no superstitions; he has no ideals beyond the visible andtangible world of senses. "[7]

[Footnote 7: "The Legacy of Greece, " p. 38. ]

Writing as an Englishman Dean Inge did not note the equally unsettlinginfluence of migratory races. The European peasant in Detroit or Chicagoor New York is still more _déraciné_. He has not only left the soil inwhose culture his ancestors had been established for generations, he hasleft the tradition and the discipline which have made him what he is. The necessary readjustments are immensely difficult. For the firstgeneration they are largely a dumb puzzle, or a dull, achinghomesickness or a gray laborious life whose outcome must be oftenstrangely different from their dreams, but for the second generation thewhole experience is a heady adventure in freedom not easy to analyzethough social workers generally are agreed that the children of theimmigrant, belonging neither to the old nor the new, are a disturbingelement in American life. A city like Detroit, in which this is beingwritten, where both movements combine, the American country and villagedweller coming to a highly specialized industrial center and theEuropean immigrant to an entirely new environment, illustrates thecomplex issue of the whole process. 

It is just to note that the Catholic immigrant, finding in his Churchthe one homelike thing, is often a better Catholic in America than hewas at home. A Protestant writer without accurate information would notdare to generalize on the religious dislocation of the second Catholicgeneration. But there must be a very great loss. The large non-churchedelements in our population must be in part due to Catholicdisintegration as they are certainly due to Protestant disintegration. And new movements find their opportunity in this whole group. Ingeneral, society, through such influences, has grown impatient ofdiscipline, scornful of old methods, contemptuous of experience andstrangely unwilling to pay the price of the best. The more unstable havesurrendered themselves to the lure of the short cut; they are persuadedthat there are quick and easy roads to regions of well-being which hadbefore been reached only through labour and discipline and much travailof body, mind and soul. 

_Popular Education Has Done Little to Correct Current Confusions_

Nor has the very great extension of popular education really done muchto correct this; it seems rather to intensify it, for education sharedand shares still the temper of the time. Our education has been moresuccessful generally in opening vistas than in creating an understandingof the laws of life and the meaning of experience; it has given us alove of speculation without properly trained minds; it has furnished uswith the catch words of science and philosophy but has not supplied, inthe region of philosophy particularly, the corresponding philosophictemper. It has, above all, been fruitful in unjustified self-confidence, particularly here in America. We have confused a great devotion tohigher education and the widespread taking of its courses with the solidfruition of it in mental discipline. America particularly has furnishedfor a long time now an unusual opportunity for bizarre and capriciousmovements. Nothing overtaxes the credulity of considerable elements inour population. Whatever makes a spacious show of philosophy is sure tofind followers and almost any self-confident prophet has been able towin disciples, no matter to what extremes he goes. 

This has not been equally true of older civilizations with a moreclearly defined culture or a more searching social discipline. Somethingmust be lacking in the education of a people in which all this is somarkedly possible. The play of mass psychology (one does not quite dareto call it mob psychology) also enters into the situation. Democracynaturally makes much of the verdict of majorities. Any movement whichgains a considerable number of adherents is pretty sure to win therespect of the people who have been taught to judge a cause by thenumber of those who can be persuaded to adopt it. This generallyunstable temper, superficial, restless, unduly optimistic, open tosuggestion and wanting in the solid force of great tradition has joinedwith the recasting of Science, Theology, Psychology and Philosophy, toopen the door for the entrance of new religions, and in general, to sounsettle the popular mind as to make almost anything possible. 

_The Churches Lose Authority_

In the field of religion certain well-defined consequences have eitherfollowed or accompanied the whole process. There has been, to beginwith, a loosening of church ties. The extent of all this has beensomewhat covered up by the reasonable growth of the historic churches. In spite of all the difficulties which they have been called upon toface, the statistics generally have been reassuring. The churches areattended in the aggregate by great numbers of people who are untroubledby doubts. Such as these have little sympathy with the more restless ortroubled, and little patience with those who try to understand therestless and troubled; they do not share the forebodings of those wholook with a measure of apprehension upon the future of Christianity. Asfar as they recognize disturbing facts at all they are very much likeCarlyle who, when told that Christianity was upon its last legs, said, "What of that? Christianity has always been upon its last legs. " Andperhaps their simple faith and hope are more to the point than manyopposing attitudes. The churches have grown faster than the population, or at least they had at the last census. More than that, there has beena marked increase in church activity. The churches are better organized;they are learning the secret of coöperation; they are reaching out inmore directions and all of them, even the more democratic, are more harddriven from the top. 

The result of all this has been a great show of action, though it isdifficult now to say whether the real results of this multipliedactivity have been commensurate in spiritual force and ethical fruitagewith the intensity of their organized life. (The writer thinks not. ) Butthrough all this we discern, nevertheless, a marked weakening ofauthority as far as the Church goes and a general loosening of ties;though the churches in the regions of finance and organization driveharder than they used to drive, in the matter of creed and conduct theyare driving with an easy rein. Denominational loyalties are relaxed;there is much changing from one denomination to another and within thedenominations and individual churches there is, of course, a substantialproportion of membership which is only nominal. 

_Efforts at Reconstruction Within the Church_

There are those who view with apprehension the whole future of religion. They believe that the foundations of the great deep are breaking beneathus, that Christianity must be profoundly recast before it can go onprevailingly, and they are reaching in one direction and another forconstructive changes, but all this within the frontiers of historicChristianity and the Church. They want church unity but they still wanta church; they want a new theology but still a theology; they want newapplications of religion but still substantially the old religion. Therewas more of this during the war than just now. Such a book as Orchard's"Future of Religion, " perhaps the most thoughtful analysis of conditionsgiven us for a long time, was born of the war itself and already many ofits anticipations seem to miss the point. Such expectations of wholesalereligious reconstruction leave out of account the essential conservatismof human nature, a conservatism more marked in religion than anywhereelse. 

There is also a strong and telling group which is seeking so to recastand interpret inherited faiths as to make them more consonant to modernneeds and more hospitable to new understandings. Such as these haveaccepted gladly the tested conclusions of science, the results ofBiblical criticism and the revealing suggestion of both psychology andphilosophy; they have sought to disentangle the essential from theunessential, the enduring from the transient. They have found in sciencenot the foe but the friend of religion. Those intimations of unfailingforce, those resolutions of the manifold phases of action and realitytoward which science is reaching have seemed to them a discovery of thevery presence and method of God, and they have found in just suchregions as these new material for their faith. They have dealtreverently with the old creeds, for they have seen that the forms whichChristianity has taken through the centuries have grown out of enduringexperiences and needs never to be outgrown, and that their finality isthe finality of the deep things of the soul itself. They have been able, therefore, to make new truth tributary to old faith and to interpret thecentral affirmations of Christianity in terms of present-day facts. Theyhave sought to share their conclusions with others and they have reallybeen able to carry Christianity through the transitional period of thelast fifty years and continue it open-minded, strongly established, reverent and enriched rather than impoverished. 

What they have done has been doubly hard, once through the sheerdifficulty of the task itself, and once through the hostile and toooften abusive temper with which they and their endeavours have beenopposed. None the less, they have saved for Christendom a reasonablefaith. Science has of late gone half-way to meet them. It is ratherpainfully revising a good many of its earlier conclusions and on thewhole walking rather humbly just now before its God, recognizing thatthe last word has not yet really been said about much of anything. 

_An Age of Doubt and a Twilight-Zone in History_

But the apparently unchanged traditions of the older forms of faith andthe relatively strong position of the Church must not blind us to thegenerally disorganized condition of religion to-day. There is much inevidence a body of doubt which clouds the outlook of multitudes uponreligion generally. Beyond debate a kind of eclipse of faith began todraw across the Western world so early as the middle of the lastcentury. The militant skepticism of the brilliant group of younger poetswho sang their defiances in the first two decades of the nineteenthcentury to a world which professed itself duly shocked, is whollydifferent from the sadness with which the more mature singers of twogenerations later announce their questioning and their disillusionment. The difference is just the difference between Shelley and MatthewArnold. There is a philosophic depth in this later music which theformer wholly lacked. Arnold speaks for his time when he announceshimself as standing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless tobe born. A profound disillusionment expressed itself in great ranges oflater nineteenth century literature and confirmed the more sensitive anddespairing in a positive pessimism, strangely contrasted to theself-assertive temper of the science and industry of the period. Itwould need a pretty careful analysis to follow all this to its roots. Something of it no doubt was due to the inability of poet andphilosopher to reconcile their new understanding of life and theuniverse with the old religious forms but more of it was likely due tosome deep exhaustion of spiritual force, an exhaustion which has fromtime to time marked transitional periods in the development of culturesand civilizations. 

There have always been twilight zones in history, times in which theforce of the old had spent itself and nothing new had come to take itsplace. We are beginning to see now that we too have been passing througha twilight zone whose contrasts are all the more dramatic through themore than tropic swiftness with which the high lights of the Victorianperiod darkened into the distractions and disillusionments of our owntime. The best one can say is that there was on the part of the moresensitive a widespread anticipation of all this, as if the chill of acoming shadow had fallen first of all upon them, and beyond debate, nota little of the doubt which has been so marked a feature of the last twogenerations in literature generally, and in the attitude of a greatnumber of people toward religion, has been due to just this. 

_The Hunger of the Soul and the Need for Faith Persist_

And yet, since religion is so inextinguishable a thing, changing forcesand attitudes have still left untouched the hunger of the soul and theneed of men for faith. Indeed the very restlessness of the time, thebreaking up of the old orders, the failure of the old certainties, has, if anything, deepened the demand for religious reality and there hasbeen in all directions a marked turning to whatever offered itself as aplausible substitute for the old, and above all a turning to thosereligions which in quite clearly defined ways promise to demonstrate thereality of religion through some sensible or tangible experience. Ifreligion will only work miracles and attest itself by some sign or otherwhich he who runs may read there is waiting for it an eagerconstituency. We shall find as we go on how true this really is, for themodern religious cult which has gained the largest number of followersoffers the most clearly defined signs and wonders. 

If religion cures your disease and you are twice persuaded, once thatyou really are cured and once that religion has done it, then you havesomething concrete enough to satisfy anybody. Or if, perplexed by deathand with no faith strong enough to pierce that veil through a persuasionof the necessity of immortality established in the very nature ofthings, you are offered a demonstration of immortality through thevoices and presences of the discarnate, then, once more, you havesomething concrete enough, if only you were sure of it, to settle everydoubt. And finally, if the accepted religions are too concrete for youand if you desire a rather vague and poetic approach to religion madevenerable by the centuries and appealingly picturesque through thepersonalities of those who present it, you have in some adaptation oforiental faith to occidental needs a novel and interesting approach tothe nebulous reality which passes in the Eastern mind for God, anapproach which demands no very great discipline and leaves a wide marginfor the play of caprice or imagination. 

_Modern Religious Cults and Movements Find Their Opportunity in theWhole Situation. The Three Centers About Which They Have OrganizedThemselves_

There has been, then, as the outcome of the complex of forces which wehave been considering, a new approach to religion distinctive in our owntime and in general taking three directions determined by that againstwhich it has reacted, or perhaps more positively by the varyingcharacter of what it seeks. A pretty careful analysis of modernreligious cults and movements shows that they have organized themselves, in action and reaction, around three centers definitely related to threeoutstanding deficiencies of inherited faith. I say deficiencies, thoughthat is of course to beg the question. We saw earlier in this study howreligion everywhere and always grows out of some of the few central andunexpectedly simple, though always supremely great, needs and how theforce of any religion waxes or wanes as it meets these needs. Religionis real to the generality of us as it justifies the ways of God to manand reveals the love and justice of God in the whole of personalexperience. Religion is always, therefore, greatly dependent upon itspower to reconcile the more shadowed side of experience with the Divinelove and power and goodness. It is hard to believe in a Providence whosedealings with us seem neither just nor loving. Faith breaks down moreoften in the region of trying personal experience than anywhere else. 

All this is as old as the book of Job but it is none the less truebecause it is old. 

The accepted theology which explained sin and sorrow in terms of thefall of man and covered each individual case with a blanket indictmentjustified by the condemnation of the whole of humanity has lost itsforce. It depended, to begin with, on a tradition of human beginningswhich has not borne examination, and it was beside, in spite of all theefforts to defend it, profoundly unethical. Calvinistic theology, moreover, made a difficult matter worse by assuming for every individuala predestined fate reaching beyond death itself which a man waspowerless to escape. Those chapters in the long story of theology whichrecord the turning and groping of minds--and souls--enmeshed in this webof their own weaving and more deeply entangled still in the challengingexperiences of life itself are among the most pathetic and arrestingin the whole story of human thought. We ought to recognize more clearlythan we have generally done and confess more frankly that our inheritedexplanations of the problems of pain and sorrow have been markedlyunsatisfactory and have greatly contributed to the justifiable reactionagainst them. 

One group of modern religious cults and movements, then, has found itsopportunity just here. Christian Science and kindred cults are just anattempt to reconcile the love and goodness of God with pain, sickness, sorrow, and to a lesser degree with sin. How they do this remains to beseen, but the force of their appeal depends upon the fact that a veryconsiderable and constantly growing number of people believe that theyhave really done it. Such cults as these have also found a place for theNew Testament tradition of healing; they have also appealed strongly tothose who seek a natural or a pseudo-natural explanation for themiraculous elements in religion generally. They have been expectedlyreinforced by the feeling for the Bible which strongly persists amongthose who are not able to find in the inherited Protestant position thatreal help in the Bible which they had been taught they should therefind, and who are not, on the other hand, sufficiently acquainted withthe newer interpretations of it to find therein a resolution for theirdoubts and a vital support for their faith. Finally, Christian Scienceand kindred cults offer a demonstration of the reality of religion inhealth and happiness, and generally, in a very tangible way of living. Here, then, is the first region in which we find a point of departurefor modern religious cults and movements. 

Spiritualism organizes itself around another center. Religion generallydemands and offers a faith in immortality. We are not concerned herewith the grounds which various religions have supplied for this faithor the arguments by which they have supported it. Generally speaking, any religion loses ground as it fails to convince its adherents ofimmortality, or justify their longings therefor. Any religion supplyingclear and indisputable proof of immortality will command a strongfollowing and any seeming demonstration of immortality not particularlyassociated with this or that religious form will organize about itself agroup of followers who will naturally give up pretty much everythingelse and center their entire interests upon the methods by whichimmortality is thus supposed to be demonstrated. Now modern Spiritualismcomes in just here. It professes to offer a sure proof of immortality toan age which is just scientific enough to demand something correspondingto scientific proof for the support of its faith and not scientificenough to accept all the implications of science, or to submit to itsdiscipline. Theosophy and kindred cults are generally a quest fordeliverance along other than accepted Christian lines; they substituteself-redemption for Christian atonement, and deliverance throughmystical disciplines for that forgiveness of sin and assurance ofsalvation in which Christianity has found its peace. 

There is, of course, a vast deal of action and reaction between thenewer movements themselves and between the new faith and the old. Thereare elements common to all religions; there are frontiers where allreligions meet and somewhat merge; at some point or other almost everyfaith touches its contrary or becomes uncertain and shifts its emphasis. Religion is always dependent upon changing tempers and very greatlyupon varying personalities; it is always in flux, impatient ofdefinitions and refusing the rigid boundary lines within which weattempt to confine it. Though it be clearly possible, therefore, to findthree distinct points of departure for the whole of the border-landcults and religions, there is running through them all a certain unityof driving force. They are in general a quest for a new type ofreligious reality; they are largely due to certain marked inadequaciesof the more accepted religious teachings and to the want of the moreaccepted religious experiences to satisfy certain types. They have cometo light in our own time through the failure of authority in bothCatholicism and Protestantism, through the failure of the acceptedunderstandings of the Bible to satisfy those who are still persuadedthat it has a real message and through the reaction of the modern spiritupon religious attitudes. They owe much to the deficiency of thetraditional explanation of sin, sorrow and suffering; they owe somethingto the failure of Christianity to create a Christian environment; andthey owe not a little to the natural longing for some positive assuranceof life after death, as well as to the quest of the soul for deliveranceand its longing for a satisfying communion with God. And they arereinforced in every direction by the restless and unsettled temper of atime subject to great changes of habit and outlook through the breakingup of old industrial and social orders and the impact of new forcesdriving in from every direction. 

We shall need to relate these conditioning causes more definitely to thevarious cults and movements as we go on to study them, but here at leastare the backgrounds against which they must be studied and the lines oftesting down which they must be followed. We shall begin in our moredetailed study of these movements with the modern religious quest forhealth and healing. But even here we shall find it worth while to tracebroadly the history of faith and mental healing. 

III

FAITH HEALING IN GENERAL

Those cults which are either founded upon faith healing or involve ithave a long ancestry. George Barton Cutten's very suggestive book[8]makes that clear enough and supplies an informing mass of detail. Medical Science and Psychology have been slow to take into account thefacts thus submitted, but they have of late made amends for theirsomewhat unaccountable delay, and we have now reached certainconclusions about which there is little controversy except, indeed, asto the range of their application. Beneath all faith healing and kindredphenomena there are three pretty clearly defined bases. First, theaction or reaction of mind upon body; second, the control of mentalattitudes by the complex of faith; and, as an interrelated third, thecontrol of the lower nerve centers by suggestion. 

[Footnote 8: "Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing. "]

_The Bases of Faith and Mental Healing_

There is an almost baffling interplay of what one may call these threecontrolling principles, and the exhaustive discussion of the wholesubject demands the knowledge of the specialist. But we do know, tobegin with, that just as there are demonstrated bodily approaches toboth the mental and spiritual aspects of life, so there are equallyundeniable mental and even spiritual approaches to physical conditions. We have here to fall back upon facts rather than upon a definiteknowledge of what happens in the shadowy border-land across which themind takes over and organizes and acts upon what is presented to it bythe afferent nervous system. Nothing, for example, could be really moreprofound than the difference between waves of compression andrarefaction transmitted through the luminiferous ether and thetranslation of their impact into light. Somewhere between the retina ofthe eye, with its magic web of sensitive nerve ends, and the properregistering and transforming regions of the brain something happensabout which Science can say no final word. 

What happens in the case of light is equally true of sound and tactualsensation. That vivid and happy consciousness of well-being which wecall health is just the translation of normal balances, pressures andfunctionings in the mechanism of the body into an entirely differentorder of phenomena. Health is a word of manifold meaning and if itsfoundations are established in the harmonious coöperation of physicalprocesses, its superstructure rises through mental attitudes into what, for want of a more clearly defined word, we call spiritual states. Twoorders meet and merge within us. Above a world of idea, insight, desireand subordination of means to ends, the whole driven by the will andsaturated with emotion, a world which has its contacts with the unseenand eternal and derives its strength from the truly immaterial; below aworld of material and forces in subjection to the laws of physics andchemistry and involved in the processes of the conservation andtransformation of physical energy, and consciousness the clearing-housefor the whole. 

_Cannon's Study of Emotional Reactions Upon Physical States_

This interplay of body and mind has of late been made the subject ofcareful and long continued experimentation with a special reference tothe reactions of strong emotion upon bodily states, particularly asregistered in chemical changes. These experiments have been carried onwith an almost incredible patience and attention to detail under themost difficult circumstances, and their conclusions seem final. Professor Walter B. Cannon of Harvard University has recently put theresult of such investigation at our service in a most interestingway. [9] (It ought to be said, however, that a similar series ofexperiments repeated at the laboratories of the University of Chicagofailed to produce the same results. )

[Footnote 9: "Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, " quotedwithout page references. ]

Strong emotion affects almost every physical region, modifies almostevery physical function. The normal secretion of digestive fluids isgreatly increased by hunger (though here, of course, hunger itself mayhave a physical basis) and also by what the investigator calls shamfeeding--food, that is, taken by an animal and so deflected as not topass into the digestive tract at all stimulates the gastric flow quiteas much as if it were actually received into the stomach. On the otherhand unhappy emotional disturbance greatly retards the digestiveprocesses. Pain, for example, results in pronounced inhibitions of thesecretion of gastric juice while happy emotional states producenaturally the opposite effect. Pain is often accompanied by nausea, indeed the nausea of a sick headache may be only secondary, induced by apain springing from quite another source than retarded digestion. 

Professor Cannon's experiments are most interesting as he traces thevariations of the flow of adrenal secretion induced by emotion and thenretraces the effect of the chemical changes so produced upon bodily andmental states. The secretion of adrenin[10] is greatly increased by painor excitement. The percentage of blood sugar is also greatly increasedby the same causes. The heaviness of fatigue is due, as we know, topoisonous uneliminated by-products resulting from long continued orover-taxing exertion of any sort. Under the influence of fatigue thepower of the muscles to respond to any kind of stimulus is greatlyreduced. (It is interesting to note, however, that muscular fibredetached from the living organism and mechanically stretched and relaxedshows after a period the same decrease in contractability understimulation. ) On the other hand any increase in adrenal secretionresults in renewed sensitiveness to stimulation, that is by an increasedpower of the muscle to respond. Falling blood pressures diminishproportionately the power of muscular response. Rising blood pressure iseffective "in largely restoring in fatigued structures their normalirritability" and an increase of adrenin seems to raise blood pressureby driving the blood from the interior regions of the body "into theskeleton muscles which have to meet, by extra action, the urgent demandsof struggle or escape. "

[Footnote 10: I follow Cannon in the form of this word. ]

Adrenin is of real use in counteracting the effects of fatigue or inenabling the body to respond to some unusual call for effort. Thecoagulation of the blood is also affected by the same agent, that is, itcoagulates very much more rapidly. [11] Coagulation is also hastened byheightened emotion; a wound does not bleed so freely when the woundedone is angry or excited. A soldier, then, in the stress of combat is notonly rendered insensible to fatigue and capable of abnormal activity, but his wounds are really not so dangerous as they would otherwise be. There are here suggestions of elemental conditions having to do withstruggle and survival, conditions which play their very great part inthe contests of life. 

[Footnote 11: Cannon thinks, however, that this effect is producedindirectly. ]

Emotions set free, as has been said, larger percentages of sugar whichare immediately utilized by the muscles in heightened or fatiguingeffort. All these experiments point very clearly to reservoirs of power, both physical and mental, upon which we may draw in times of stress andunder emotional excitement. [12] Such emotionally induced chemicalactions and reactions as have been indicated release these storedenergies, render us for the time being unconscious of fatigue and evenguard us against the too rapid exhaustion of vital power. Whateverheightens emotion, therefore, modifies the very chemical structure ofthe body. 

[Footnote 12: Excessive emotional reactions upon bodily states mayexplain, as Cannon suggests, the more obscure phenomena of religiousfrenzy such as the ceremonial dances of savages, the "Danse Macabre" ofthe Middle Ages, the feats of the whirling dervishes, the jumping andshouting of revivalism; also, maybe, the modern jazz. ]

_The Two Doors_

There are other changes as well. The breath is quickened, the lungs areexpanded, waste products are very much more rapidly eliminated and so inanswer to summoning states of the soul the body as a whole readjustsitself in marvellous subtle forms, mobilizing all its forces for thecontests which the emotion anticipates, or indeed which the emotionitself calls out. And if all this seems unduly technical it is only tobear out with something like a scientific accuracy the statements made alittle earlier that two orders meet and merge within us and that thereactions of our loves, our fears, or our longings upon our bodilyprocesses may be stated in terms of the test tube and the chemist'sscale. 

Such changes as are thus registered react in turn upon mentalattitudes. Fatigue produces mental depression. An accumulation ofuneliminated waste darkens all our horizons; irritability of mind andsoul attend physical irritability; any unhappy modification in thebalance of the physical registers automatically an equally unhappymodification in the balance of the psychic. Most of us, as we come toknow ourselves better, recognize marked alterations even in spiritualstates which we are taught to refer to physical condition, but just astruly altered spiritual conditions produce altered physical states. There is an endless give and take and there are, therefore, two doors ofapproach to our pains, wearinesses and sicknesses. 

_The Challenge of Hypnotism_

Medicine, surgery and hygiene as at present organized largely approachpersonal well-being from the physical side. They have for their supporta body of fact and a record of accomplishment which cannot be put out ofcourt without sheer intellectual stultification. Modern medicine hasbeen so massively successful in dealing with disease on the basis of aphilosophy which makes everything, or nearly everything, of the body andnothing or next to nothing of the mind, that medicine was in danger ofbecoming more sheerly materialistic than almost any other of oursciences; Physics and Chemistry had their backgrounds in which theyrecognized the interplay of realities too great for their formulæ andforces too subtle for their most sensitive instruments. But medicine wasalmost in the way of forgetting all this when it was compelled--andthat for its own good--to take account of an entirely different set offorces. 

This was, to begin with, as far as the modern scientific approach isconcerned, first made clearly apparent in Hypnotism. Hypnotism seems tobe such a modification of normal mental conditions under the power ofcommanding suggestion as really for the time being to focusconsciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A newset of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon normalconsciousness. Attention is withdrawn from the usual frontiers (if onemay use the word) to which, consciously or subconsciously, it has alwaysbeen directed and centered upon one single thing. [13]

[Footnote 13: Sidis defines Hypnosis as the disassociation of thesuperior and inferior nerve centers. They commonly work in perfectharmony, their blended unity forming one conscious personality. "Inhypnosis the two systems or nervous centers are disassociated, thesuperior centers and the upper consciousness are inhibited or better cutoff, split off from the rest of the nervous system with its organicconsciousness, which is thus laid bare, open to the influence ofexternal stimuli or suggestions. .. . In hypnotic trance . .. We havedirect access to man's organic consciousness and through it to organiclife itself. ". .. If we broaden this last sentence to include not onlyorganic consciousness but the deeper strata of personality in which notonly individual but perhaps racial experience is bedded, we have the keyto a vast range of obscure phenomena. Sidis believes that "strongpermanent impressions or suggestions made on the reflex organicconsciousness of the inferior centers may modify their functionaldisposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organic structure"and this in a sentence is probably what lies behind all faith and mentalhealing. --"The Psychology of Suggestion, " pp. 69 and 70. ]

The hypnotized person becomes, therefore, unconscious of any reportingagencies outside the field of his abnormally focused attention. Normalconditions of pain or pleasure cease for the time to become real. Attention has been forced entirely out of normal channels and given anew direction. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though thosemessages of the afferent nerves cease to have any effect upon thesubject, the imaginings of the subject carried back along outgoing linesproduce the most unexpected results in physical states. If a postagestamp be placed upon the hand of the hypnotized subject and he be toldthat the stamp is a mustard plaster, the stamp reddens the skin andpresently raises a blister. In other words, heightened and intensifiedexpectant attention is able to produce the same results as an irritatingagency. [14]

[Footnote 14: Experiments by Krafft-Ebing and Forel. To be taken withcaution. See Jacoby, "Suggestion and Psycho-Therapy, " p. 153. ]

_Changed Attention Affects Physical States_

We are concerned here chiefly with the fact and it is a fact capable offar-reaching application. Of course the nature and extent of the changesthus produced are the battlegrounds of the two schools. Medical Scienceis quite willing to admit that while functional action may thus bemodified no real organic changes can be produced. There is a border-landso much still in shadow that no final word can be said about the wholematter, but it is incontestably true that modifications of attentionhave a reflex in the modification of physical states. 

A pain which is not registered does not, for the time being at least, exist, and if the attention can either through hypnotism or by apersistent mental discipline be withdrawn from disturbing physicalreports, then the conditions which produce them will at least be left tocorrect themselves without interference from consciousness and since thewhole tendency of disturbed physical organism is to correct itself, thewhole process probably goes on more quickly as it certainly goes on withless discomfort if attention is withdrawn. [15] The assumption of healthis a tremendous health-giving force and if the condition to be remediedis really due to a mental complex which needs only some strong exertionof the will or readjustment of attitude to change, then marvellousresults may follow changed mental and spiritual states. The apparentlydumb may speak, the apparently paralyzed rise from their beds, theshell-shocked pull themselves together and those under the bondage oftheir fears and their pains be set free. There are so many illustrationsof all this that the fact itself is not in debate. 

[Footnote 15: Organic changes (the storm center of the controversy) maypossibly be induced through a better general physical tone. Such changeswould not be directly due to suggestion but to processes released bysuggestion. Organic change may certainly be checked and the effect of itovercome by increased resistance. So much conservative physicians admit. How far reconstruction thus induced may go is a question for thespecialist. ]

_The Power of Faith to Change Mental Attitudes_

Now since mental attitudes so react upon bodily states, whateverstrongly controls mental attitudes becomes a very great factor inmental healing. There is a long line of testimony that what may becalled the complex of faith does just this with unique power, for faithimplies supernatural intervention. If there be anywhere anall-prevailing power whose word is law and we could really be persuadedthat such a power had really intervened--even if it actually had not--onour behalf and brought its supernatural resource to bear upon ourtroubled case, then we should have a confidence more potent in theimmediate transformation of mental attitudes than anything else we couldpossibly conceive. If we really believed such a power were ready to helpus, if we as vividly expected its immediate help, then we mightanticipate the utmost possible therapeutic reaction of mind upon body. Afaith so called into action should produce arresting results, and thisas a matter of investigation is true. 

In following through the theories of faith healing we may take hereeither of two lines. The devout may assert a direct divineinterposition. God is. He has the power and the will; all things areplastic to His touch; He asks only faith and, given faith enough, thething is done and there is no explaining it. Those who believe this arenot inclined to reason about it; in fact it is beyond reason save asreason posits a God who is equal to such a process and an order in whichsuch results can be secured. This is rather an achievement of faith thanreason but the Christian Church generally has held such a faith--a faithsustained by the testimony which favours it and unaffected by thetestimony which challenges it. The scientific temper which seekseconomy in all its explanations and asks only for a cause sufficient forthe effect and which is, moreover, constantly trying to relate theunknown to the known, takes another line and finds in faith healing justone more illustration of the power of mind over body. This does notexclude God but it discovers Him in resident forces and finds in law therevelation of His method. The conclusions, then, to which we aregenerally coming may not only be reconciled with a devout faith, theymay, when followed through, enrich faith; but they do subdue the wholegreat matter to a sequence of cause and effect and they are graduallyfinding a satisfactory explanation for what has heretofore been deeplyinvolved in mystery. 

Just as Hypnotism, through the very dramatic abnormality of it, inaltering the sensitiveness of those physical tracts from which attentionis withdrawn or in producing physical effects through suggestivefocusing, has helped us to understand the part which attention plays inthe flux of physical states, so our later studies of the subconscioushelp us here. We do know that a great deal may really take place inpersonality of which consciousness takes no account. Consciousness inits most active phases is alert, purposeful and preoccupied with theimmediate concern of the moment. Consciousness heeds commands and takesaccount of such conditions as strongly assert themselves, but does notin its full drive take much account of suggestion unless the suggestionpossesses unusual force. Suggestions usually need leisurely turning overin the mind and the mind commonly refers them--often without knowingit--to those regions of mental action which lie beneath the threshold ofstrongly focused consciousness. 

But suggestion does not thereby cease to work. It starts processes allits own which go on till they are worked through. After a longer orshorter period of incubation the outcome of suggestion is lifted intothe light of consciousness, often to produce results all the morestriking because we cannot explain them to ourselves or any one else. All this does not withdraw such phenomena from the realm of law; it onlyclothes them with the mystery of the unknown and extends the fields inwhich they may operate. Proper suggestion let fall into these unknowndepths or improper suggestion as well, becomes an incalculable force inshaping the ends of life. We have here, then, well attested truths orlaws--it is difficult to know what to call them--which help us tounderstand the bases of faith healing or mental healing by suggestion. Now directly we turn to such records as remain to us we find that suchforces as these have been in action from the very beginning. All diseasewas in early times referred generally to spirit possession. If only theevil spirit could be exorcised the patient would get well and the priestwas, of course, the proper person to undertake this. Religion andmedicine were, therefore, most intimately united to begin with andhealing most intimately associated with magic. The first priests weredoctors and the first doctors were priests and what they did as priestsand what they did as doctors were alike unreasonable and capricious. The priest and his church have very unwillingly surrendered the verygreat hold over the faithful which this early association of medicineand religion made possible. Any order or institution which can approachor control humanity through the longing of the sick for health, has animmense and unfailing empire. 

_Demon Possession the Earliest Explanation of Disease_

There are, says Cutten, three fairly well defined periods in the historyof Medicine. The first, beginning as far back as anything human beginsand coming down to the end of the second century; the second, endingwith the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries; and the third from perhapsthe sixteenth century on. The second period, he adds, was by far themost sterile and stationary of the three "largely due to the prohibitiveattitude of the Church. The science of Medicine, then, is almost whollythe result of the investigations and study of the last period. Thismeans that medicine is one of the youngest of the sciences, while fromthe very nature of the case it is one of the oldest of the arts. "

Demon possession was, as has been said, the earliest explanation ofdisease. This would naturally be true of a time almost wholly wanting inany conception either of law or any relation of cause and effect beyondthe most limited regions of experience. Since the only cause of whichman had any real knowledge was his own effort he peopled his world withforces more or less like himself, except that they were invisible, whooperated practically the whole of natural phenomena. There was a spiritfor every place and every happening; spirits for fields and hearths, thresholds and springs. Some of them were friendly, some of themnaturally unfriendly, but they were everywhere in existence, everywherein action and naturally if they were unfriendly they would from time totime and in various most curious ways get into the body itself and theredo any amount of mischief. 

The priest-doctor's task, therefore, was to get them out. He might scarethem out, or scold them out, or pray them out, or trick them out. Hewould use his medicine as much to make the place of their temporaryabode uncomfortable for the demon as remedial for the patient and, indeed, the curious and loathsome things which have been used formedicines might well disgust even a malevolent demon. One thing standsout very clearly and that is that whatever the medicine did or leftundone, it worked through its influence upon the mind of the patient andnot through any real medicinal value. 

_The Beginnings of Scientific Medicine_

Of course along with all this would go a kind of esoteric wisdom whichwas part of the stock in trade of the healer. There were charms, incantations and magic of every conceivable sort. The medicine man ofuncivilized or even half-civilized peoples really makes medicine for themind rather than the body. There were, however, gleams of scientificlight through all this murky region. The Egyptians knew something ofanatomy though they made a most capricious use of it and there must havebeen some knowledge of hygienic methods; the prohibitions of Leviticus, for example, and of the Jewish law generally for which the Jew must havebeen, as far as medical science is concerned, somewhat in debt to theEgyptian and the Chaldean, really have sound hygienic reasons behindthem. The Greeks began with demons but they ended with something whichapproached true science. 

The real contribution of Greece, however, seems to have been on thepositive rather than the negative side. They made much of health as anend in itself, had gods and goddesses of physical well-being. The Greekhad constantly held before him such an ideal of physical excellence ashad never before been approached and has never since been equalled. Heseems to have been abstemious in eating; he practiced the most strenuousphysical exercises; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and so created acivilization in which health very largely took care of itself. Anexamination of what records remain to us hardly sustains the acceptedopinion that the Greeks had made substantial advances along purelyscientific lines, [16] but at any rate as far as medicine goes, there islittle to choose between the Greece of the fourth century before Christand the Europe of the sixteenth century after, save that the life of theGreek was far more normal, temperate and hygienic and the mind of theGreek more open, sane and balanced. 

[Footnote 16: Probably too strong a statement. For an opposite viewstrongly supported by a scholar's research see Singer's article in "TheLegacy of Greece" (Oxford Press), p. 201. ]

Plato anticipated conclusions which we are just beginning to reach whenhe said, "the office of the physician extends equally to thepurification of mind and body. To neglect the one is to expose the otherto evident peril. It is not only the body which, by sound constitution, strengthens the soul, but the well regulated soul, by its authoritativepower, maintains the body in perfect health. " Whether the best classiccivilization made, consciously, its own this very noble insight ofPlato, the best classic civilization did secure the sound mind and thesound body to an extent which puts a far later and far more complexcivilization to shame. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Greek tothis whole great subject was his passion for bodily well-being and hismarvellous adaptation of his habits and type of life to that end. 

He did, moreover, separate religion, magic and medicine to someappreciable extent and he gave us at least the beginnings of a medicalprofession, approaching medicine from the scientific rather than thereligious or traditional point of view. Even though his science was apoor enough thing, his doctors were none the less doctors and themedical profession to-day is entirely within its right when it goes backto Hippocrates for the fathering of it. 

_The Attitude of the Early and Medieval Church_

Christianity changed all this and on the whole for the worse. And yetthat statement ought to be immediately qualified, for Christianity didbring with it a very great compassion for suffering, a very greatwillingness to help the sick and the needy. The Gospels are inextricablyinterwoven with accounts of the healing power of the founder ofChristianity. All the later attitude of Christianity toward disease mustbe considered in the light of this fact. We owe to Christianity thefirst real hospitals, the first really compassionate and unselfish carefor the sick and impulses which, as they have finally worked out, havehad more to do with giving quality and direction to medicine andparticularly in investing the whole practice of medicine with its trueatmosphere than any other single force. 

And yet all this has been a long, long time coming true and for almost1, 500 years the Church and its authorities were a hindrance rather thana help and that for two or three outstanding reasons. Christianity, tobegin with, sadly underestimated physical values in its overinsistenceupon spiritual values. The body was at best but the tabernacle of thesoul and the soul being the chief concern, whatever happened to the bodywas of little importance. The body was not only underestimated, it wasscorned and abused, starved and scourged; it was the seat of unholyinfluences and impulses; its natural longings were at the best undersuspicion, at the worst under absolute condemnation. Christianity, speaking through the Church, took immense care for its spiritualhygiene, though even here it went wrong because it forgot Plato's nobleword, but it failed utterly in physical hygiene. 

Then again sickness and suffering were for the Church but the manifestpunishment of some sin known or concealed. To interfere, therefore, wasin some way to defeat the justice of God. Pestilences were inscrutableprovidences; they were the wrath of God made manifest. In the face of sostupendous a calamity anything man might do was not only futile butimpertinent. 

By a strange contradiction early and medieval Christianity, while makinglittle of the body, nevertheless strongly opposed any study of anatomywhich depended upon post-mortems or dissection. This probably because oftheir belief in the resurrection of the body. Any mutilation of the bodyafter death would be a real handicap in the day of resurrection. Butbehind all this, equally real though intangible, was the desire of theChurch to have the whole of life under its own direct control. Itinstinctively feared methods of thought or processes of investigationnot directly a part of its own imperial administration of life. Somesubtle distrust of the human reason went along with all this. As aresult the Church, in the main, threw herself against the moreindependent processes of scientific thought, sought to subdue all thefacts of life to her creeds and understandings and so became a realhindrance to any pursuit of truth or any investigation of fact which layoutside the region of theological control. How largely all this retardedgrowth and knowledge and the extension of human well-being it isdifficult to say, but the fact itself is well established. 

_Saints and Shrines_

For one thing early Christianity continued the belief in demoniacpossession. By one of those accidents which greatly influence historythe belief in demon possession was strongly held in Palestine in thetime of Christ and the Gospel narratives reflect all this in ways uponwhich it is not necessary to enlarge. The Gospels themselves lent theirmighty sanction to this persuasion and there was nothing in the temperof the Church for more than a thousand years afterward to greatly modifyit. Indeed the temper of the Church rather strengthened it. Origenbelieved that demons produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of theair and pestilences. They hover concealed in clouds in the loweratmosphere and are attracted by the blood and incense which the heathenoffered them as gods. 

According to St. Augustine all diseases of Christians are to be ascribedto these demons and the church fathers generally agreed with these two, the greatest of them all. It was, therefore, sinful to do anything buttrust to the intercession of the saints. The objection of the Church todissection which is, of course, the indispensable basis for any realknowledge of anatomy was very slowly worn down. The story of AndreasVesalius whom Andrew White calls the founder of the modern science ofanatomy is at once fascinating and illuminating. He pursued his studiesunder incredible difficulties and perhaps could never have carried themthrough without the protection of Charles V whose physician he was. Hewas finally driven out, a wanderer in quest of truth, was shipwreckedon a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in the prime of his life andstrength "he was lost to the world. " But he had, none the less, won hisfight and the opposition of the Church to the scientific study ofanatomy was gradually withdrawn. But every marked advance in medicalscience had really to fight the battle over again. The Sorbonnecondemned inoculation, vaccination had slowly to fight its way and eventhe discovery of anesthetic, perhaps the greatest single blessing evergiven surgery, met with no little theological obstruction. It is onlyfair to say in this connection that so stupid a conservatism has been byno means the sole possession of the Church and the clergy. Medicine hasbeen upon occasion almost as conservative and the difficulties which SirJoseph Lister encountered in his endeavour to win the London hospitalsfor asepsis and anti-sepsis were quite as bitter. The difficulties wereof a piece with the opposition of the Church to scientific advancement. After all a conservatism of this sort is a matter of temperament ratherthan creed or class. 

But if the Church was strangely slow to give place to medicine andsurgery, the Church sought, through agencies and methods of its own, tocure disease. It is impossible to follow through in detail the longstory though it all bears upon the line we are following through itsmassive testimony to the power of mind over body. Since the Churchbelieved in demon possession it sought to cure by exorcism and there arein the ritual of the Church, as the ritual has finally taken form, offices growing out of this long, long battle against evil spirits whichhave now little suggestion of their original purpose. The sign of theCross was supposed to have commanding power, the invocation of thetriune deity had its own virtue, the very breathing of the priest wassupposed to influence the evil spirit and he fled defeated from thetouch of holy water. 

The Church possessed, as was everywhere then believed, not only aprevailing power over demons, but a supernatural power all her own forthe healing of disease. This power was associated with saints and relicsand shrines. During the lifetime of the saint this power was exercisedthrough direct saintly interposition. After the death of the saint itwas continued in some relic which he left behind him, or some shrinewith which he had been particularly associated. There grew up graduallya kind of "division of labour among the saints in the Middle Ages. " Eachsaint had its own peculiar power over some bodily region or over someparticular disease. And so the faithful were guarded by a legion ofprotecting influences against everything from coughs to sudden death. There is almost an unimaginable range of relics. Parts of the true Crosspossessed supreme value. St. Louis of France was brought back almostfrom death to life by the touch of the sacred wood. The bones and hairsof saints, rings which they had worn and all such things as these hadvalue and to prove that the value was not resident in the relic but inthe faith with which the relic was approached we have reported bones ofsaints possessing well authenticated healing value, later proved to havebeen the bones not of men but of animals. There have been sacred springsand consecrated waters almost without number. They will still show youin Canterbury Cathedral stones worn by the feet of countless pilgrimsseeking at the shrine of Thomas à Becket a healing to the reality ofwhich those who wore away those stones bore testimony in a variety ofgifts which made the shrine of à Becket at one time one of the treasurehouses of Christendom. 

"The two shrines at present best known are those of Lourdes in Franceand Ste. Anne de Beaupré in the Province of Quebec. Lourdes owes itsreputed healing power to a belief in a vision of the Virgin receivedthere during the last century. Over 300, 000 persons visit there eachyear. " Charcot, it is worth noting, had confidence enough not in theshrine but in the healing power of faith to send fifty or sixty patientsto Lourdes every year. His patients were, of course, the mentally andnervously unbalanced. The French government supervises the sanitaryconditions at Lourdes and a committee of doctors have undertaken someexamination of the diseased who visit the shrine for the guidance oftheir profession. Ste. Anne de Beaupré owes its fame to certain wristbones of the mother of Christ. 

_Magic, Charms, and the King's Touch: The Rise of the Faith Healer_

Religious faith is not always necessary--any faith will do. Charms, amulets, talismans have all played their part in this long compellingstory. The various metals, gems, stones and curious and capriciouscombinations of pretty much every imaginable thing have all been soused. Birth girdles worn by women in childbirth eased their pain. Acircular piece of copper guarded against cholera. A coral was a goodguard against the evil eye and sail-cloth from a shipwrecked vessel tiedto the right arm was a preventive as well as a cure for epilepsy. Thereis almost no end to such instances. The list of charms and incantationsis quite as curious. There are forms of words which will cure insomniaand indeed, if one may trust current observation, forms of words notprimarily so intended may still induce sleepfulness. 

The history of the king's touch as particularly helpful in epilepsy andscrofula, though useful also for the healing of various diseases, isespecially interesting. This practice apparently began with Edward theConfessor in England and St. Louis in France and was due to the faith ofthose who came to be touched and healed in the divine right and lonelypower of the king. It is significant that the practice began with thesetwo for they, more than any kings of their time or most kings since, were really men of rare and saintly character. Curiously but naturallyenough the English have denied any real power in this region to Frenchkings and the French have claimed a monopoly for their own sovereigns. The belief in the king's touch persisted long and seems toward the endto have had no connection with the character of the monarch, forCharles II did more in this line than any one who ever sat on an Englishthrone. During the whole of his reign he touched upward of 100, 000people. Andrew White adds that "it is instructive to note, however, thatwhile in no other reign were so many people touched for scrofula and somany cures vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of thedisease. "

Along with the king's touch went the king's gift--a piece of gold--andthe drain upon the royal treasury was so considerable that after thereign of Elizabeth the size of the coin was reduced. Special coins wereminted for the king's use in that office and these touching pieces arestill in existence. William III refused to take this particular powerseriously. "God give you better health and more sense, " he said as heonce touched a patient. In this particular instance the honestskepticism of the king was outweighed by the faith of the suppliant. Weare assured that the person was cured. The royal touch was discontinuedafter the death of Queen Anne. 

The list of healers began early and is by no means ended now. The powerof the healer was sometimes associated with his official station in theChurch, sometimes due to his saintly character and often enough only toa personal influence, the fact of which is well enough established, though there can be in the nature of things no finality in the estimateof his real efficacy. George Fox performed some cures; John Wesley also. In the seventeenth century one Valentine Greatrakes seems to have beenthe center of such excitements and reported healings as Alexander Dowieand others in our own time and it is finally through the healer ratherthan the saint or the king or shrine or relic that we approach therenaissance of mental and faith healing in our own time. 

IV

THE APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MARY BAKER EDDY

There is, however, another stage in this long line of development whichneeds to be considered since it supplies a double point of departure;once for the most outstanding healing cult in our time--ChristianScience--and once for the greatly enlarged use of suggestion in modernmedical practice, and that is mesmerism and "animal magnetism. "

_Mesmerism a Point of Departure for Modern Healing Cults_

Paracelsus[17] may be taken as a starting point just here. He is knownin the history of medicine "for the impetus he gave to the developmentof pharmaceutical chemistry, but he was also the author of a visionaryand theosophic system of philosophy. " He believed in the influence ofthe stars upon men, but he enlarged upon the old astrologic faiths. "Hebelieved the human body was endowed with a double magnetism, one portionattracted to itself the planets and was nourished by them, the result ofwhich was the mental powers, the other portion attracted anddisintegrated the elements, from which process resulted the body. " Hisworld, therefore, was a world of competitive attractions. He believedthe well had an influence over the sick through magnetism and used themagnet in his practice. 

[Footnote 17: A German-Swiss physician and alchemist, b. 1493, d. 1541. These quotations, partly from authorities on faith healing and partlyfrom the history of Spiritualism, illustrate the underground connectionin this whole region. ]

"This dual theory of magnetic cures, that of the magnetic influence ofmen on men and of the magnet on man, was prevalent for over a century. ""It is, then, upon these ideas--the radiation from all things, butespecially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which wouldact in all things else, and which was in each case directed by theindwelling spirit, together with the conception of a perpetual contactbetween reciprocal and opposing forces--that the mysticism of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly depends. "[18]

[Footnote 18: Podmore, "Modern Spiritualism, " Vol. I, p. 45. I am indebt also to Cutten for general information and some quoted paragraphs. ]

These ideas were adopted by a group of men who are now only names forus. The phenomena of magnetism fascinated them and supplied themanalogies. There is, they thought, an all-prevailing magnetic influencewhich binds together not only celestial and terrestrial bodies, but allliving things. Life and death were for them simply the registry of theebbing and flowing of these immaterial tides and they ended byconceiving a vital fluid which could be communicated from person toperson and in the communication of which the sick could be healed--thedriftwood of their lore has come down to us on the tides of time; westill speak of magnetic personalities--and they sought in various waysto control and communicate these mysterious forces. 

One of them invented steel plates which he applied to the body as a curefor disease. He taught his system to Mesmer who made, however, onemarked advance upon the technique of his predecessors and gave his nameto his methods; he produced his results through physical contacts andpasses. But he shared with his predecessors and stated with that compactclearness of which the French language is so capable even when dealingwith obscure matters, that there is a "fluid so universally diffused andconnected as to leave nowhere any void, whose subtlety is beyond anycomparison and which by its nature is capable of receiving, propagatingand communicating all impressions of movement. .. . This reciprocal actionis subject to mechanical laws at present unknown. "[19] This fluid in itsaction governs the earth and stars and human action. 

[Footnote 19: Price's "Historique de facts relatifs du MagnétismeAnimal, " quoted by Podmore. ]

He originated the phrase "Animal Magnetism" and was, though he did notknow it, the originator of hypnotism; until well within our own timemesmerism was the accepted name for this whole complex group ofphenomena. The medical faculties examined his claims but were notwilling to approve them, but this made no difference in Mesmer'spopularity. He had so great a following as to be unable to deal withthem personally. He deputed his powers to assistants, arranged a mostelaborate apparatus and surrounded his whole procedure with a dramaticsetting of stained glass, mirrored and scented rooms and mysteriousmusic. The result of it all naturally, as far as his patients wereconcerned, was marked excitements and hysterias. They had often to beput into padded rooms. And yet the result of all this murky confusionwas said to be numbers of marked cures. He was investigated by theFrench government and two commissions presented their reports, neitherof which was favourable. Imagination, not magnetism, they said, accounted for the results. His popularity wore away markedly when heundertook to explain his method and reveal his secrets. He left Paris in1815 and lapsed into obscurity. 

_The Scientific Investigation of Mesmerism in France_

As has been said, there are two lines of development growing out ofMesmer and his methods. Ten years after Mesmer left Paris AlexandreBertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraudor mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his associates hadproduced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced bysuggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer hadcontrived for his so-called treatments. The schools of medicine wereslow to follow out Bertrand's discovery and it was not until somethinglike twenty years later, through the studies of Braid, that hypnotismbegan to be taken seriously. 

But once the matter was brought broadly before them, the doctors beganto follow it through. Charcot, in the Salpêtriére, used hypnoticsuggestion for the correction of abnormal mental and nervous states. Thepsychologists took up the matter and hypnotic suggestion has come to benot only a legitimate subject for the investigation of the student andan accepted method in correction of abnormal mental states, but as itwere a window through which we are beginning to see deeply intounsuspected depths and intricacies of personality. 

Modern faith healing cults, however, have not come to us down this line, though the studies of Bertrand, Braid, Charcot, Du Bois and theirassociates supply the interpretative principles for any realunderstanding of them. Mesmerism naturally appealed to the type of mindmost easily attracted by the bizarre and the mysterious. There arealways amongst us the credulous and curious who find little enougheither to awe or inspire them in the broad sweep of law, or in suchfacts as lie open to the light of reason. Such as these are impatient ofdiscipline, eager to free themselves from the sequence of cause andeffect; they are impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts tohealth, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of theirown inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with realityand which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of disproofas through their disengagement from normal experience they are capableof verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the"idée fixe. " Everything for them centers about one idea; they have onekey and one only to the marvellous complexity of life. Such a temper asthis naturally disassociates them from reality and makes themcontemptuous of contradictory experiences. 

_Mesmerism is Carried to America; Phineas Quimby an Important Link in aLong Chain_

America has been far too rich in such a temper as this and it was nevermore so than in the forties and the fifties of the last century. Mesmerism crossed the ocean and while Braid and later Bernheim andCharcot were following it through on sound, psychological lines andbringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific discipline, itfell here into the hands of charlatans and adventurers. PhineasParkhurst Quimby, best known for his connection with Mary Baker Eddy, hardly deserves the name of charlatan, though he was dangerously nearbeing just that. He belonged to the border-land regions in thought andpropaganda and he did give to the whole complex movement which we havebeen considering a direction which has played a relatively great part inits later development. He had a shrewd mind which ranged over wideregions; he is a pretty typical example of the half-disciplined, forceful and original personality which has played so large a part inAmerican life. The New England of his time--Quimby was born in NewHampshire and spent his life in Maine--was giving itself whole-heartedlyto a mysticism bounded on the one side (its higher and morerepresentative side) by Emerson and the transcendentalists and on theother by healers, prophets of strange creeds and dreamers of Utopias. Phrenology, mind reading, animal magnetism, clairvoyance, all had theirprophets. 

Quimby belongs to this succession. His education was meagre, he did noteven know how to spell according to the dictionary or punctuateaccording to the grammar. [20] He had his own peculiar use of words--ause by which Mary Baker Eddy was doubtless greatly influenced. He hadmarked mechanical ability and a real passion for facts. He was anoriginal thinker, little in debt to books for his ideas though he wasundoubtedly influenced by the temper of his environment to whichreference has already been made. He had a speculative, but not a trainedinterest in religion and dealt freely with the orthodoxy of his timeconstrained by no loyalty to the accepted faith and no criticalknowledge of its content. "Truth" and "Science" were characteristicwords for him and he shared his speculations and conclusions freely withhis disciples. 

[Footnote 20: What is here said of Quimby is condensed from Dresser's"The Quimby Manuscripts. "]

_Quimby is Led to Define Sickness as Wrong Belief_

In his early thirties he was supposed to be dying of consumption andsuffered much from excessive medication. He recovered through anemotional crisis but does not seem to have followed out the possiblesuggestion of his recovery. He turned instead to mesmerism and travelledabout with one Lucius Burkmer over whom he had strong hypnoticinfluence. When hypnotized Burkmer (or Burkman) claimed the power tolook as through a window into the bodies of Quimby's patients anddiscover, often with illuminating detail, their condition; a good manyreputed cures followed. The testimonials to these cures and to thestrange powers of Burkmer are themselves an arresting testimony to thelengths people go in the face of what they do not understand. "I havegood reason to believe that he can discern the internal structure of ananimal body and if there be anything morbid or defective therein detectand explain it. .. . He can go from point to point without passing throughintermediate space. He passes from Belfast [Maine] to Washington or fromthe earth to the moon . .. Swifter than light, by a single act ofvolition. "[21]

[Footnote 21: "The Quimby Manuscripts, " p. 38. ]

Quimby had too alert an intelligence to rest content with the merelyoccult. He came to believe that Burkmer only saw what the patientthought, could do no more than describe the patient's idea of his ownstate, or else report the "common allopathic belief about the disease inquestion, " and the cure, he was persuaded, was not in the medicineprescribed but in "the confidence of the doctor or medium. " (Note thatQuimby here associates the cures produced by the medical faculty and hisown cures in one sweeping generalization. ) What he was really dealingwith then was "belief. " It might be the belief of the doctor or thepatient or the belief of his friends--but sickness was only "belief. "This also was a sweeping generalization but it becomes intelligible aswe follow the process by which Quimby reached his conclusions and ithelps us to understand the significance of Belief as one of the keywords of Christian Science. Quimby was led to identify sickness andwrong beliefs through this analysis of mesmeric diagnosis and health andright belief through his own experiences as a healer. He had no trainingto help him to an understanding of the real facts which lay behind thebelief in sickness. He became a skillful diagnostician of states of mindand a healer of such diseases as could be so treated. But he knew, scientifically, no more of what lay behind it all than a ploughman mayknow of what lies beneath the furrows he turns. 

_Quimby Develops His Theories_

Mrs. Eddy took over the catch-words of his system and its looseassumptions, and a reasonably careful comparison of the Quimbymanuscripts and "Science and Health" shows not only Mrs. Eddy'sfundamental and never honestly acknowledged and finally categoricallydenied indebtedness to Quimby, but the confusion which Quimby's ratherstriking and original philosophy suffered at her hands. Beginning withhis persuasion that health and sickness are phases of belief Quimbydiscarded mesmerism altogether and addressed himself to the minds of hispatients. He had doubtless a keen intuitive knowledge of human natureand its morbid fancies and he was dealing generally with neurotictemperaments over which he exercised a strong and helpful power ofsuggestion. His explanation of disease--that it is a wrongbelief--becomes grotesque enough when he comes down to detail. This, forexample, is his diagnosis of Bronchitis--"You listen or eat this beliefor wisdom [evidently that Bronchitis is real] as you would eat yourmeals. It sets rather hard upon your stomach; this disturbs the error ofyour body and a cloud appears in the sky. .. . The elements of the body ofyour belief are shaken, earth is lit up by the fire of your error, theheat rises, the heaven or mind grows dark . .. The lightning of hotflashes shoot to all parts of the solar system of your belief. At lastthe winds or chills strike the earth or surface of the body, a coldclammy sensation passes over you. This changes the heat into a sort ofwatery substance which works its way into the channels and pores to thehead and stomach. "[22]

[Footnote 22: "Quimby Manuscripts, " p. 118. ]

This is Quimby at his worst but beneath it is the germ of the method andphilosophy which have attained so luxurious a growth--the explaining, that is, of disease in terms of wrong belief. Inevitably in theelaboration of all this Quimby reached out to include religion andtheology and even created his own distinctive metaphysics. Hedistinguished between the mind and spirit; he must of course discover inpersonality a power superior to fluctuating mental attitudes. He calledhis system a science since he was trying to reduce it to a system anddiscover its laws. He found a parallel to what he was doing in thenarratives of healing in the Christian Gospels and claimed Christ as thefounder of his science. [23]

[Footnote 23: _Ibid. _, p. 185. ]

All belief opposed to his was "error"; "Truth" was naturally opposed toerror. He subordinates the testimony of the senses to the necessities ofhis system; he defines God variously as Wisdom, as Truth, possibly asPrinciple though his use of the word Principle is far more intelligiblethan Mrs. Eddy's. [24] He increasingly identifies his system and theteachings of Jesus and ends by calling it "Christian Science. "[25]

[Footnote 24: "The Quimby Manuscripts, " p. 309. ]

[Footnote 25: _Ibid. _, p. 388. ]

In substance in the more than 400 closely printed pages of the Quimbymanuscripts as now edited we discover either the substance or thesuggestion of all that Mrs. Eddy later elaborated. Now all this, confused as it is, brings us to the threshold of a distinct advance inmental and faith healing. 

_Mary Baker Eddy Comes Under Quimby's Influence_

Practically faith and mental healing had depended, till Quimby took itup, upon persons or objects. The saint or the healer worked throughpersonal contact; the shrine must be visited, the relic be touched. Sucha system was naturally dependent upon accidents of person or place; itwould not be widely extended nor continued nor made the basis ofself-treatment. But if what lay behind the whole complex group ofphenomena could be systematized and given real power of popular appealthrough its association with religion it would possess a kind ofcontinuing independence, conditioned only by the willingness of peopleto be persuaded of the truth of its philosophy or to answer to itsreligious appeal. It would then become a mental and spiritualdiscipline to be written into books and taught by the initiated. As faras it could be associated with religion it would become the basis of acult and it would have an immense field. 

All difficult or chronic or obscure illnesses would offer an opportunityto its propagandists, and the necessary obscurities and irrationalitiesof such a system would simply be, for the minds to which it wouldnaturally appeal, added elements of power. Any system which has sicknessfor its field and credulity for its reinforcement and a specious show ofhalf truth for its philosophic form and religion to give its sanctionand authority is assured, to begin with, of a really great following. Its very weaknesses will be its strength. It will work best as it isneither clear nor simple--though it must make a show of being both. Andif, in addition, there is somewhere at the heart of it force and truthenough to produce a certain number of cures it will go on. What it failsto do will be forgotten or ignored in the face of what it really doesdo. 

Now Quimby, through his own native force and such a combination ofcircumstances as occurs only once in long periods of time, stood uponthe threshold of just such a revolution in the history of faith andmental healing as this. He anticipated the method and supplied thematerial, but he either did not or could not popularize it. He was notselfish enough to monopolize it, not shrewd enough to commercialize it, and, maybe, not fanatic enough to make it a cult. He was more interestedin his own speculations than in making converts and without one of thoseaccidents which become turning points in a movement nothing would haveprobably come of his work save its somewhat vague and loose continuancein the thought and teaching of a small group. (It is doubtful if NewThought, which as we shall see grew out of his work through hisassociation with the Dressers, would have come to much without thestimulus of Christian Science against which it reacted. ) Some one wasneeded to give the whole nebulous system organization and driving forceand above all to make a cult of it. 

_Outstanding Events of Her Life: Her Early Girlhood_

Mary Baker Eddy did just this and Christian Science is the result. It isidle to calculate the vanished alternatives of life but in allprobability she never would have done it without Quimby. She and herfollowers would do far better to honestly recognize this indebtedness. It would now make little difference with either the position of theirleader or the force of their system but it would take a pretty keenweapon out of the hands of their critics and give them the addedstrength which thoroughgoing honesty always gives to any cause. Thereis, on the other hand, little likelihood that Quimby's persuasions wouldever have carried beyond the man himself if he had not found in Mrs. Eddy so creative a disciple. 

The outstanding facts of Mary Baker Eddy's life are too well known toneed much retelling here. The story of her life and the history ofChristian Science as told by Georgine Milmine in _McClure's Magazine_during the years of 1907-8 is final. It is based upon thoroughinvestigation, original documents and an exhaustive analysis of facts. The facts brought out in the various litigations in which Mrs. Eddy andthe church have been involved confirm both the statements andconclusions of this really distinctive work. The official life by SibylWilbur (whose real name seems to be O'Brien) is so coloured as to besubstantially undependable. It touches lightly or omits altogether thosepassages in Mrs. Eddy's life which do not fit in with the picture whichMrs. Eddy herself and the church desire to be perpetuated. 

Mrs. Eddy was descended from a shrewd, industrious and stronglycharacterized New England stock. Her father was strongly set in hisways, narrow and intense in his religious faith. Mary Baker was anervous, high-strung girl, unusually attractive in personal appearance, proud, precocious, self-conscious, masterful. She was subject tohysterical attacks which issued in states of almost suspended animation. Her family feared these attacks and to prevent them humoured her inevery way. In due time she joined the Tilton Congregational Church. Shesays herself that she was twelve years old at the time, but the recordsof the church make her seventeen. The range of her education is debated. Mrs. Eddy herself claims a rather ambitious curriculum. "My father, " shesays, "was taught to believe that my brain was too large for my body andso kept me out of school, but I gained book knowledge with far lesslabour than is usually requisite. At ten years of age I was familiarwith Lindley Murray's Grammar, as with the Westminster Catechism andthe latter I had to repeat every Sunday. My favourite studies wereNatural Philosophy, logic and moral science. From my brother Albert Ireceived lessons in the ancient tongues, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Aftermy discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I gleaned fromschool books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined thatgrammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea ofGod in man's origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order andunity. Prosody the song of angels and no earthly or inglorioustheme. "[26]

[Footnote 26: "Retrospection and Introspection, " 1909. ]

_Her Education: Shaping Influences_

It is not fair to apply critical methods to one who confesses that mostof the knowledge she had gleaned from school books vanished like adream, but there is much in Mrs. Eddy's writing to bear out herstatement. Those who knew her as a girl report her as irregular inattendance upon school, inattentive during its sessions and far fromknowing either Greek or Latin or Hebrew. "According to these schoolmatesMary Baker completed her education when she had finished Smith's Grammarand reached Long Division in Arithmetic. " The official biography makesmuch of an intellectual friendship between the Rev. Enoch Corser, thenpastor of the Tilton Congregational Church, and Mary Baker. "Theydiscussed subjects too deep to be attractive to other members of thefamily. Walking up and down in the garden, this fine old-schoolclergyman and the young poetess as she was coming to be called, threshedout the old philosophic speculations without rancour or irritation. "[27]

[Footnote 27: "The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, " Sibyl Wilbur, 4th edition. Christian Science Publishing Company. ]

There is little reason to doubt her real interest in the pretty rigidCalvinistic theology of her time. Indeed, we could not understand herfinal line of religious development without taking that intoconsideration. Milmine suggests other forces which would naturally haveinfluenced a sensitive and curious girl; for example, the currentinterest in animal magnetism, a subject which dominated certain aspectsof her thinking to the end. Milmine suggests also that she may have beenconsiderably influenced by the peculiar beliefs of the Shakers who had acolony near Tilton. The Shakers regarded Ann Lee, their founder, as thefemale principle of God and greater than Christ. They prayed always to"Our Father and Mother which art in heaven. " They called Ann Lee thewoman of the Apocalypse, the God-anointed woman. For her followers shewas Mother Ann, as Mary Baker was later Mother Eddy. Ann Lee declaredthat she had the gift of healing. The Shakers also made much of aspiritual illumination which had the right of way over the testimony ofthe senses. The Shakers called their establishment the Church of Christand the original foundation the Mother Church. The Shakers forbadeaudible prayer and enjoined celibacy. There are parallels enough here tosustain Milmine's contention that Mary Baker was at least largelyinfluenced by suggestions from her peculiar group of neighbours. 

_Her Unhappy Fortunes. She is Cured by Quimby. An Unacknowledged Debt_

Mary Baker married George Washington Glover at the age of twenty-two. She was soon left a widow and her only son was born after his father'sdeath. The story of the years which follow is unhappy. She was poor, dependent upon relatives whose patience she tried and whose hospitalitywas from time to time exhausted. Her attacks of hysteria continued andgrew more violent. Her father sometimes rocked her to sleep like achild. The Tiltons built a cradle for her which is one of the traditionsof this unhappy period of her life. She tried mesmerism and clairvoyanceand heard rappings at night. 

She married again, this time a Dr. Daniel Patterson, a travellingdentist. He never made a success of anything. They were miserably poorand his marriage was no more successful than most of his otherenterprises. He was captured, though as a civilian, during the Civil Warand spent one or two years in a southern prison. Futile efforts weremade at a reconciliation and in 1873 Mrs. Patterson obtained a divorceon the grounds of desertion. Meanwhile she had been separated from herson, of whom she afterward saw so little that he grew up, married andmade his own way entirely apart from his mother. 

In 1861 Mrs. Patterson's physical condition was so desperate that sheappealed to Quimby. Her husband had had some interest in homeopathy andshe was doubtless influenced by the then peculiar theories of thehomeopathic school. (Indeed she claimed to be a homeopathic practitionerwithout a diploma. ) She had had experience enough with drugs to make herimpatient and suspicious of current methods of orthodox medication. Under Quimby's treatment she was physically reborn and apparentlyspiritually as well. It is necessary to dwell upon all these well-knowndetails to understand what follows and the directions which her mind nowtook. Milmine's analysis is here penetrating and conclusive. She hadalways been in revolt against her environment. Her marriages had beenunhappy; motherhood had brought her nothing; she had been poor anddependent; her strong will and self-assertive personality had beenturned back upon herself. 

She had found no satisfaction in the rigid theologies of the time. Shehad sought help from accepted religion and religion had had nothing togive her. We have to read between the lines and especially to evaluateall this period in the light of "Science and Health" itself toreconstruct the movement of her inner life, but beyond a doubt herthought had played about the almost tragic discrepancy between her ownexperiences and the love and goodness of God. She had known pain andunhappiness in acute forms and had found nothing in what she had beentaught ample enough to resolve her doubts or establish her faith. 

She found in Quimby's philosophy a leading which she eagerly followed. Now for the first time she is really set free from herself. A truersense of dramatic values would have led Mrs. Eddy herself to have mademore of the unhappy period which began to come to an end with her visitto Quimby and would lead her disciples now to acknowledge it morehonestly. It is a strong background against which to set what followsand give colour by contrast to her later life. The twice-born from Saulof Tarsus to John Bunyan have dwelt much upon their sins and sorrows, seeking thereby more greatly to exalt the grace of God by which they hadbeen saved. Mary Baker Eddy came strongly to be persuaded that she hadsaved herself and consequently not only greatly underestimated her debtto Quimby, but emptied her own experiences of dramatic contrasts to makethem, as she supposed, more consistent, and her disciples have followedher. 

As a matter of fact, though her life as a whole is not an outstandingasset for Christian Science and is likely to grow less so, one mustrecognize the force of a conviction which changed the neurotic Mrs. Patterson of the fifties and sixties into the masterful and successfulwoman of the eighties and nineties. She belongs also to the fellowshipof the twice-born and instead of minimizing the change those who seek tounderstand her, as well as those who seek to exalt her, would do well tomake more of it. She did that herself to begin with. No master ever hadfor a time a more grateful disciple. She haunted Quimby's house, readhis manuscripts, wrote letters for the paper, "dropped into verse" andthrough her extravagance "brought ridicule upon Quimby and herself. "

Quimby died in 1866, accompanied to his last resting place by a tributein verse from his grateful pupil. Mrs. Eddy had at the time apparentlyno thought of continuing his work except in a most modest way. She wroteJulius Dresser who had come under Quimby's influence, suggesting that hewould step forward into the place vacated. "I believe you would do avast amount of good and are more capable of occupying his place than anyother I know of. "[28] She asked Dresser's help in recovering from a fallwhich she had just had on the ice and which had so injured her, as shesupposed, to make her the helpless cripple that she was before she metQuimby. This fall is worth dwelling upon for a bit, for it really marksa turning place in Mrs. Eddy's life. In her letter to Dresser she saysthat the physician attending "said I have taken the last step I evershould, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk. "[29]Sometime later in a letter to the _Boston Post_ Mrs. Eddy said, "Werecovered in a moment of time from a severe accident considered fatal bythe regular physicians. " There is a considerable difference between twodays and a moment of time and the expression of a determination to walkin the Dresser letter and the testimony to an instantaneous cure in the_Boston Post_ letter. Dr. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddyat the time, gives still a third account. He treated her, he says, overa period of almost two weeks and left her practically recovered. He alsoattended her in a professional capacity still later and offers all thisin a sworn statement on the basis of his record books. There is a veryconsiderable advantage in a philosophy which makes thought the onlyreality, for, given changing thought and a complacent recollection, facts may easily become either plastic or wholly negligible. 

[Footnote 28: "A History of the New Thought Movement, " Dresser, p. 110. ]

[Footnote 29: _Ibid. _]

_She Develops Quimby's Teachings Along Lines of Her Own_

The real significance of this much debated but otherwise unimportantepisode is that it seems to have thrown Mrs. Eddy upon her ownresources, for now that Quimby was dead she begins to develop what shehad received from him through both experience and teaching along linesof her own. She had found a formula for the resolution of problems, bothphysical and mental, which had hag-ridden her for years. She had anatural mental keenness, a speculative mind, a practical shrewdness (thegift of her New England ancestors) and an ample field. The theology, themedical science and indeed the philosophy or psychology of the NewEngland of the sixties contributed strongly, through their limitations, to the growth of bizarre systems which had in them elements of truth. Weshall need to come back to this again in any evaluation of ChristianScience as a whole, but we cannot understand the rapid development ofthe movement of which Christian Science was just one aspect withouttaking all this into consideration. 

Medicine itself has been greatly revolutionized within the last fiftyyears. While Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy was finding her unhappyway through border-land regions into a cloudy light, Louis Pasteur, sitting, in the phrase of Huxley, "as humbly as a little child beforethe facts of life, " was making those investigations in bacteriologywhich were to be, in some ways, the greatest contribution of thenineteenth century to the well-being of humanity. He was followingpatiently the action of microscopic organisms, especially in theirrelation to health, discovering the secret of contagion and infection, outlining methods of defense against the attacks of these invisiblearmies, finding the true basis for inoculation, extending its operation, robbing hospitals of their terrors and surrounding surgery withsafeguards heretofore undreamt of, literally performing miracles (in hiscontrol of swine plague and the like), and for the want of anothersubject preparing to experiment upon himself for the prevention ofhydrophobia, and in doing it all in the most simple and humble way, naively unconscious of his own fame and living from first to last in anoble and comparative poverty which contrasts dramatically with thematerial well-being for which Mrs. Eddy was so eager. Nothing of thishad ever come into Mrs. Eddy's field or those whom she addressed. Withall the aid which the modern physician has at his control, diagnosis isstill a difficult matter, physicians confess it themselves. There isstill, with all the resource of modern medical science, a residuum ofhopeless and obscure cases which baffle the physician. That residuum wasvery much larger fifty years ago than it is now. 

_She Begins to Teach and to Heal_

The typical Protestant religious experience, as we have seen, was notgreat enough to contain all the facts of life. The molten passion of anearlier Calvinism had hardened down into rigidities which exalted thepower of God at the cost of human helplessness. There was no adequaterecognition among the devout of the sweep of law. Everything thathappened was a special Providence and it was hard enough to fit thetrying facts of life into an understanding of Divine Love when there wasapparently so much in life in opposition to Divine Love. 

A very great deal of the ferment of the time was just the endeavour tofind some way out of all this and the group of which Mrs. Eddy was apart were really the first to try to find their way out except as roadsof escape which were, on the whole, not ample enough had been sought bythe theological liberalism of the time of which Unitarianism was themost respectable and accepted form. There are, as has been said, curiousunderground connections through all this region. We find homeopathy, spiritualism, transcendentalism, theological liberalism and faithhealing all tied up in one bundle. 

The line which Mrs. Eddy now came to follow is, on the whole, clearenough. She becomes in her turn teacher and healer, giving her ownimpress and colour to what she called the science she taught, claimingit more and more as her own and not only forgetting, but denying as shewent on, her indebtedness to any one else. The whole thing graduallybecame in her mind a distinct revelation for which the ages had beenwaiting and this revelation theory is really the key to thecontradictions and positive dishonesties which underlie the authorizedaccount of the genesis of Christian Science. She associated herself withone of the more promising of her pupils who announced himself as Dr. Kennedy, with Mrs. Eddy somewhat in the background. Kennedy was theagent, Mrs. Eddy supplied him with the material of what was a mixedmethod of teaching and healing. She had always been desperately poor;now for the first time she had a respectable bank account. 

There were corresponding changes in her personality and even herphysique. She began to give lessons, safeguarding her instructions fromthe very first in such ways as to make them uncommonly profitable. Herpupils paid $100 for the course and agreed also to give her a percentageof the income from their practice. In the course of litigation whichafterward follows, the courts pronounced that they did not find in hercourse of instruction anything which could be "in any way of value infitting the defendant as a competent and successful practitioner of anyintelligible art or method of healing the sick. " The court, therefore, was of the opinion that "consideration for the agreement had whollyfailed. " In a sense the court was mistaken. Mrs. Eddy was giving herdisciples something which, whether it fitted them to be competent andsuccessful practitioners of any intelligible art or method of healingthe sick, or no, was of great financial advantage both to them and totheir teacher. She afterward raised her tuition fee to $300 and statedthat God had shown her in multitudinous ways the wisdom of thisdecision. 

_Early Phases of Christian Science_

Everything was, to begin with, a matter of personal relationship betweenMrs. Eddy and her students. They constitute a closely related group, thepupils themselves extravagant in their gratitude to their teacher. Therewere, of course, schisms, jealousies, recriminations, litigation, butnone the less, the movement went on. The first attempt at organizationwas made at Lynn in 1875. A hall was rented, meetings were held in theevening, the society was known as the "Christian Scientists" and as anorganization Christian Science came into the world. The first edition of"Science and Health" was also published in 1875. There was difficulty infinding a publisher; those who assisted Mrs. Eddy financially werelosers in the enterprise. They were never reimbursed, though "Scienceand Health" afterward became the most remunerative single publication inthe world. Two years later Mrs. Glover (for after her divorce fromPatterson she had taken her earlier married name) married Gilbert Eddyand so took the name by which she is best known to the world. 

There is much in this period of Mrs. Eddy's life to indicate that shehad not yet reached an inner serenity of faith. She was never able tofree herself from a perverted belief in animal magnetism or mesmerismwhich showed itself in fear rather than faith. She believed herselfpersecuted and if she did not believe in witchcraft she believed insomething curiously like it. Indeed, to Mrs. Eddy belonged the rathercurious distinction of having instigated the last trial for witchcraftin the United States and with a fitting sense of historic propriety shestaged it at Salem. The judge dismissed the case, saying that it was notwithin the power of the Court to control the defendant's mind. The casewas appealed, the appeal waived and the whole matter rests as a curiousinstance in the records of the Salem court. 

Mrs. Eddy does not appear as the plaintiff in the case. The complainantis one of her students, but Mrs. Eddy was behind the complaint, the realreason for which is apparently that the defendant had refused to paytuition and royalty on his practice and was interfering with the work ofthe group of which Mrs. Eddy was leader. The incident has value only asshowing the lengths to which the mind may be led once it has detacheditself from the steadying influences of experience-tested reality. It isinteresting also to note that in one way and another Mrs. Eddy and herchurch have been involved in more litigation than any other religiousteacher or religious movement of the time. 

_She Writes "Science and Health" and Completes the Organization of HerChurch_

Nothing apparently came of the first tentative organization in 1875. Thefirst incorporated Church of Christ Scientist was chartered in 1879 withtwenty-six charter members and Boston as its seat. Meetings of thischurch were held, to begin with, in Lynn and Boston, but Lynn was notfriendly to the new enterprise and the Boston group became the center offurther growth. Mrs. Eddy left Lynn finally in 1882 and during all thenext period the history of Christian Science is the history of theMother Church in Boston and of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Mrs. Eddy suffered no dissent, her pupils either followed or left her. She was the controlling force in the whole movement. She began tosurround herself with a certain mystery and delighted in theatricaleffects. She had written and rewritten "Science and Health" until itbegan to take final form. The _Journal of Christian Science_ became theofficial organ of Mrs. Eddy's movement as "Science and Health" was itsgospel. 

The movement reached beyond Boston and New England and invaded the West. It was now so outstanding as to create general public interest. Thechurches began to take notice of it and indeed, whatever has been forthe last twenty years characteristic of Christian Science was thenactively in action. What follows is the familiar story of Mrs. Eddy'sown personal movements, her withdrawal to Concord, her growingdetachment from the movement which she nevertheless ruled with an ironhand, the final organization of the church itself along lines whollydictated by its leader, the deepening of public interest in the movementitself, Mrs. Eddy's removal from Concord to Newton and her death. Sheleft behind her the strongest and most driving organization built up byany religious leader of her time. Of all those, who since the Wesleyshave inaugurated and carried through a distinct religious movement, onlyAlexander Campbell is in the same class with Mrs. Eddy and Campbell hadbehind him the traditional force of the Protestantism to which he gaveonly a slightly new direction and colouring. Mrs. Eddy's contributionsare far more distinct and radical. 

We need, then, to turn from her life, upon whose lights and shadows, inconsistencies and intricacies, we have touched all too lightly, toseek in "Science and Health" and the later development of ChristianScience at once the secret of the power of the movement and itssignificance for our time. 

V

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A PHILOSOPHY

Christian science has a considerable group of authorized publicationsand a well-conducted department of publicity. Its public propaganda iscarried on by means of occasional lectures, always extremely welladvertised and through its reading rooms and periodicals. Itsunadvertised propaganda is carried on, naturally, by its adherents. Every instance of obscure or protracted illness offers it an opportunityand such opportunities are by no means neglected. But the supremeauthority in Christian Science is Mary Baker Eddy's work "Science andHealth. " This is read at every Sunday service and is the basis of alllectures and explanatory advertisements. In general its exponents do notsubstantially depart from the teachings of its book, nor, such is thediscipline of the cult, do they dare to. There are doubtless suchmodifications of its more extreme and impossible contentions as everyreligion of authority experiences. Christian Science cannot remainunaffected by discussion and the larger movements of thought. But it hasnot as yet markedly departed from the doctrines of its founder and mustthereby be judged. 

The book in its final form represents a considerable evolution. Thecomparison of successive editions reveals an astonishing amount ofmatter which has been discarded, although there has been no realmodification of its fundamental principles. References to maliciousanimal magnetism which fill a large place in the earlier editions, arealmost wholly wanting in the last, and there has been a decided progresstoward a relative simplicity of statements. The book is doubtless muchin debt to Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, Mr. Wiggins, who brought to therevision of Mrs. Eddy's writings a conscientious fidelity. One needs tostand a good ways back from the book itself in order at all to get anybalanced view of its philosophy but, so seen, its fundamentals arealmost unexpectedly simple. 

_Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System ofHealing; General Conditions Which Have Lent it Power_

Christian Science is offered as a philosophy, a theology, a religion anda method for the practical conduct of life and it needs to be consideredunder each of these four heads. It demands also for any properunderstanding of it the backgrounds of Mrs. Eddy's peculiar temperamentand checkered history. It is a growth. For her fundamentals Mrs. Eddyis, beyond reasonable debate, in debt to Quimby and in some waysQuimby's original insights have suffered at her hands. None the less, inits final form "Science and Health" is what Mrs. Eddy has made it and itis what it is because she was what she was. She shared with her owngeneration an absorbing interest in fundamental theological problems. She inherited a religion which has reduced the whole of life to rigidand on the whole too narrow theological formulæ. She was not able to fither experience into the formula which her faith supplied and yet, on theother hand, her faith exercised a controlling influence over her life. She was in a small and pathetic way a kind of nineteenth century Jobgrappling with the old, old question given sin and, above all, pain andsuffering to find God. She could not adjust either Divine love or a justDivine sovereignty to what she herself had been called upon to bear. Anatural tendency toward the occult and the desperate willingness of thehopelessly sick to try anything which promises a cure, led her in manydirections. So much her biography explains. 

Quimby was the first teacher she found whose system seemed to offer anykey at all to the intellectual and spiritual puzzle in which she foundherself and when his system seemed to be proved for her by her recoveryfrom a chronic abnormal state, she thereafter followed and elaboratedwhat he suggested. Here a certain natural shrewdness and ingenuity ofmind stood her in good stead. She was helped by her own ignorances andlimitations. If she had been a trained thinker, familiar with a widerange of philosophic speculation, she would never have dared write sodogmatically; if she had been a great philosopher with the philosopher'sinclusive vision, she would never have dared build so much onfoundations so narrow. 

Mrs. Eddy was, unconsciously to herself, a type. She thought and feltfor multitudes of perplexed people unable to reconcile the more tryingexperiences of life with what faith they had in the love and goodness ofGod, unable on the other side to find the love and goodness of God inthe wide sweep of law and the orderly sequence of cause and effect, andincapable under any circumstances of the patient analysis needed totrace to all their sources the threads of their strangely mingled websof life; impressionable folk under the spell of words; speculative; atonce credulous and skeptical; intellectually alert enough to want to dotheir own thinking and not intellectually disciplined enough to do itwell; persuaded that the Bible has both a message and authority andunable to find in their traditional interpretation of it either asatisfying message or an adequately directing authority; impatient ofdiscipline and pathetically eager for some short cut to happiness andwell-being. In a very signal way Mrs. Eddy has spoken and written forthis type particularly in American life. Her very style a liability asit is, when tested by either logic or the accepted standards of goodwriting, has, nevertheless, been an asset with those who have made hertheir prophetess. 

The secret of Mrs. Eddy's power and the power of her system after her ismost largely in her essential intellectual and spiritual kinship withsuch a temper and intellectual status as this, but she possessed also areal measure of creative capacity, a marked reach of speculative power, rare shrewdness and a masterful temper. Mrs. Eddy believed herself tohave found her system in the Old and New Testaments--but she did not. She gradually built it up out of the suggestions which had been givenher to begin with; she gave it colour and direction from her ownexperiences; she proved it to her own satisfaction in the healings whichseemed to result from it, then fitted it all as best she could into theframework of her inherited Christian faith and read its meanings backinto the Scriptures. It is a pseudo-philosophy pseudo-Christianized (ifone may use the word) by a curious combination of ingenuity, devotion, main strength and even awkwardness. And though Christian Science iscarrying on to-day as a religion rather than as either a philosophy or asystem of healing, it will stand or fall on the intellectual side as aphilosophy and not as a religion. 

_The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science_

It is professedly an idealistic monism based on carefully selected factsand depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience ofthose who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy noreality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only onereality and that is God. For a definition of God she offers onlysynonyms and affirmations though here perhaps she follows only the usualprocedure of theology. God is divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind--and all these capitalized, for it makes a vast differencein the philosophy of Christian Science whether such familiar words asthese are spelled with a capital letter or not. It would be possiblefrom Mrs. Eddy's own words to pretty effectually prove what has beenmore than once claimed: that Christian Science does not offer a personalGod, but all our terminology in this region is necessarily somewhatloose, though hers is excessively so. Some of her definitions of God areas personal as the Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles. The writer believes, however, after such dispassionate consideration ofthe philosophy of Christian Science as he is able to give, that it wouldmake absolutely no difference in its philosophic basis whether God wereconceived as a person or not. If the God of Christian Science be takenmerely as the exaltation of an abstract idealism or a philosophicAbsolute everything would be secured which is otherwise secured. 

Up to a certain point Christian Science marches with other idealisticsystems. From Plato down we have had philosophers a plenty, who havesought to build for us a universe whose only realities are mind and itsattributes, or perhaps more technically, consciousness and its content. It is truly a difficult enough matter to relate the world without andthe world within, once we begin thinking about it (though happily and inthe practical conduct of life this is not so hard as the philosophersmake out, otherwise we should be in a hopeless state), and it is naturalenough for one type of mind to simplify the problem by making the worldwithin the only world. Nor have there been wanting those who have soughtto reduce everything to a single reality whether matter or mind, andever since we have had theology at all a perplexed humanity has beenseeking to reconcile the goodness and the power of God with the sin andsorrow of our troubled world. 

But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this greatfellowship of dreamers and philosophers and takes its own line. Itaffirms consciousness and its content to be the only reality; it affirmsthe divine Mind to be the ultimate and all-conditioning reality; itaffirms love and goodness to be the ultimate qualities of the divineMind, but it meets the problem of sin and evil by denying them anyreality at all. (Here it is in more or less accord with certain forms ofmysticism. ) But even as Christian Science cuts this Gordian knot itcreates for itself another set of difficulties and involves itself inthose contradictions which will eventually be the undoing of it as aphilosophy. 

_It Undertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil. Contrasted Solutions_

What Christian Science is seeking is an ideal order with a content ofunqualified good and it secures this by denying the reality of everyaspect of experience which either challenges or contradicts its ownidealism. What is distinctive, then, in Christian Science is not itsaffirmations but its denials. All systems of philosophic idealism facepractically the same problem and offer various solutions. They mostcommonly resolve evil of every sort--and evil is here used in so wide away as to include sin and pain and sorrow--into an ultimate good. 

Evil is thus an "unripe good, " one stage in a process of evolutionwhich, when it has had its perfect and all-transforming way, will revealboth moral and physical evil to have been no evil at all but simplyaspects of life, trying enough at the time and puzzling enough whentaken by themselves, but having their own distinct and contributoryvalue when considered in their relation to the final whole. Such anapproach as this does not in any wise diminish for the individual eitherthe reality of pain or the unhappy consequences of sin, but it does askhim to judge the wisdom and love of God not by their passing phases butby their outcome in the wealth and worth of character. 

Robert Browning sang this sturdily through a long generation riding downits difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism andsubduing argument to lyric passion. 

 "The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. 

 "And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized? Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"

Others affirm the self-limitation of God. [30] In His respect for thathuman freedom which is the basis of self-regulated personal action andtherefore an essential condition of character, He arrests Himself, as itwere, upon the threshold of human personality and commits His childrento a moral struggle justifying the inevitable incidents of moral defeatby the greatness of the ends to be attained. A vast deal of what we callevil--broadening evil to include not only moral defeat but also pain--iseither a consequence or a by-product of what Henry Churchill King callsthe fight for character. Such a solution as this is consistent with thelove of God and the moral order; whether it is consistent with athoroughgoing monism or not is another question. William James doubtedit and so frankly adopted Pluralism--which is perhaps just a way ofsaying that we cannot reconcile the contending forces in our world orderwith one over-all-controlling power--as his solution of the problem. 

[Footnote 30: Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive SpiritualMonism and Christian Theism. ]

Josiah Royce has valiantly maintained, through long and subtle argument, the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "Allfinite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of viewthe Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anythingthat can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in itsentirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayingsare the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion. "[31] Hefinds the root of evil in the dissatisfaction of the finite will--adissatisfaction which on the other hand is the secret of the eventualtriumph of good. 

[Footnote 31: "The World and the Individual, " Royce, Vol. II, Chap. 9--passim. ]

We suffer also through our involution with "the interests and ideals ofvast realms of other conscious and finite lives whose dissatisfactionsbecome part of each individual man's life when the man concerned cannotat present see how or why his own ideals are such as to make thesedissatisfactions his fate. " We suffer also through our associations withnature, none the less "this very presence of evil in the temporal orderis the condition of the perfection of the eternal order. " He dismissesdefinitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of themystic that an "experience of evil is an experience of unreality . .. Anillusion, a dream, a deceit" and concludes: "In brief, then, nowhere inTime is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of theEternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring oftemporal joys, the consciousness that makes us delight to share theworld's grave glories and to take part in its divine sorrows, --sure thatthese sorrows are the means of the eternal triumph, and that theseglories are the treasures of the house of God. When once this comfortcomes home to us, we can run and not be weary, and walk and not faint. For our temporal life is the very expression of the eternal triumph. "

One may gravely question whether philosophy has ever so completely madeout its case as Professor Royce thinks. He is affirming as the reasonedconclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough torecognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His loveand goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion ofpresent sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growingthrough pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a realcontribution to character and of so rising above sin as to makepenitence and confession and the struggle for good and the achievementof it also a contribution to character. So St. Paul assures us that allthings work together for good for those that love God. "Thewillingness, " says Hocking, "to confront every evil, in ourselves andoutside ourselves, with the blunt, factual conscience of Science;willingness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the blemish;this kind of integrity can never be dispensed with in any optimisticprogram. "[32]

[Footnote 32: "The Meaning of God in Human Experience, " p. 175. ]

Sir Henry Jones takes the same line. "The first requisite for thesolution of the contradiction between the demand of religion for theperfection of God, and therefore the final and complete victory of thegood in the other, is the honest admission that the contradiction isthere, and inevitable; though possibly, like other contradictions, it isthere only to be solved. "[33]

[Footnote 33: "A Faith that Enquires, " p. 45. ]

_The Divine Mind and Mortal Mind_

Christian Science solves this problem, as has been said, by denying thereality of evil, but since we have an abundance of testimony to pain andsickness, Mrs. Eddy goes a step farther. She denies the reality of thetestimony of the senses wherever pain and sickness are concerned. [34](Mrs. Eddy's denial of the reality of sin is hardly parallel to herdenial of the reality of physical ills. ) And here the word comes inwhich is made to carry a heavier load than any one poor word was everburdened with before. All that is involved in the recognition ofphysical ills and indeed all that is involved in the recognition of thematerial side of existence is error. (Once fairly on her road Mrs. Eddymakes a clean sweep of whatever stands in her way. ) What one may callthe whole shadowed side of experience is not only ignored, it is deniedand yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is, in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind. Mortal mind, she says, "is nothing claiming to be something; mythology;error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; . .. Thatwhich neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the spiritualsense; sin; sickness; death. "[35]

[Footnote 34: "Science and Health, " last edition, pp. 108, 120, 293, 488. ]

[Footnote 35: _Ibid. _, p. 591. ]

Mortal mind is that side of us which accepts our entanglement in thefacts and forces of the world order and upon mortal mind so vaguelyconceived Mrs. Eddy throws the whole burden of responsibility for allthe unhappy aspects of experience and conditioning circumstances. Shegives it a surprising range of creative power. It has createdeverything Mrs. Eddy does not like or believe in. In other words, thereis not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other thereality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy thefirst reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal realitywhich we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escapeat any moment by simply shifting the center of our creative idealism. Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear throughendless repetition and some analysis, but she never for a momentaccounts for its existence. It is no creation of what she calls thedivine Mind; indeed she says in substance that God is not conscious ofit at all; it lies entirely outside the range of His knowledge. (Page243. )

God is Good. Since He is good He cannot have created nor be responsiblefor, nor even recognize pain, sorrow or suffering. "The Divine Mindcannot suffer" (page 108, also page 335), "is not responsible forphysical and moral disasters" (page 119). God did not create matter (theFather mind is not the father of matter) (page 257), for matter meanspain and death, nor do such things as these belong in any way to theorder of the Divine Mind. They have no admitted reality in Mrs. Eddy'sscheme of a true idealism. Man is "God's spiritual idea" and since hebelongs by right to an order in which there is neither sin nor sorrownor death, such things as these have no reality for him save as headmits them. What really admits them is mortal mind, the agent ofanother system of Belief in which humanity has in some way, which isnever really explained, become entangled, and we may apparently escapefrom the one order to the other simply by a change in our beliefs. Forall the shadowed side of life has reality only as we accept or believein it; directly we cease to believe in it or deny it it ceases to be. 

It is, as near as one can make out, a myth, an illusion, whosebeginnings are lost in obscurity and which, for the want of therevelation vouchsafed through her, has been continued from age to age bythe untaught or the misled. For example, Arsenic is not a poison, so weare told again and again. It is only a poison because people think itis;[36] it began to be a poison only because people thought it was, itcontinues to be a poison only because the majority of people think it isnow and, such is the subtle and far-reaching influence of mind uponmind, it will continue to be a poison as long as any one continues tobelieve it to be. Directly we all believe that Arsenic is not a poisonit will be no poison. Poisons, that is, are the creation of mortal mind. Pain is pain only through the same mistaken belief in the reality of it. "By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bindmortals to sickness, sin and death. " And so on at great length andalmost endless repetition. 

[Footnote 36: Page 178. ]

_The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's System_

Since matter conditions us who were born to be unconditioned and sincematter is apparently the root of so many ills, the seat of so manypains, matter goes with the rest. Mrs. Eddy is not always consistent inher consideration of matter; sometimes she confines herself to sayingthat there is neither sensation nor life in matter--which may be trueenough save as matter both affords the material for sensation andconditions its forms, which is an immense qualification, --but again andagain she calls matter an illusion. Consistently the laws of physics andchemistry should disappear with the laws of hygiene and medicine, butMrs. Eddy does not go so far as that though it would be difficult tofind a logical stopping place once you have taken this line. Mortal mindis apparently the source of all these illusions. 

Mrs. Eddy's disposal of matter, along with her constant return to itsmisleading mastery in experience is an outstanding aspect of her book. The writer is inclined to believe that Mrs. Eddy's formula: "There is. .. No matter in life and no life in matter, " is an echo of Tyndall'sfamous utterance--made about the time she was working with hersystem--that he found "in matter the promise and potency of all life. "There is surprisingly little reference in "Science and Health" tophilosophic or scientific sources. Cutter's physiology is quoted in someeditions--an old textbook which the writer remembers to have found amonghis mother's school books. There are a few references to popularastronomy, but in general for Mrs. Eddy modern science does not existexcept in the most general way as the erroneous expression of error andalways with a small "s" as against the capital "S" of her own system. Nor does she show any knowledge of other philosophic idealisms nor anyacquaintance with any solution of the problems she was facing save thecommonplaces of evangelical orthodoxy. "Science and Health" knowsnothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of themedical science of 1860 and 1870. 

But she cannot have been wholly uninfluenced--being a woman of an alertmind--by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, wasraging about a pretty crass and literal materialism, and her writingsprobably reflect--with a good deal of indirection--that controversy. Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwisepuzzling enough. She is, in her own fashion, the defender of anidealistic interpretation of reality and experience. Now all idealisticsystems have had to dispose of matter in some way. In general idealistsfind in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the materialwhich sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in everyway so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend hisposition plausibly in assuming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects, really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistencyof it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this byassuming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, insolution, in some larger system of thought which really supplies for usour environment and if he be both devout and consistent he calls thisthe thought God. [37] In this way he solves his problem--at least to hisown satisfaction--and even supplies a basis for Theistic faith. But hedoes not deny the working reality of his so-called material experiencesnor does he, like Mrs. Eddy, accept one aspect of this experience anddeny the other. This is philosophically impossible. 

[Footnote 37: So Royce in "The World and the Individual. "]

A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or otherof the self-revelation of God. It may be hard pressed to discover justhow the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. (That is theessential difficulty in all Creationism. ) But something must be assumedto get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much inthat resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuousand imponderable forms--which is the tendency of modern science--torender this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination thanperhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements inmatter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strainin a magnetic field and thus the

 "Cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which is inherent, "

become the projection into sensibly apprehended form of the flux of aninfinite and eternal energy, it is not hard to define that energy interms of a divine will. Indeed it is hard not to do just that. But thereis no place in such a resolution as this for the conclusions of "Scienceand Health. "

Or we may accept in one form or another a dualism in which thepractical mind is generally content to rest. According to this point ofview we have to do with a reality which may be known under two aspects. It is the chemical action and interaction of elements--and the mindwhich measures and combines them; it is the physical action andinteraction of force--and the mind which directs the process. Biologically "the living creature gives an account of itself in twoways. It can know itself as something extended and intricately built up, burning away, moving, throbbing; it can also know itself as the seat ofsensation, perceptions, feelings, wishes, thoughts. But there is not oneprocess, thinking, and another process, cerebral metabolism (vitalprocesses in nerve-cells); there is a psycho-physical life--a realitywhich we know under two aspects. Cerebral control and mental activityare, on this view, different aspects of one natural occurrence. What wehave to do with is the unified life of a psycho-physical being, abody-mind or mind-body. "[38] In short there is no philosophy or scienceoutside the covers of her own book to which Mrs. Eddy may turn forsupport and though this does not prove the case against her--she mightbe right and the whole disciplined thought of her time be wrong--thislatter supposition is so improbable as to rule it out of court. 

[Footnote 38: J. A. Thomson, "The Outline of Science, " p. 548. ]

The materialism against which she contends has ceased to exist. Thematter which she denies does not exist in the sense of her denial. Therewas, even when she was writing, a line of which she was apparentlywholly ignorant which has since been immensely developed, and of allthis there is naturally no reflection at all in her work. It is morehopelessly out of touch with the laborious and strongly establishedconclusions of modern thought in every field than the first chapters ofGenesis for there one may, at least, substitute the science of to-dayfor the science of 3, 000 years ago and still retain the enduringinsights of the faith then voiced, but there is no possibleaccommodation of "Science and Health" to either the science or thephilosophy of the twentieth century. It must be left to a consistentChristian Scientist to reconcile his gospel with the freer movements ofthe world of which he is still a citizen--though perhaps this also mightbe urged against a deal of contemporaneous Christian faith--but it isall an arresting testimony to the power of the human mind to organizeitself in compartments between which there is no communication. 

_Experience and Life_

Beyond all this is the fact of which "Science and Health" takes noaccount--the conditioning of conscious life and working experience byits material environment however conceived. This is true of every phaseof life and all our later emphasis upon the power of the mind in onedirection and another to escape this conditioning scarcely affects themassive reality of it. Christian Science makes no attempt at all toescape this--save in the region of physical health--or else it providesan alibi in the phrase, "I have not demonstrated in that region yet. "But it does not thus escape the limitation imposed upon us all and ifwe may dare for a moment to be dogmatic, it never will. At the best welive in a give and take and if, through discipline and wideningknowledge, we may push back a little the frontiers which limit us, andassert the supremacy of soul over the material with which it is sointimately associated, we do even this slowly and at great cost andalways in conformity with the laws of the matter we master. 

There is a body of evidence here which can no more be ignored thangravitation, and we best dispose of association of personality with thematerial fabric of the body and the world of which it is a part, not bydenying their mutual interdependence but by discovering therein the lawsand methods of an infinite wisdom. Here are ministries through which wecome to consciousness of ourselves, here are materials upon which weexercise our power, here are realities which hold us fast to normal andintelligible lives, here are masters whose rule is kind and servantswhose obediences empower us. They condition our happinesses as well asour unhappinesses and supply for us the strings of that harp of thesenses upon which the music of life is played. Life really gains itsspiritual content through the action and interaction of the aspiringself upon its environment--whether that environment be intimate as theprotest of a disturbed bodily cell or remote as Orion and thePleiades. [39] The very words which Mrs. Eddy uses would be idle if thiswere not so and though a thoroughgoing defender of her system may readinto its lines a permission for all this, the fundamentals of her systemdeny it. 

[Footnote 39: "And I am inclined to think that the error of forgettingthat spirit in order to be real or that principles, whether of morality, religion or knowledge, must be exemplified in temporal facts, is a noless disastrous error than that of the sciences which have not learnedthat the natural, when all the meaning of it is set free, blossoms intothe spiritual like the tree into flower. Religion and philosophy andscience also have yet to learn more fully that all which can possiblyconcern man, occupy his intelligence or engage his will, lies at thepoint of intersection of the natural and spiritual. "--"A Faith thatEnquires, " p. 27. ]

Christian Science breaks down both philosophically and practically justhere. It is none the less a dualism because it denies that it is. Itconfronts not one but two ranges of reality; it gains nothing by makingmortal mind the villain in the play. It is compelled to admit theexistence of the reality which it denies, even in the fact of denyingit. What we deny exists for us--we could not otherwise deny it. Roycehas put all this clearly, strongly, finally. "The mystic first deniesthat evil is real. He is asked why, then, evil seems to exist. Hereplies that this is our finite error. The finite error itself hereuponbecomes, as the source of all our woes, an evil. But no evil is real, hence no error can be real, hence we do not really err even if wesuppose that evil is real. Here we return to our starting point andcould only hope to escape by asserting that it is an error to assertthat we really err or that we really believe error to be real, and witha process thus begun there is indeed no end, nor at any stage in thisprocess is there consistency. "[40] All this is subtle enough, but if weare to make our world by thinking and unthinking it, all this isunescapably true. 

[Footnote 40: "The World and the Individual, " Vol. II, p. 394. ]

When, moreover, you have reduced one range of experience to illusionthere is absolutely nothing to save the rest. If evil is error and errorevil and the belief that evil is an illusion is itself an illusion whatis there to guarantee the reality of good? The sword with which Mrs. Eddy cut the knot of the problem of evil is two-edged. If the optimistdenies evil for the sake of good and points for proof to the solidcoherency of the happier side of life, the pessimist may as justly denygood for the sake of evil and point for proof to the solid coherency ofthe sadder side of life; he will have no trouble in finding his facts. If sickness is a dream then health is a dream as well. Once we havetaken illusion for a guide there is no stopping until everything isillusion. The Eastern mystic who went this road long before Mrs. Eddyand who thought it through with a searching subtleness of which she wasincapable, reached the only logical conclusion. All experience isillusion, entire detachment from action is the only wisdom, andabsorption in an unconscious something which only escapes being nothingis our appointed destiny:

 "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, And our little life Is rounded with a sleep. "

_Sense-Testimony Cannot Be Accepted for Health and Denied for Sickness_

Christian Science, then, is not monism, it is rather a dualism; itconfronts not one but two ranges of reality and it is compelled to admitthe existence of the reality which it denies, even the fact of denyingit, for it is a philosophical axiom that what we deny exists for us--wecould not otherwise deny it. Denial is the recognition of reality justas much as affirmation. To repeat, it is this continuous interwovenprocess of trying to reconcile the one-sided idealism of ChristianScience with the necessity of its argument and the facts of life whichgives to "Science and Health" what one may call its strangely bifocalcharacter, though indeed this is a somewhat misleading figure. One hasthe same experience in reading the book that one has in trying to readthrough glasses which are out of focus; you are always just seeing andjust missing because Mrs. Eddy herself is always just seeing and justmissing a really great truth. 

This fundamental inconsistency penetrates the whole system even down toits practical applications. Christian Science denies the testimony ofthe senses as to sickness and yet accepts them as to health. It goesfurther than this, it accepts the testimony of the senses of otherpeople--physicians, for example, in accepting their diagnosis. Theedition of "Science and Health" published in 1918 offers in chaptereighteen a hundred pages of testimonials sent in by those who have invarious ways been helped by their faith. These letters are shot throughand through with a recognition of the testimony of the senses which noexplanation can possibly explain away. "I was afflicted with a fibroidtumour which weighed not less than fifty pounds, attended by acontinuous hemorrhage for eleven years. " If the senses have any languageat all, this is their language. A growth cannot be known as a fibroidtumour without sense testimony, nor its weight estimated without sensetestimony, nor a continuous hemorrhage be recorded, or its cessationknown without sense testimony, nor can epilepsy be diagnosed, norbilious attacks recognized without sense testimony. On page 606 agrateful disciple bears witness to the healing of a broken arm, testimony to said healing being demonstrated by a visit to a physician'soffice "where they were experimenting with an X-ray machine. The doctorpointed out the place as being slightly thicker at that part, like apiece of steel that had been welded. " In other words, Christian Sciencecannot make out its case without the recognition of the veracity of asense testimony, whose truth its philosophy denies. 

Mrs. Eddy seems to dismiss all this in one brief paragraph. "Is a mansick if the material senses indicate that he is in good health? No, formatter can make no conditions for man. And is he well if the senses sayhe is sick? Yes, he is well in Science, in which health is normal anddisease is abnormal. "[41] If Mrs. Eddy and her followers believe sospecious a statement as that, to set them free from an inconsistencywhich is central in their whole contention, they are welcome to theirbelief, but the inconsistency still remains. You can go far by usingwords in a Pickwickian sense but there is a limit. A consistent idealismis philosophically possible, but it must be a far more inclusive anddeeply reasoned idealism than Christian Science. The most thoroughgoingidealisms have accepted the testimony of the senses as a part of thenecessary conduct of life as now conditioned. Anything else would reduceus to unspeakable confusion, empty experience of its content, dissolveall the contacts of life and halt us in our tracks for we cannot take astep safely without the testimony of the senses and any scheme of thingswhich seeks to distinguish between the varying validities of sensetestimony, accepting only the evidence of the senses for health andwell-being and denying the dependability of whatever else they register, is simply an immense caprice which breaks down under any examination. 

[Footnote 41: Page 120. It is only fair to say that Mrs. Eddy ishampered by her own want of clear statement. The phrase (so often usedin "Science and Health") "in Science" is probably in her mind equivalentto "in the ideal order" and if Mrs. Eddy had clearly seen and clearlystated what she is groping for: that the whole shadowed side of lifebelongs to our present world of divided powers and warring forces andunfinished enterprises, that God has something better for His childrentoward which we are being led through the discipline of experience andthat we may therefore seek to conceive and affirm this ideal order andbecome its citizens in body, mind and soul, she would have escaped aperfect web of contradiction and been in line not only with the greatphilosophies but with historic Christian faith. But then ChristianScience would not be Christian Science. ]

_The Inescapable Reality of Shadowed Experience_

Evil does not cease to be because it is denied. The acceptance of sensetestimony is just as necessary in the region of pain and sickness as indriving a motorcar down a crowded street and the hypothesis of amisleading mortal mind, instead of explaining everything, demands itselfan explanation. What Mrs. Eddy calls mortal mind is only the registry ofthe dearly bought experience of the race. We began only with the powerto feel, to struggle, to will and to think. We have been blind enoughand stupid enough but we are, after all, not unteachable and out of ourexperience and our reflections we have created the whole splendid anddependable body of human knowledge. What we know about pain is itselfthe outcome of all the suffering of our kind. We began with no developedphilosophy nor any presuppositions about anything. Experience reflectsencompassing realities which we are able to escape only as we make theirlaws our ministers. We did not give fire the power to burn, wediscovered that only in the school of the touch of flame. We did notgive edged steel the power to cut, we found that out through death andbleeding wounds. We did not give to poisons their deadly power, ourattitude toward them is simply the outcome of our experience with them. 

Conditioned as we are by those laws and forces with which this presentexistence of ours is in innumerable ways inextricably interwoven, ourtested and sifted beliefs are only the outcome of an action andinteraction of recipient or creative personality upon its environmentold as human consciousness, and if in all this we have become persuadedof pain and suffering and shadowed experience, it is only because theseare as real as any elements in experience can possibly be. To attemptto write them out or deny them out or juggle them out in any kind of waysave in bravely meeting them and humbly being taught by them and in thefull resource of disciplined power getting free from them by removingthe causes which create them, is to cheat ourselves with words, loseourselves in shadows which we mistake for light and even if in someregions we seem to succeed it is only at the cost of what is more bitterthan pain and more deadly than wounds--the loss of mental and spiritualintegrity. This is a price too great to pay for any mere healing. 

VI

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A THEOLOGY

"Science and Health" is offered, among other things, as a key to theScriptures, and along with her interpretation of both the Old and theNew Testaments in terms of her peculiar philosophy Mrs. Eddy rewritesthe great articles of the Christian creeds. A careful student of Mrs. Eddy's mental processes is able in this region to understand them betterthan she understood them herself. She had, to begin with, an inheritedreverence for the Bible as an authority for life and she shared withmultitudes of others a difficulty to which reference has already beenmore than once made. For what one may call the typical Protestantconsciousness the Bible is the final revelation of God, governing, ifonly we can come to understand it, both our faith and our conduct oflife, but the want of a true understanding of it and, above all, theburdening of it with an inherited tradition has clouded its light formultitudes of devout souls. 

_Science and Health Offered as a Key to the Scriptures_

Such as these have been almost pathetically eager to accept anyinterpretation, no matter how capricious, which seemed to read anintelligible meaning into its difficult passages, or reconcile itscontradictions, or make it a more practical guide in the conduct oflife. Any cult or theory, therefore, which can seem to secure for itselfthe authority of the Bible has obtained directly an immensereinforcement in its appeal to the devout and the perplexed, and Mrs. Eddy has taken full advantage of this. Her book is veined with Scripturereferences; two of her chapters are expositions of Biblical books(Genesis and Revelation); and other chapters deal with great doctrinesof the Church. 

_It Ignores All Recognized Canons of Biblical Interpretation. Illustrations_

Mrs. Eddy naturally sought the authority for her philosophy between thecovers of the Scriptures. Beyond debate her teachings have carried muchfarther than they otherwise would, in that she claims for them aScriptural basis, and they must be examined in that light. Now there arecertain sound and universally recognized rules governing the scholarlyapproach to the Old and New Testaments. Words must be taken in theirplain sense; they must be understood in their relation to their context. A book is to be studied also in the light of its history; the time andplace and purpose of its composition, as far as these are known, must beconsidered; no changes made in the text save through criticalemendation, nor any translations offered not supported by acceptedtexts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. Bysuch plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will notbear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblicalinterpretation on almost every page. [42]

[Footnote 42: This is a brief--and a Christian Scientist may protest--asummary dismissal of the claim of "Science and Health" to be a "key tothe Scriptures. " But nothing is gained--save of the unnecessarylengthening of this chapter--in going into a detailed examination of hermethod and conclusions. She has insight, imagination, boundlessallegorical resource, but the whole Bible beneath her touch becomes aplastic material to be subdued to her peculiar purpose by omissions, read-in meanings and the substantial and constant disregard of plainmeanings. To the student the whole matter is important only as revealingthe confusion of the popular mind which receives such a method asauthoritative. ]

Her method is wholly allegorical and the results achieved areconditioned only by the ingenuity of the commentator. It would require abody of citation from the pages of "Science and Health, " not possiblehere, to follow through Mrs. Eddy's peculiar exegesis. One needs only toopen the book at random for outstanding illustrations. For example, Genesis 1:6, "And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of thewaters and let it divide the waters from the waters. " The word"firmament" has its own well established connotation gathered from acareful study of all its uses. We can no more understand the earlierchapters of Genesis without an understanding of Hebrew cosmogony than wecan understand Dante without a knowledge of medieval cosmogony. But, given this knowledge which is the common possession of all soundscholarship, we can at least understand what the passage means, eventhough we have long left behind us the naïve conception of the vaultedskies to which it refers. 

All this is a commonplace not worth repeating at the cost of the whitepaper upon which it is printed, save as the ignoring of it leads to suchan interpretation of the passage as that which Mrs. Eddy offers:"spiritual understanding by which human conception material mind isseparated from Truth is the firmament. The Divine Mind, not matter, creates all identities and they are forms of Mind, the ideas of Spiritapparent only as Mind, never as mindless matter nor the so-calledmaterial senses" (page 505). Comment is not only difficult butimpossible in the face of a method like this. If such an interpretationwere an exception it might seem the unfair use of a hypercritical temperto quote this particular expression of Mrs. Eddy's mind. But her wholetreatment of Scripture suffers from the same method. 

Everything means something else. The Ark is "the idea, or reflection oftruth, proved to be as immortal as its Principle. " Babel is"self-destroying error"; baptism is "submergence in Spirit"; Canaan is"a sensuous belief"; Dan (Jacob's son) is "animal magnetism"; the doveis "a symbol of divine Science"; the earth is "a type of eternity andimmortality"; the river Euphrates is "divine Science encompassing theuniverse and man"; evening "the mistiness of mortal thought"; flesh "anerror, a physical belief"; Ham (Noah's son) is "corporeal belief";Jerusalem "mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporealsenses"; night, "darkness; doubt; fear"; a Pharisee, "corporeal andsensuous belief"; river is "a channel of thought"; a rock is "aspiritual foundation"; sheep are "innocence"; a sword "the idea ofTruth. "[43]

[Footnote 43: Glossary, p. 579--passim. ]

Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to make such textual modifications ofpassages as suit her purpose and even when she is not dealing with hertexts in such ways as these, she is constantly citing for her proofspassages which cannot by any recognized canon of interpretation possiblybe made to mean what she says they mean. Beneath her touch simple thingsbecome vague, the Psalms lose their haunting beauty, even the Lord'sPrayer takes a form which we may reverently believe the author of itwould not recognize. 

 "Our Father: Mother God, all harmonious, Adorable One, Thy kingdom is come; Thou art ever present. Enable us to know--as in heaven, so on earth--God is omnipotent, supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections; and love is reflected in love; and God leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin, disease and death. For God is Infinite, all Power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all and All. "

_Its Conception of God_

It was quite as inevitable that she should undertake to fit herspeculations into the fabric of the theology in which she and most ofher followers had been trained, as that she should try to secure for herspeculation the weight of the authority of the Bible. She would have totake for her point of departure the centrality of Christ, theoutstanding Christian doctrines, markedly the Incarnation and theAtonement and she would need somehow to dispose of the Sacraments. Allthis is inevitably implied in the persistent designation of her wholesystem as a Christian system. 

The chapter headings in "Science and Health" and the sequence ofchapters are the key to the movement of her mind; they are determined byher association of interests. Marriage is on the same level with Prayer, Atonement and the Eucharist, and Animal Magnetism with Science, Theologyand Medicine. It is hard to know where to begin in so confused a region. She is handicapped, to begin with, by the rigidity of her idealism andactually by her limitation both of the power and personality of God. This statement would probably be as sharply contradicted by Mrs. Eddy'sapologists as anything in this study, but it is not hastily made. Philosophically He is for Mrs. Eddy only an exalted ideality intorelation with which we may think ourselves by a change in our system ofbelief. Actually, as we shall see, this conception yields to emotionaland devotional needs--it is bound to--but in theory it is unyielding. 

Now the accepted Christian conception of God is entirely different. Boththe Old and New Testaments conceive a God who is lovingly and justlyconscious of all our need, who is constantly drawing near to us inmanifold appeals and approaches and who has, above all, in theIncarnation made a supreme and saving approach to humanity. He is nomore rigid than love is rigid; His attitude toward us, His children, changes as the attitude of a father toward the changing tempers of achild. Now all this may be true or it may be only the dream of ourstrangely sensitive personalities, but whether it be true or not, it isthe Christian conception and any denial of this or any radicallydifferent substitution for it cannot call itself Christian save as itwrites into the word Christian connotations to which it has heretoforebeen utterly strange. 

_Mrs. Eddy's Interpretation of Jesus Christ_

Mrs. Eddy begins, therefore, with the handicap of a philosophy which canbe adjusted to Christian theology only through fundamental modificationsof that theology. It is hard to systematize the result. Mrs. Eddydistinguishes between Jesus and Christ. Her conception of Jesus isreasonably clear whether it be historically true or not, but herconception of the Christ is vague and fluctuating. Jesus was apparentlythe first Christian Scientist, anticipating, though not completely, itsphilosophy and demonstrating its practices. His teachings are sointerpreted as to be made to yield a Christian Science content. When Heurged the commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" what Hereally meant was, "Thou shalt have no belief of Life as mortal; thoushalt not know evil, for there is one Life. "[44] "He proved by His deedsthat Christian Science destroys sickness, sin and death. Our Mastertaught no mere theory, doctrine or belief; it was the divine Principleof all real being which He taught and practiced. "[45] "He taught Hisfollowers the healing power of Truth and Love"[46] and "the proofs ofTruth, Life and Love which Jesus gave by casting out error and healingthe sick, completed His earthly mission. "[47] "The truth taught by Jesusthe elders scoffed at because it demanded more than they were willing topractice. "[48] They, therefore, crucified Him and He seemed to die, butHe did not. Apparently He was not dead when He was entombed and Histhree days in the tomb gave Him "a refuge from His foes, a place inwhich to solve the great problem of being. " In other words Hedemonstrated His own healing in the tomb. "He met and mastered, on thebasis of Christian Science, the power of mind over matter, all theclaims of medicine, surgery and hygiene. He took no drugs to allayinflammation; He did not depend upon food or pure air to resuscitatewasted energies; He did not require the skill of a surgeon to heal thetorn palms and bind up the wounded side and lacerated feet, that Hemight use those hands to remove the napkin and winding sheet and that Hemight employ His feet as before. "[49]

[Footnote 44: Page 19. All citations from last edition. ]

[Footnote 45: Page 26. ]

[Footnote 46: Page 31. ]

[Footnote 47: Page 41. ]

[Footnote 48: Page 41. ]

[Footnote 49: Page 44. ]

"His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while He was hidden in thesepulchre, whereas He was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tombthe power of the spirit to overrule mortal, material sense. " Hisascension was a final demonstration in which He "rose above the physicalknowledge of His disciples and the material senses saw Him no more. " Heattained this perfection of demonstration only gradually and He leftbehind Him an incomplete revelation which was to wait for its fullillumination for the coming of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Perhapsmore justly He left behind Him, according to Mrs. Eddy and herfollowers, a body of teaching which could not be clearly understooduntil she came to complete the revelation. At any rate, ChristianScience is really His second coming. 

_Christian Science His Second Coming_

In an advertisement printed in the New York _Tribune_ on January 23, 1921, Augusta E. Stetson says: "Christ in Christian Science is come tothe understanding of those who looked for His reappearing. " And ifcertain sentences which follow mean anything, they mean that, in thethought of Mrs. Eddy's followers, she completes what Jesus began andfulfills the prophecy of His reappearing. "Her earthly experience runsparallel with that of her Master; understood in a small degree only bythe few who faintly see and accept the truth, she stood during herearthly mission and now stands on the mount of spiritual illuminationtoward whose heights no feet but those of the blessed Master have sodirectly toiled, first in agony and finally, like Jesus Christ themasculine representative of the Fatherhood of God, she as the femininerepresentative of the motherhood of God, will appear in triumphantdemonstration of divine power and glory as the combined ideal man inGod's image and likeness. "

And, indeed, there are not wanting intimations in "Science and Health"which give to Mrs. Eddy a certainty in this region which Jesus Himselfdid not possess. He falters where she firmly trod. No need to dwellupon the significant omissions which such an interpretation of thehistoric Jesus as this demands. The immensely laborious and painstakingscholarship which has sought, perplexedly enough it must be confessed, to discover behind the Gospel narratives the fundamental facts andrealities of His life, is entirely ignored. Mrs. Eddy has no place forthe social aspects of the teachings of Christ, indeed His whole systemof ethic could be "blacked out"; as far as her teaching is concerned itwould make absolutely no difference. 

Mrs. Eddy distinguishes, in theory at least though there is noconsistency in her use of terms, between Jesus and the Christ. "Jesus isthe human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality ofJesus, the Christ" (page 473). "Jesus is the name of the man who, morethan all other men, has presented Christ, the true idea of God, healingthe sick and the sinning and destroying the power of death" (page 473). "In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teachingand practice of Christianity . .. But to reach His example and test itsunerring Science according to His rule, . .. A better understanding ofGod as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus, is required" (page 473). 

It is difficult enough to know just what this means, but as one standsfar enough back from it all it seems to reduce Jesus historically to thefirst outstanding Christian Science teacher and healer. "Jesusestablished what He said by demonstration, thus making His acts ofhigher importance than His words. He proved what He taught. This is theScience of Christianity. Jesus _proved_ the Principle, which heals thesick and casts out error, to be divine" (page 473). He is, therefore, historically of chiefest value as the demonstrator of Christian Science, the full philosophy of which apparently awaited a later revelation. 

"Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin throughChristian Science, and attributes all power to God" (page 473). "Heunveiled the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love" (page 38). TheChrist of Christian Science, then, is an ideal Truth, a spiritual idea, apparently an abstraction. But Mrs. Eddy is not consistent in her use ofthese two names. On one page Christ is "the spiritual idea of divineLove"; on the next page "we need Christ and Him crucified" (page 39), though how an ideal truth or a spiritual idea could possibly becrucified we are not told. In many of her passages Mrs. Eddy uses thefamiliar phrase, Jesus Christ, in apparently its ordinary connotations. 

_The Incarnation: Christian Theology and Christian Science Belong Reallyto Different Regions_

The Incarnation is disposed of in the same vague way. "Those instructedin Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that God isthe only author of man. The virgin mother conceived this idea of God andgave to her ideal the name of Jesus. "[50] "The illumination of Mary'sspiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth. The Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother withthe full recognition that being is Spirit. "[51] "Jesus was the offspringof Mary's self-conscious communion with God. "[52] Now all this isneither honest supernaturalism nor the honest acceptance of the normalmethods of birth. It is certainly not the equivalent of the Gospelaccount whether the Gospel account be accepted or rejected. To use aphrase which has come into use since "Science and Health" was written, this is a "smoke screen" under cover of which Mrs. Eddy escapes thenecessity of either accepting or denying the testimony of the Gospels. 

[Footnote 50: Page 29. ]

[Footnote 51: Page 29. ]

[Footnote 52: Page 30. ]

Something of this, one must confess, one may find in not a littlereligious teaching old and new, but it is doubtful if there is anywhereso outstanding an instance of what one may call the smoke screen methodin the consideration of the Incarnation, as in the passages just quoted. As a matter of fact all this is simply the attempt to fit the idealisticdualism, which is the real philosophic basis of Christian Science andwhich, in so far as it is capable of explanation at all, can be aseasily explained in two pages as two hundred, into the theology in whichMrs. Eddy was nurtured and which was a background common to both herselfand her disciples. Christian Science would carry far less weight in therace it is running if it frankly cut itself clear of a theology withwhich it has fundamentally no affinity. This indoctrination of anidealistic dualism with a content of Christian theology probablyheightens the appeal of the system to those who are most at home in anew faith as they discover there the familiar phrases of their olderfaith, but it weakens the fundamental Christian Science apologetic. Ithink, however, we ought justly to recognize this as simply aninevitable aspect in the transition of Christian Science from theorthodox faith and experience of historic Christianity to a faith andexperience of its own. 

Seen as a curious half-truth development made possible by a whole groupof forces in action at the end of the nineteenth century, ChristianScience is reasonably intelligible, but as a system of doctrine builtupon the hitherto accepted bases of Christian fact and teaching, it isnot intelligible at all and the long controversy between the Christiantheologian and the Christian Science lecturer would best be ended byrecognizing that they have so little in common as to make attack andcounter-attack a movement in two different dimensions. The one thingwhich they have in common is a certain set of words and phrases, butthese words and phrases have such entirely different meanings on the oneside and the other as to make the use of them hopelessly misleading. 

_The Atonement. The Cross of Christian Science and the Cross ofTheology_

There are passing references to the Cross in "Science and Health, " butthe word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs. Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised inthe preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Crossof Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and misunderstandings and afinal and terribly fierce method of criticism. One feels that mainly sheis thinking of her own cross as a misunderstood and abused woman and forsuch suggestion she prefers the Cup as a figure to the Cross. As for theAtonement "every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort forreform, every good thought and deed will help us to understand Jesus'Atonement for sin and aid its efficacy. "[53] "Wisdom and Love requiremany sacrifices of self to save us from sin. " All this seems to be inline with the moral theory of the atonement until we see that in such aline as this there is no recognition of the fact that again and again wesuffer and that largely for others, and when she adds that "Its [theatonement] scientific explanation is that suffering is an error ofsinful sense which Truth destroys, and that eventually both sin andsuffering will fall at the feet of everlasting love" (page 23), thosepassages cancel one another, for if suffering be "an error of sinfulsense" it is hard to see how any pang of it can help us to understandJesus' atonement unless His suffering be also "an error of sinfulsense, " and this is to reduce the atonement to a like error. 

[Footnote 53: Page 19. ]

In another connection Mrs. Eddy finds the efficacy of the Crucifixion"in the practical affection and goodness it demonstrated for mankind. "But this turns out to be nothing more than that the Crucifixion offersChrist a needed opportunity for the instruction of His disciples totriumph over the grave. But since in another connection we are told Henever died at all (chapter Atonement and Eucharist, paragraph "Jesus inthe tomb") even this dissolves into unreality. Moreover the "eternalChrist in His spiritual selfhood never suffered. "[54] Whichever road shetakes here Mrs. Eddy reaches an impasse. It ought to be said, in justiceto Mrs. Eddy, that her treatment of the atonement reflects thedifficulty she found in the theology in which she had been trained as agirl and that there are many true insights in her contentions. She wasat least seeking a vital and constructive interpretation and doubtlessher observations, confused as they are, have been for her followers areal way out of a real difficulty. Here, as in so many other regions, "Science and Health" is best understood by its backgrounds. 

[Footnote 54: A curious and far-off echo of early Docetism which also inits own way reduced Christ's suffering to a simple seeming to suffer. ]

As a matter of fact there is in Christian Science absolutely no soil inwhich to plant the Cross as the Cross is understood in Christiantheology. There is no place in Christian Science for vicariousatonement, whether by God or man; there is little place in ChristianScience for redemptive suffering; there is a rather narrow region inwhich suffering may be considered as instructive, a guide, perhaps, tolead us out of unhappy or shadowed regions into the regions of physicaland, maybe, spiritual and moral well-being, and to quench the love ofsin. [55] Mrs. Eddy sometimes speaks of Christ as the Saviour but if hersystem be pressed to a logical conclusion she must empty the word of allthe associations which it has hitherto had and make it simply theequivalent of a teacher or demonstrator. 

[Footnote 55: Page 36. But this is to recognize the reality ofsuffering. Mrs. Eddy is here on the threshold of a great truth--thatsuffering is an aspect of education--but she goes no further. ]

_Sin an Error of Mortal Mind_

Sin along with sickness and death are the projections of mortal error, the creations of mortal mind; sin, sickness and death are to beclassified as effects of error. Christ came "to destroy the belief ofsin. " All this is to root sin simply in the mind. No intimation at allhere of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements oflife; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life;no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays. Mrs. Eddy's sin is far too simple. There is, once more, a sound reasonfor that. Mrs. Eddy is twice-born, if you will, but the struggle fromwhich she finally emerged with whatever measure of victory she attainedwas not fought out with conscience as the field of battle, or in thefinal reconciliation of a divided self finding unity and peace on somehigh level. 

If Mrs. Eddy's true struggle was of the soul and not of complainingnerves she has left no record of it anywhere. It was rather the reactionof a speculative mind against the New England theology. Her experienceis strangely remote from the experience of Saul of Tarsus, or Augustine, or John Bunyan. This is not to deny that in the practical outcome ofChristian Science as evidenced in the life of its adherents there is nota very real power of helpful moral adjustment, but the secret of thatmust be sought in something else than either its philosophy or itstheology. Christian theologians themselves have been by no means agreedas to what sin really is. Under their touch it became too often atheological abstraction rather than entanglement of personality caughtin manifold urgencies and pulled this way and that by competing forcesbattling in the will and flaming in passion and desire. But a sin whichhas no reality save through a mistaken belief in its existence iscertainly as far from the fact of a world like ours as is a sin which isonly one factor in a scheme of redemption. 

But at any rate, if sin have no reality except our mistaken persuasionthat it be true and if we are delivered from it directly we cease tobelieve in it and affirm in the stead of it the reality of love andgoodness, then while there may be in such a faith as this both the needand possibility of the recasting of our personal lives, there is in itneither need nor possibility of the Christian doctrine of the atonement. Naturally since man is incapable of sin, sickness and death, he isunfallen, nor is "his capacity or freedom to sin any part of the divineplan. " "A mortal sinner is not God's man. Mortals are the counterfeitsof immortals; they are the children of the wicked one, or the one evilwhich declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo" (page475). 

Here also is an echo from an early time and a far-off land. It is notlikely that Mrs. Eddy ever heard of Mani or Manicheeism, or knew to whata travail of soul St. Augustine was reduced when he fought his waythrough just a kindred line of teaching which, to save God from anycontact with or responsibility for evil, affirmed our dual genesis andmade us on one side children of darkness and on the other the childrenof light, without ever really trying to achieve in a single personalityany reconciliation of two natures drawn from two entirely differentsources. Nor does Mrs. Eddy know that one Eusebius, finding muchevidence of this faith in the Christianity of the fourth century, dismissed it briefly enough as "an insane heresy. " Heresy it certainlywas for all those who were fighting their way out of their paganism intoan ordered Christian faith and whether it be insane or no, it is of allthe explanations which have been offered for the presence of evil in aworld supposedly ruled by the love and goodness of God, the one whichwill least bear examination. It has been dead and buried these thousandyears. 

We may deny, if we are so minded, any freedom of the will at all, soinvolving ourselves in an inevitable sequence of cause and effect as tomake us also simply weather-vanes driven east or west by winds ofinheritance and environment which we have no power to deflect and towhich we can only choose to respond. But to deny us the freedom to sinand so to shut us up to a determinism of goodness is no more in accordwith the facts than to deny us the power to be good and shut us up to adeterminism of sin. If we are free at all we are free in all directions. 

_The Sacraments Disappear. Mrs. Eddy's Theology a Reaction from theRigid Evangelicism of Her Youth_

"Science and Health" deals in the same radical way with the sacraments. Nothing at all, apparently, is made of baptism save that Mrs. Eddy saysour baptism is a purification from all error. In her account of the LastSupper the cup is mostly dwelt upon and that only as showing forth thebitter experience of Jesus. The bread "is the great truth of spiritualbeing, healing the sick" and the breaking of it the "explaining" it toothers. More is made of what is called the last spiritual breakfast withthe Disciples by Lake Galilee than of the Last Supper in the upper room. "This spiritual meeting with our Lord in the dawn of a new light is themorning meal which Christian Scientists commemorate" (page 35). "Ourbread, " she says, "which cometh down from heaven, is Truth; our wine, the inspiration of Love" (page 35). All this is of a piece with thegeneral allegorical use of the Old and New Testaments in "Science andHealth, " but it is a marked departure from the sacrament of the Lord'sSupper even in the simple memorial way in which it is kept bynon-liturgical churches. 

Mrs. Eddy's theology, then, is in part a reaction from the hard phrasingof the evangelical doctrines in which she was trained and it is indeedin part a reaching out toward the interpretation of these doctrines interms of life and experience, but as a theology it is extraordinarilyloose and even though the familiar phrases of Protestant and Catholicfaiths are employed, what is left is wholly out of the current of themain movement of Christian theology heretofore. The central articles ofthe historic creeds practically disappear under Mrs. Eddy's treatment. 

Here, then, is a philosophy which will not bear examination, a use ofScripture which can possibly have no standing in any scholarlyfellowship, and a theology which empties the central Christian doctrinesof the great meanings which have heretofore been associated with them. And yet in spite of all this, Christian Science gets on and commendsitself to so considerable a number of really sincere people as to makeit evident enough that it must have some kind of appealing andsustaining power. Where, then, is the hiding of its power? Partly, ofcourse, in its spaciousness. There are times when a half-truth has apower which the whole truth does not seem to possess. Half truths can beaccepted unqualifiedly; they are capable of a more direct appeal and ifthey be skillfully directed toward needs and perplexities they arealways sure of an acceptance; they make things too simple, that is onesecret of their hold upon us. This, of course, is more largely trueamong the spiritually undisciplined and the mentally untrained, but eventhe wisest folk find it easier upon occasion to accept a half truthwhich promises an easy satisfaction or deliverance than a whole truthwhich needs to be wrestled with and may be agonized over before itbrings us into some better estate. 

_The Real Power of Christian Science is in Neither Its Philosophy NorIts Theology_

We have already seen what predisposing influences there were in thebreaking down of what we have called the accepted validations ofhistoric Christianity--due, as we have seen also, to many contributingcauses--to offer unusual opportunity to any new movement which promiseddeliverance. But one must seek the conditions which have made possibleso many strange cults and movements in America, not only in thebreakdown of the historic faiths, but also in the state of populareducation. Democracy tends, among other things, to lead us to value amovement by the number of people whom it is able to attract. We are, somehow, persuaded that once a majority has accepted anything, what theyhave accepted must be true and right. Even a strong minority alwayscommands respect. Any movement, therefore, which succeeds in attractinga considerable number of followers is bound to attract others also, justbecause it has already attracted so many. One has only to listen to thecurrent comment on Christian Science to feel that this is a real factorin its growth. 

Democracy believes in education, but has not commonly the patience tomake education thoroughgoing. Its education is very much more likely tobe a practical or propaganda education than such training as createsthe analytical temper and supplies those massive backgrounds by whichthe departures of a day are always to be tested. In America particularlythere is an outstanding want of background. It needs history, philosophy, economic understanding and a wealth of racial experience togive to any people either the power to quickly discriminate between thetruth and the half-truth, or to carry itself with poise through atransitional period. But one may not dispose of the distinct hold ofChristian Science upon its followers by such generalizations. The realinwardness of no religion can ever be known from its theology. A sinceredevotion may attend a most deficient theology and we need to becharitable in judging the forms which other people's faith takes. Whatseems unreasonable to one may seem quite right to another and whatevercarries a sincere faith deepening into a positive spiritual experienceaccomplishes for the moment its purpose. These studies of ChristianScience are severe--for one must deal with it as honestly as he knowshow--but the writer does not mean that they should fail in a duerecognition of the spiritual sincerity of Christian Scientists. We musttherefore go in to what is most nearly vitally central in the system tofind the real secret of its powers. It continues and grows as a systemof healing and a religion. 

VII

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A SYSTEM OF HEALING AND A RELIGION

Christian Science practice is the application of its philosophy andtheology to bodily healing. This is really the end toward which thewhole system is directed. "Science and Health" is an exposition of Mrs. Eddy's system as a healing force. Her philosophy and theology areincidental, or--if that is not a fair statement--they both condition andare conditioned by her system of healing. There is hardly a page in herbook without its reference to sickness and health. Her statements areconsequently always involved and one needs to stand quite back from themto follow their outline. Here, as elsewhere, one may read deeply andindirectly between the lines attitudes and beliefs against which she isreacting. Her reactions against the environment of her girlhood andearly womanhood affect her point of view so distinctly that without therecognition of this a good deal of what she says is a puzzle without akey. 

_Christian Science the Application of Philosophy and Theology to BodilyHealing_

She had been taught, among other things, that sickness is a punishmentfor sin. One may safely assume this for the theology of her formativeperiod fell back upon this general statement in its attempt to reconcileindividual suffering and special providence. One ought not justly to saythat Mrs. Eddy ever categorically affirms that she had been taught this, or as categorically denies the truth of it, but there are statements--asfor example page 366--which seem to imply that she is arguing againstthis and directing her practitioners how to meet and overcome it. Thisperhaps accounts for the rather difficult and wavering treatment of sinand sickness in a connection where logically sickness alone should beconsidered. 

Mrs. Eddy would not naturally have thus associated sin and sickness hadthey not been associated for her in earlier teaching and yet, as hasbeen said, all this is implicit rather than explicit. The key to a greatdeal in "Science and Health" is not in what the author says, but in thereader's power to discover behind her statements what she is "writingdown. " Her system is both denial and affirmation. In the popularinterpretation of it quite as much is made of denial and the recognitionof error as of its more positive aspects, but in the book there is apretty constant interweaving of both the denial of evil and theaffirmation of well-being. 

There is a sound element of wisdom in many of her injunctions, but moreneeded perhaps fifty years ago than now. We must remember constantlythat Mrs. Eddy is writing against the backgrounds of a somber theology, a medical practice which relied very greatly on the use of drugs whichwas at the same time limited in its materia medica and too largelyexperimental in its practice. She was writing before the day of thetrained nurse with her efficient poise. The atmosphere of a sick room isnot naturally cheerful and generally both the medical procedure and thespiritual comfort of the sick room of the fifties and sixties did verylittle to lighten depression. When, therefore, Mrs. Eddy urges, as shedoes, an atmosphere of confidence and sympathy she is directly in theright direction. 

_Looseness of Christian Science Diagnosis_

As we pass beyond these things which are now commonplace, what she saysis not so simple. It is difficult to say how far the healing whichattends upon Christian Science is in her thought the result of DivinePower immediately in exercise, and how far it is the outcome ofdisciplines due to the acceptance of her theology and philosophy. It ishard also to distinguish between the part the healer plays and thecontribution of the subject. There is no logical place in ChristianScience practice for physical diagnosis. "Physicians examine the pulse, tongue, lungs, to discover the condition of matter, when in fact all isMind. The body is the substratum of mortal mind, and this so-called mindmust finally yield to the mandate of immortal Mind" (page 370). 

The result of this in practice is that the Christian Science healeraccepts either the diagnosis of the medical schools, reportedsecond-hand or else the patient's own statement of his condition. Needless to say there is room for very great looseness of diagnosis insuch a practice as this. The actuality of sickness must be recognizedneither directly nor indirectly. The sickness must not be thought ortalked. Here also, as far as the patient is concerned, is a procedure ofundebated value. It all comes back, as we shall see presently, tosuggestion, but any procedure which frees the patient from depressingsuggestion and substitutes therefor an encouraging suggestion is in theright direction. At the same time those who are not Christian Scientistswould rather stubbornly believe that somebody must recognize the fact ofsickness or else we cannot begin to set in action the machinery forcuring it, even if that machinery be Christian Science itself, and we donot change this rather stubborn fact by covering sickness with the blankdesignation Error. Even the error is real for the time being. [56]

[Footnote 56: The writer once received an unexpected sidelight on thepractice of the Christian Science healer in this connection. He onceenjoyed the friendship of a Christian Science healer with whom he oftenplayed golf. He called this healer up one morning to make anappointment. His voice was not recognized over the telephone and he wasmistaken for a patient. The reply came back in professional tones--"Andwhat error are you suffering from this morning?" When he answered thathis own particular error was his persuasion that he could play golf thetelephone atmosphere was immediately changed. ]

The results of fear are constantly dwelt upon and this too is in theright direction. Much is made of the creative power of mind in that itimparts purity, health and beauty (page 371). When Mrs. Eddy says onpage 373 that disease is expressed not so much by the lips as in thefunctions of the body she is making one of those concessions to commonsense which she makes over and over again, but when she attempts toexplain how erroneous or--as one may venture to call it--diseased beliefexpresses itself in bodily function one is reminded of Quimby. Temperature, for example, is wholly mental. Mrs. Eddy's reason forbelieving this is apparently because "the body when bereft of mortalmind at first cools and afterward it is resolved into its primitivemortal elements. " "Mortal Mind produces animal heat and then expels itthrough the abandonment of a belief or increases it to the point ofself-destruction" (page 374). Fever is a mental state. Destroy fear andyou end fever. 

In all this there is a profound ignorance of the real causes of feverwhich helps us to understand the marked deficiencies of the wholesystem. There is nowhere any recognition of the body as an instrumentfor the transformation and conservation and release of energy real as adynamo. There is nowhere any recognition of the commonplaces of modernmedical science in the tracing of germ infections. True enough, medicalscience had hardly more than begun when "Science and Health" was firstwritten to redefine fevers in terms of germ infection and the consequentdisorganization of the balance of physical functionings, and theoxidation of waste materials real as fire on a hearth, but that is noreason why such ignorance should be continued from generation togeneration. 

_The Power of Mental Environment_

In general, Christian Science practice as indicated in "Science andHealth" is a strange mingling of the true, the assumed and the false;its assumptions are backed up by selected illustrations and all thatchallenges it is ignored. Disease is unreal because Mind is not sick andmatter cannot be (page 393). But Mind is "the only I, or Us, divinePrinciple, . .. Life, Truth, Love; Deity, which outlines but is notoutlined" (page 591). In other words Mind is an ideal affirmation whichMrs. Eddy assumes to underlie human experience and possibly to revealitself through human experience, and it certainly does not follow thatwhile an ideal affirmation is not sick, a human being involved in thenecessary relationships of our present material existence may not be. Mrs. Eddy never clearly distinguishes between what a speculative mindmay affirm and actual experience report. Her dialectic is a constantwrestling with reality in a range of statement which involves her inmany contradictions. She recognizes what she denies and denies what sherecognizes and, in a lawyer's phrase, constantly changes the venue. 

But through and behind it all is an intelligible method. Confidence isto be reëstablished, fear is allayed, the sufferer from error led tocommit himself to healing forces. These healing forces are notconsistently defined. Sometimes they are the "power of the mind tosustain the body" (page 417); sometimes "the power of Christian Science"(page 412), or "the power of Truth" (page 420) or divine Spirit, or herbook itself. "Continue to read and the book will become the physician, allaying the tremor which Truth often brings to error when destroyingit" (page 422). 

Mrs. Eddy sometimes anticipates in a vague way the reaction of thoughtand emotion upon physiological function to which Cannon has given suchcareful attention, but her definite statements are strangely inadequate. "What I term _chemicalization_ is the upheaval produced when immortalTruth is destroying erroneous mortal belief. Mental chemicalizationbrings sin and sickness to the surface, forcing impurities to pass away, as is the case with a fermenting fluid" (page 401). [57] She recognizesthe limits of Christian Science practice when she advises her followersto leave surgery and the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations tothe fingers of a surgeon until the advancing age admits the efficacy andsupremacy of mind (page 401). 

[Footnote 57: Compare "The Quimby Manuscripts, " p. 118. ]

Great care is to be taken as to the patient's mental environment. Mrs. Eddy's constant emphasis upon this explains the excessive separatistnature of Christian Science. More than almost any other of its cults itseparates its followers from those who do not belong to the cult. Theycannot, naturally, attend churches in which the reality of disease isrecognized; they must have their own nurses as well as their ownhealers; in certain regions they must confine their reading to their ownliterature; their children must be educated, on their religious side, intheir own cult schools and they cannot consistently associate themselveswith remedial movements which assume another philosophy as their basis. It is difficult for a detached observer to see how a consistentChristian Scientist reconciles the general conclusions of a modernscientific education with the presuppositions of his cult. That he doesthis is one more testimony to a power which indeed is exercised in manyother fields than the field of Christian Science to keep in thepractical conduct of life many of our governing conceptions in differentand apparently water-tight compartments. 

_Christian Science Defines Disease as a Belief Which if Treated as anError Will Disappear_

The answer to such a line of criticism is, of course, in the familiarChristian Science phrase that perfect demonstration has not yet beenachieved in the regions in which the Christian Scientist appears to beinconsistent. But beyond this is the rather stubborn fact that in someof these regions demonstration never will be realized; Christian Scienceis confined to the field in which suggestion may operate. Mrs. Eddy ismost specific about diseases, concerning which the medical practice ofher time was most concerned and in the light of later medical sciencemost ignorant--fever, inflammation, indigestion, scrofula, consumptionand the like. These are all beliefs and if treated as error they willdisappear. Even death is a dream which mind can master, though thisdoubtless is only Mrs. Eddy's way of affirming immortality. She hardlymeans to say that death is not a fact which practically has to bereckoned with in ways more final and unescapable than any other fact inlife. As Dr. Campbell Morgan once said: "If you have the misfortune toimagine that you are dead, they will bury you. "

Mrs. Eddy concludes her chapter on Christian Science Practice with anallegory which she calls a mental court case, the suggestion of which isto be found in one of the Quimby manuscripts. [58] Since this manuscriptis dated 1862 it anticipates Mrs. Eddy by almost thirteen years. Thesetting is like the trial of Faithful and Christian in the town ofVanity Fair as recorded in Bunyan's "Pilgrim Progress. " Doubtlessmemories of Mrs. Eddy's reading of that deathless allegory arereproduced in this particular passage which the author is inclined tobelieve she wrote with more pleasure than anything else ever turned outby her too facile pen. Personal Sense is the plaintiff, Mortal Man thedefendant, False Belief the attorney for Personal Sense, Mortal Minds, Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Hypnotism, Envy, Greed andIngratitude constitute the Jury. The court room is filled withinterested spectators and Judge Medicine is on the bench. The case isgoing strongly against the prisoner and he is likely to expire on thespot when Christian Science is allowed to speak as counsel for thedefense. He appeals in the name of the plaintiff to the Supreme Court ofSpirit, secures from the jury of the spiritual senses a verdict of "NotGuilty" and with the dismissal of the case the chapter on ChristianScience Practice ends. 

[Footnote 58: "The Quimby Manuscripts, " p. 172. ]

_Christian Science Has a Rich Field to Work_

Now what can finally be said of the whole matter? In general, twothings. Recognizing the force and reality of psycho-therapy ChristianScience gets its power as a healing system from the great number ofpeople who are open to its appeal and the shrewd combination of elementsin the appeal itself. In spite of our great advance in medical knowledgeand practice and in spite of the results of an improved hygiene thereremains in society at large a very great deposit of physical ill-beingsometimes acute, sometimes chronic, sometimes clearly defined, sometimesvague, badly treated cases, hopeless cases and a great reach of caseswhich are due rather to disturbed mental and moral states than toascertainable physical causes. Illness has its border-land region aswell as thought and the border-land faiths make their foremost appeal tothose who, for one reason or another, live in border-land physicalstates. 

And, to repeat, the number of those who belong to this group isunexpectedly large. Naturally such as these grasp at anything whichoffers help; they supply to the manufacturer of cure-all drugs theirclientele; they fill printed pages with testimonials of marvellous curesachieved where the regular medical faculty had been helpless; they crowdabout every faith healer; they are the comrades of the pilgrims toLourdes and Ste. Anne de Beaupré; they belong to the fellowship of thosewho, in the Middle Ages, haunted shrines and sought out relics and askedto be touched by kings. We discover their forebears in the pages of theGospels and as far back as any records go we see this long, patheticprocession of the hopeless or the handicapped seeking help. And againand again they get it, for we have also seen that, given faith enougheither in a saint or a shrine or a system, psycho-therapy with certainsubjects and in certain cases does heal. But this type of healingdepends upon no one philosophy or no single force except indeed thoseobscure forces which are released by suggestion. 

While this was being written certain evangelistic faith healers in thecity of Detroit were sending out broadsides of testimonials to theirhealings, as definite in detail as the testimonials in "Science andHealth, " or the _Christian Science Journal_, and yet the basalprinciples by which these men have claimed to work are as different fromthe basal principles of Christian Science as east is from west. Whilethis is being revised Coué, the apostle of suggestion according to theNancy school, is besieged in New York by those who have been led to hopefor healing through the success of his method. Whether the relic be trueor false does not matter if only the relic be believed in. 

_One of the Most Strongly-Drawn Systems of Psycho-therapy Ever Offered_

Now Christian Science is one of the most strongly drawnpsycho-therapeutic agencies ever offered. Most faith healing systemsheretofore have depended upon some place, some thing, some healer. Hereis a system capable of the widest dissemination and dependent only upona book and its interpreters. It universalizes what has heretofore, forone reason or another, been localized. It is shrewdly organized, as faras propaganda goes, and effectively directed. It is widely advertised byits friends--and its critics. Its temples, for beauty and dignity, putto shame most Protestant churches. Its rituals combine in an unusual waythe simple and the dramatic. It is so fortunately situated as to be ableto keep finance--which is a trying element in Protestant Church life--inthe background. Its followers have that apostolic fervour which attachesto movements sure of their divine commission and not yet much worn bytime. It possesses distinctly one of Sir Henry Jones' hall-marks ofreligion. "It impassions the spirit of its disciples and addsconsequence to the things it sanctions or condemns. "

It draws upon deeply established Christian reverences and faiths. Itsecures for its authority the persistent but perplexed faith in theBible which the average Protestant inherits and for those who believe init the force of this authority is no wise weakened by the fact that byevery sound canon of Biblical interpretation it is illicit. Its verydogmatism is an asset. It could not do its work if it were less sure. The confusions of the systems which try the critically minded are acontribution to the devout who find in them an added opportunity forfaith. Its experience meetings create enthusiasm and confidence. It is, in short, more than any one of the movements we are here considering, aclearly defined cult whose intensities, limitations and mysticassurances all combine to produce among its disciples the temper mostfavourable to suggestion and it locks up on its force as a system ofhealing. 

An accurate analysis of what it actually accomplishes would require animmense and probably impossible labour--a knowledge of each case, anaccurate diagnosis when even for the trained diagnostician the thing isdifficult enough, and the following up of all reported cases. Themedical faculty would probably have done better to have taken suchmovements as these more seriously and to have brought to them a trainedinvestigation which, except in the case of Lourdes, has never even beenattempted. Doubtless there is looseness and inconsistency in the wholesystem. Almost any one who has had a practical observation of theworking of Christian Science has knowledge enough not only of loosenessand inconsistency but of what seems to the non-Christian Science mindpositive untruth. Something, however, must always be allowed here forthe way in which the mind acts under excitement and for the way in whichdelusion deludes. All this combines to make any final judgment in thisregion difficult, but there still remains, after all qualification, anarresting solidity of achievement. Christian Science does work, especially with the self-absorbed, the neurotic and those who haveneeded, above all, for their physical deliverance, a new access to faithand courage. Christian Science practitioners have also an unusualopportunity in what may be called moral rehabilitation with physicalconsequences. The physician has a better chance with the bodies of hispatients than with their souls; the minister a better chance with thespiritual needs of his parishioners than with their bodies and habits;the Christian Science practitioner to an unusual extent has the whole oflife under his control and it ought in all fairness to be conceded thatthis power is helpfully employed. 

The very discipline of Christian Science is itself a therapeutic. Thereare really a good many things which become non-existent directly youbegin to act as if they did not exist. An atmosphere in which no onerefers to his ailment and every one to his well-being is a therapeuticatmosphere. Psychologists have taught us that if we go through themotions of being happy we are likely to have an access of happiness; ifwe go through the motions of being unhappy we have an access of misery. If we go through the motions of being well, very often we achieve asound measure of health. 

_But it is Fundamentally a System of Suggestion_

All this has been so strongly dwelt upon of late as to make any extendedconsideration of it unnecessary here, as indeed any extendedconsideration is impossible for any one save a specialist. What we aremore concerned with is the way in which the discipline and philosophy ofChristian Science produce their results. The answer to this question isas plain as anything can be in our present state of knowledge, foressentially, as a healing force, Christian Science stands or falls withthe therapeutic power of suggestion. It is a strongly drawn system ofpsycho-therapy because it is a strongly drawn system of suggestion. Itssuggestion involves assumptions which are sometimes philosophy, sometimes theology, and more commonly a baffling interplay of the two. 

But the outcome of it all is the practical persuasion on the part of thepatient that he is not sick and does not need so much to get well as todemonstrate that he is well, and that in this demonstration he has anabsolute force on his side. To this end the whole body of affirmation, persuasion, assumption, suggestion and technique of Christian Science isdirected. As one tries to analyze these separate elements they are, taken singly, inconsistent, often unverifiable and often enough, by anytests at all save the tests of Christian Science, positively untrue. Butas Mrs. Eddy has combined them and as they are applied in practice theydo possess an undeniable power. They are not dependent, as has beensaid, fundamentally upon persons or things or places. Here is a coherentsystem, the force of which may be felt when it is not understood and itbears upon the perplexed or the impressionable with very great power. Itwould be appreciably weakened if any one of its constituent elementswere taken out of it. But fundamentally it can do no more than any othersystem of suggestion, unquestionably accepted, can do. 

_It is Bound to be Affected by Our Growing Understanding of the Rangesof Suggestion_

A deal of water has gone under the bridge since Mary Baker Eddy beganher work. What was then almost wholly involved in mystery is nowbeginning to be reduced to law. The psychology of suggestion is by nomeans clear as yet, nor are the students of it agreed in theirconclusions, but we do know enough about the complex character ofconsciousness, the actuality of the subconscious and the reaction ofstrongly held attitudes upon bodily states to be in the way, generally, of freeing this whole great matter from the priest, the healer, thecharlatan or the prophet of strange cults and referring it hereafter fordirection and employment to its proper agents--the physician, the expertin disordered mental conditions and the instructed spiritual adviser. 

It is now generally agreed that suggestion, however induced, maypositively affect bodily function. If it is a wrong suggestion itseffects are hurtful, right suggestion its effects are helpful. Now sincea vast range of physical maladjustments--and this may be broadened toinclude nervous maladjustments as well--is functional, suggestivetherapeutics have a far-reaching and distinct field. When ChristianScience or any other healing cult reports cures in this field, thosecures, if verified by sufficient testimony, may be accepted asaccomplished. Those who have accomplished them may take what credit theywill for their own agency in the matter, but for all that the cure is notestimony at all to the truth or falsity of their system. It proves onlythat those helped have believed it. 

The matter of organic healing is more difficult. Medical Science doesnot generally admit the possibility of organic change throughsuggestion. There may be, however, a real difference of opinion as towhether a particular trouble is functional or organic. Here is aborder-land not so much of fact as of diagnosis. A cure may be reportedas of an organic trouble when the basal diagnosis was wrong and it wasonly functional, but the body possesses undoubtedly the power ofcorrecting or at least of limiting organic disease. Tuberculosis is anorganic disease but it is again and again limited and finally overcomewithout the knowledge of the subject. Post-mortem examinations mayreveal scars in the lungs and so reflect processes only thus brought tolight. 

Whatever serves general physical well-being may greatly help the body ineliminating disease and securing a going measure of physical health. Insuch indirect ways as these suggestion may, therefore, while not actingdirectly upon diseased organism, contribute most distinctly to arrestorganic disease. Thoughtful physicians are ready to concede this andthus open a door for a measure of organic healing which technicallytheir science denies. A very revealing light has been let in upon thiswhole region by hypnotism. Some of the students of hypnotism areinclined to go as far as to admit organic change under hypnoticsuggestion. "Strong, persistent impressions or suggestions made on thereflex organic consciousness of the inferior centers may modify theirfunctional disposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organicstructures. "[59]

[Footnote 59: Sidis, "The Psychology of Suggestion, " p. 70. ]

Christian Science, then, as a healing agency has a great field for thereare always folk enough to heal. It has a method, a discipline highlyeffective in producing changed mental and spiritual states and, strangely enough, it is all the more effective because it is so narrowlytrue. Those to whom it makes its appeal are, for the most part, notcapable of analyzing through to their sources its fundamentalinveracities, nor would they be inclined to do that if they were able. Its vagueness and its spacious rhetoric really give it power. It doesproduce results and probably one case of physical betterment has aprevailing power which a chapter of criticisms cannot overcome and, morethan that, one case of physical betterment may screen a dozen in whichnothing happened at all. 

For Christian Science has in this region two alibis which can always bebrought into action, the most perfect ever devised. If it fails to cureit is either because the one who was not cured lacked faith, or becauseof the erroneous belief of some one else. A system which believes thatthe toxic effect of poisons depends upon the vote of the majority inthat arsenic will cease to be a poison when everybody ceases to think ofit as a poison and will be a poison as long as anybody believes it is, is perfectly safe even if it should fail to cure a case of arsenicalpoison, for until facts and experience cease to weigh at all there willalways be some one somewhere believing that arsenic is a poison and thatone will be the scapegoat for the system. 

_As a Religion it is Strongest in Teaching That God Has Meaning for theWhole of Life_

Christian Science is, however, more than a system of mentaltherapeutics, it is also a religion and due allowance must be made inany just appraisal of it for the way in which it has made religion realto many for whom religion had ceased to have a working reality. It needsto be said on one side that a good deal of Christian Science religion isreally taking the Ark of God to battle, using religion, that is, forcomfort, material prosperity, health and just such tangible things. ButChristian Science meets a demand of the time also just here. Our ownage, deeply entangled in material satisfactions, has no mind to postponethe satisfactions of religion to a future life. The monk and, indeed, the generality of the devout in the medieval Church sought inself-limited earthly joy a proper discipline for the soul and a state incontrast to which the felicities for which they paid so great a priceshould be the more welcome. The devout of Mary Baker Eddy's time, thoughinclined to find in material well-being a plain mark of divine favour, none the less accepted sickness and sorrow as from the hand of God andprayed that with a meek and lowly heart they might endure this fatherlycorrection and, having learned obedience by the things they suffered, have a place amongst those who, through faith and patience, inherit Hispresence. 

But our own time is not so eager to inherit promises as to enter intopossession. A religion which does not demonstrate itself in actualwell-being is under suspicion. The social passion now much in evidenceamong the churches grows out of this as well as the many cults whichseek the proof of the love of God in health, happiness and prosperity. And indeed all this is natural and right enough. If religion be real thefruits of it should be manifest, though whether these are the moresignificant and enduring fruits of the spirit may be questioned. Areligion which demonstrates itself in motor-cars and generous incomesand more than comfortable raiment may be real enough to those whoprofess it, but its reality is not quite the reality of the religion ofthe Sermon on the Mount. 

Christian Science is in line with a distinct contemporaneous demand todemonstrate God's love in about the terms of Jacob's famous vow atBethel--"If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come againto my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God. " This is afar cry from the noble protestation of Job which sounds still across theyears: "Though he slay me, still will I trust in him. "

And yet the more sensitive and richly endowed among the followers ofMary Baker Eddy have found in Christian Science other values than these. They have passed, by a sort of saving instinct, beyond itscontradictions and half-truths to what is centrally best in the wholesystem. God, that is, has a meaning for life not hereafter but now, notin creeds but in experience, not alone in hard disciplinary ways, but inloving and intimate and helpful ways. True enough, this is no monopolyof Christian Science; Christianity holds this truth in fee simple. Butunfortunately, in ways which it is perfectly possible to trace, thegreat emphases of Christianity have in the past been too largely shiftedfrom this. 

There has been and still is in most Protestant churches too muchreticence about the meaning of God for the individual life and maybe toogreat hesitation in really using to the full the proffer of divinepower. The accepted understandings of the place of pain and suffering inlife have been, as it were, a barrier between the perplexed and theirGod; His love has not, somehow, seemed sufficiently at the service ofmen, and though Christian Science secures the unchallenged supremacy ofthe love of God by emptying it of great ranges of moral meaning andshutting away therefrom all the shadowed side of life, it has probablyjustified the love of God to multitudes who have, for one reason andanother, heretofore questioned it and they have discovered in thisnew-found sense of God's love and presence, a reality and wealth ofreligious experience which they had never known before. 

_It Exalts the Power of Mind But Ignores Too Largely the Processes byWhich Mind Realizes Its Ideals_

There is also in Christian Science practice and philosophy theapprehension of a real truth which New Thought formulates much moreclearly. Mind is creative. (Not alone mind with a capital "M" but ourown every-day, human, small "m" mind. ) The trouble is that ChristianScience hopelessly short-circuits the creative process. Our human worldis finally what we make it through our insight, our understanding andabove all by our sense of values, but the actual achievement of changedpurposes in a changed world is a process whose immensity is not even somuch as hinted at in "Science and Health. " Christian Science too largelyignores and seems commonly to deny the whole disciplinary side of lifewith its inevitable accompaniment of failure, fault and pain. Pain is nodelusion; pain is the sign of something gone wrong in the great businessof normal physical life. Nor is sin only an unreality which "seems realto human erring belief"; sin is a sign that something has gone wrong inthe struggle for a normal, disciplined, moral life. Nor is the wholebody of evil simply a shadow to be dismissed as easily as one turnsone's back upon some darkness and faces toward the light; evil is thesign of something gone wrong, or something not yet attained in themassive progress of a humanity which combines in itself so manydiscordant elements, which has so long a way to go and so much to learnand so many things to conquer as it struggles upward toward a happierstate. 

Christian Science cannot in the end be true to the great facts ofexperience, which have a power beyond the force of any assertion tocountervail, unless it is false to Mary Baker Eddy's philosophy, nor canit be true to its philosophy without impoverishing moral and spiritualendeavour. It is hard to find a place in the system--taken rigidly--forsympathy or tenderness or the richest of human qualities, or for thoseelements of wealth in character contributed by pain bravely borne orsorrow uncomplainingly accepted. There is little place in ChristianScience for the Beatitudes and less still for that fine courage which isitself the one assured victory which the hard beset may win on any fieldof battle. The writer believes that while this severe judgment isjustified by "Science and Health, " it is not justified by the practicaloutcome of the cult in the lives of many of its disciples. They are indevotion and kindness the equal of many in the Church and superior tosome. Their loyalty to their Church rebukes a good deal of orthodoxeasy-going. All of which proves at least that life is bigger than ourtheories about it and in the end subdues those who would make the bestof it, to communities of experience and understanding in which we areall strangely kin. For, after all, unpleasant things cannot be thoughtout; they must be fought out and dug out and lived out. The wholeredemptive force of society in thoroughgoing and far-reaching ways mustbe brought to bear upon the very sources of all the evil side of life, and the bare philosophy of Christian Science is not equal to this task. 

_Is Not Big Enough for the Whole of Experience_

It is doubtful if Christian Science has ever made an appreciable changein the mortality statistics of any city and yet if the Public HealthDepartment were to permit for forty-eight hours the milk or water supplyof a city to be polluted, statistics would disclose that within tendays. This is only an illustration but it does illustrate. We must workif we are to dig up the roots of evil things and get a better growth intheir stead and anything which attempts to substitute for this a denialof the reality of the evil, a mystical religious attitude and a mereformula of faith, no matter how oft repeated or how sincerely accepted, or indeed no matter how efficacious in certain selected regions amongcertain selected groups, is on the whole not a contribution to humanwell-being. 

Very likely Mrs. Eddy's followers in the practical conduct of theirlives are already recognizing this and gradually, and maybeunconsciously, adapting themselves to it. There are already signs ofcertain processes of conformity to the necessities of experience; theseare likely to go farther. If Christian Science follows the history ofsuch movements in the past, it will, after having made its own distinctassertion of whatever measure of truth it contains, be gradually sweptback into the main current of religion and practice. It will maintain anominal distinctness, but in the general conduct of life it will loseits more outstanding characteristics and become largely a distinctionwithout a difference. Milmine, in her thoughtful criticism of ChristianScience at the end of her history says that the future of ChristianScience stands or falls with psycho-therapy. 

That is true only on the one side. As far as Christian Science has truereligious insights and approaches it will go on in spite of what happensto psycho-therapy, though there is enough in psycho-therapy to assureits future within well-defined regions if that were all. Somethingbigger than psycho-therapy will finally judge and dismiss ChristianScience to its own place--life and experience will do that--and it issafe to say that in the end Christian Science will have to come to termswith a truth bigger than its own, with a body of experience which cannotbe dealt with on the selective process of taking what you want anddenying the rest, and more than that, it will have to come to terms withthe whole great matter of an intellectual, moral and spiritual strugglegoverned by law and conditioned by the vaster world of which we are apart. This is not to deny that Christian Science and allied teachingshave made contributions of real value to our common problem. It is onlyto affirm that here is something not big enough for the whole either oftruth or experience. 

VIII

NEW THOUGHT

New Thought has been defined as "an attitude of mind, not a cult. " It isreally both. It is necessary to include it in this study because it is acult; it is hard justly to appraise it because it is an attitude ofmind. Attitudes of mind are as elusive as the play of light on runningwater. We can estimate their force and direction only as we have anunderstanding of the main currents of thought by which they are carriedalong and as far as New Thought goes these main currents are far olderthan the cult itself. 

_New Thought Difficult to Define; "An Attitude of Mind, Not a Cult"_

New Thought has never had an apostolic succession or a rigid disciplineor a centralized organic form. This has given to it a baffling loosenessin every direction, but has, on the other hand, given it a pervasivequality which Christian Science does not possess. It has a vast anddiffuse literature and so merges into the general movement ofcontemporaneous thought as to make it difficult to find anywhere adistinct demarcation of channels. 

New Thought is either a theology with a philosophic basis or aphilosophy with a theological bias. It is centrally and quite distinctlyan attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of scienceand philosophy, a reaction against old theologies and perhaps a kind ofnebula out of which future theologies will be organized. For a greattheology is always the systematic organization of a complex of forces, amassive structure wrought through the years by manifold builderssubduing a rich variety of material to their purposes. 

The teaching of the Scriptures, old traditions, the needs of worship andorganization, political and social circumstances, changing moral ideals, the trend of philosophies and sciences, the challenge of schisms andheresies, the sanctifying power of blind custom and the mysticalauthority of the Church itself all combine to make a theology. Once agreat theology is so constituted it possesses an immense power overlife. It shapes character and ideals and gives direction to faith, orders effort and so becomes, as it were, a mould into which souls andsocieties are cast. 

Theologies may be changed, in fact they are always in the way of beingchanged, but they yield slowly to transforming forces. Nothing is sopersistent as organized faith and yet the very strength of a greattheology is always its weakness. It is never really anything else than acrystallization of past forces. The experiences which voice themselvesin theology have cooled and hardened down; the philosophy which isimplicit in theology is past philosophy; the science implicit intheology is senescent science. 

There is always in evidence, then, in the regions of theology adisturbing pressure occasioned by the reaction of contemporaneousmovements in science and philosophy and understandings of life generallyupon these old and solidly established inherited forms. Currents ofthought are always, as it were, running past the great formulæ sincethought is free and formulæ are rigid, and then returning upon them. From time to time this movement gathers great force. The old has beenrigid so long, the new is so insistent that the conflict between themfills an age with its clamour, stresses souls to its travail, breaksdown ancient forms without immediately building up their equivalent, andcontributes uncertainties and restlessnesses everywhere in evidence. 

Now this is exactly what has been happening in the region of religion inthe last thirty years. An inherited order, strongly fashioned andorganized and long essentially unchanged, has been compelled to takeaccount of the forces about it. Certainly theology is not so static asan earlier paragraph would seem to indicate, none the less the greattheological centralities do possess an immense power of resistance. Wehave already seen how little Protestantism had changed since theReformation until it met the full impact of modern science andphilosophy. We have had really until our own time and still largelycontinue a theology with the Creation story of the ancient Hebrews, theoutlook upon life of the age of the Apostles, the philosophy of theGreek fathers, St. Augustine's conception of human nature and theexpectation of the end of the world and the issues of history of theJewish apocalypse given a Christian interpretation. 

True enough, there are in all this precious and timeless qualities butthere is also through all the fabric of our formulated faith theinterweaving of such understandings as those who shaped our creeds had, of law and history and truth. Any far-reaching change, then, inphilosophy or science was bound to profoundly affect religion and evenforty years ago far-reaching modifications of the old order wereoverdue. 

New Thought is just one outcome of the tremendous impact ofcontemporaneous thought upon our inherited theology; a detached fragmentor rather group of fragments, for even as a cult New Thought, as hasbeen said, is loosely organized and its varying parts have in commononly a common drift. Yet that drift is significant for it has beneath itthe immense force of a philosophy which has been gathering head for morethan a century. It is to this, therefore, that we ought to addressourselves for any understanding of the changed outlook upon life whichis carried, as it were, from the surface of profounder tides. 

_"The Rediscovery of the Inner Life"_

Josiah Royce dismisses the whole of philosophy from Spinoza to Kant inone single pregnant phrase. He calls it "the rediscovery of the innerlife. " It is along this line that modern philosophy and religionapproach each other. Religion has always been the setting forth of theinner life in terms of its relationship to God and the proofs of thereality of religion have always been found in the experiences of thesoul. The mystic particularly made everything of the inner life; helived only in its realities. For the sake of its enrichment and itsempowerment he subjected himself to rigorous disciplines. Itsrevelations were to him all sufficient, for having found God therein heasked for nothing beside. 

Wherein, then, is this new mysticism, or better, this new cult of theinner life different from the old? It is not easy to answer thatquestion in a paragraph, though it is easy to feel the answer in anycomparison of the great classics of mysticism--which are mostlyspiritual autobiographies--and New Thought literature. To turn from St. Augustine to Dresser, or from St. Theresa to Trine is to changespiritual and intellectual climates. There is in the modern literaturelittle reflection of such spiritual struggle as fills the greatConfessions with the agony of embattled souls, nor any resolution ofsuch struggle into the peace of a soul "fully awake as regards God butwholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect ofherself. " This testimony of St. Theresa is illuminating as a contrastingbackground for New Thought. There the soul is very much awake, both asregards things of this world and in respect of herself. 

These new cults of the inner life are far more self-conscious than theold and far more self-analytical. They seek to discern the laws inanswer to which they act and utilize those laws in the practical conductof life. They are always either appealing to underlying philosophies orelse trying to make a philosophy of their own. Mysticism madeeverything of God and nothing of itself. It plotted its mystic way butknew nothing of psychology. New Thought seeks to discover in psychologya road to God. The centers of mysticism were emotional; the centers ofNew Thought are intellectual. All these cults are far more akin toGnosticism than mysticism, though they are saved, yet not wholly, fromthe lawlessness of Gnosticism by a pretty constant return to theoutstanding conclusions of science and philosophy. 

_Spinoza's Quest_

Now if we seek to discover the real genesis of the movement and traceits development we would better begin, so deep are the roots of things, with Spinoza rather than Quimby. Here the deeper currents, upon thesurface of which New Thought moves, take their rise and here also wereturn to Royce's phrase--"the rediscovery of the inner life"--and thephilosopher who inaugurated the philosophic quest for just thisdiscovery. 

Spinoza was one of the last of the mystics and the first of the modernphilosophers. He shared with the mystics of an earlier time a consumingsense of the futility of life save as life perfected itself incontemplations of an eternal excellency and communion with something fargreater than itself. "After experience had taught me, " he says (and thisis quoted from Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy"), "that all theusual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that noneof the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either goodor bad except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finallyresolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which wouldaffect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether theremight be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable meto enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness. "

Now there is in all this a strangely modern note--dissatisfaction withwhat is offered by the commonplace and the accepted, a great emphasisupon the mind as the key to the readjustments of life, a quest for somesingle formula which would offer "continuous, supreme and unendinghappiness. " This is exactly what Mary Baker Eddy and all the otherperplexed and bodily broken "seekers" who gathered about Quimby werereally wanting and this is what, for one reason or another, theproffered religious experiences of their time failed to secure them. "This was, then, " to quote Royce, "the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim'sProgress. " (As indeed it is the beginning of every Pilgrim's Progress. )"But now, for what distinguishes him from other mystics and makes him aphilosopher and not a mere exhorter, he has his religious passion, hemust reflect upon it . .. The philosopher must justify his faith. "

We have no need here to follow Spinoza along all the way, difficult andmisty enough, by which he sought to justify his faith. The outstandingfact is enough. He is a mystic who reasons his way through where theelder mystic has felt his way through, and the goal which he finallyreaches, though it be the goal which the earlier mystics had found byother roads, --the loss of self in God--is none the less such anachievement of reason as Spinoza was able to compass. 

_Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of Mind_

So this polisher of lenses bequeathed to the century which followed himits greatest inheritance and set for it its greatest task: the innerlife as the supreme concern of the philosopher and the discovery of itslaws and the interpretations of its realities the supreme task ofphilosophy. Those who continued his work began far enough, apparently, from the point where he left off and went a road strangely remote fromhis. Having taken the inner life for their study they sought to lay bareits very foundations. Nowadays, if we are so minded, we dictate tomachines which write our words curiously enough in shallow lines uponwax cylinders and when the cylinders are full shave off the fragilerecord and begin again. 

This is what the eighteenth century did for the mind. It reduced it to avirgin surface, it affirmed the reality of nothing except theimpressions thereupon registered by what sense supplied. We owe toexperience and to experience only "all that vast store which the busyand boundless fancy of man has painted on it [the white paper of themind] with an almost endless variety. " We have nothing with which tobegin but sensation; we have nothing to go on with but reflection. "These two, namely external, material things as the objects ofsensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects ofreflection, are the only originals from whence all our ideas take theirbeginnings. "[60] Such things as these are perhaps enough to begin with, but they are not enough to go on with as our thinkers soon enoughdiscover. Some way must be found to relate the material thus suppliedand to build it up into a glowing, continuous, reasonable and consciousinner life. 

[Footnote 60: Locke, "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. "]

So in turn the philosophers laboured at their problem. They made muchnot only of reflection but of association; they found a place for memoryand imagination; they discovered that we may as truly define experiencein terms of ideas as of sensation; they discovered finally that by nopossible process even of the most ingenious reasoning can you get thefull wealth of life out of a mind which was nothing more to begin withthan a piece of white paper, any more than you can get Hamlet (if we maysuppose Shakespeare to have used a dictaphone) out of a wax cylinder, aneedle and a diaphragm. 

So Kant ended what Spinoza began, by reaffirming the creative power ofthe mind itself. It does far more than passively receive, it interprets, organizes, contributes, creates. True enough, it is not an unconditionedcreator, it has laws of its own in obedience to which it finds both itsfreedom and its power. It must take the material which experiencesupplies and yet, in its higher ranges, in the regions of conduct andfaith, that is, where conscience has become the guide and thenecessities of the soul the law, we do possess the power inenfranchising obediences and splendid adventures of faith to make aworld rich in goodness, power and peace. And here, once more, there is astrangely modern note. Life is a pilgrim's progress. We are set out todiscover "whether there might be some real good, the discovery andattainment of which would enable us to enjoy continuous, supreme andunending happiness. " And we do possess the power within ourselves, ifonly we may discover the controlling laws and release effective forces, to come at least a stage nearer our goal. All this makes for thatexaltation of the creative self which is so marked a characteristic ofpresent-day attitudes and which is perhaps the distinctive affirmationof New Thought. 

_Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism the Practical Outcome of aGreat Movement_

But it needed time for all this to work itself out. The philosophicbasis for it had been supplied but it is a far cry from philosophy tothe practical conduct of life. Kant's transcendental philosophy needed adeal of working over before it became practicable for the man in thestreet. And to begin with what was deepest in the philosophy of theEnlightenment led in unexpected directions. "While the practicaltendencies of all speculative thought inevitably appear in the opinionsand customs of a general public far removed from their sources, it isparticularly true of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, that itsinfluences had no small part in shaping the popular point of viewconcerning the moral, religious and political convictions of thatage. "[61] Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism were, says Hibben, thepopular and practical outcome of the whole movement, --Utilitarianism inEthics, Deism in Religion, Individualism in Politics. These threegrowths--and they have borne a deal of bitter fruit in the last onehundred years--grow out of one soil. In general they are due to Locke'ssensationalism, Hume's skepticism, a new emphasis upon reason as opposedto revelation and the self-sufficiency of the individual. If consciouslife is nothing but sensation worked over and built up, then pleasurablesensations are the best we can aspire to, happiness is the end of thequest. So Utilitarianism defined goodness in terms of happiness and gaveto conduct generally a grasping, greedy quality for which we have paidover and over again in the disappointments and disillusionments of anage, which, supposing itself to have discovered the true secret ofwell-being, found too much of its seeming happiness only Dead Sea fruit. 

[Footnote 61: Hibben, "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, " p. 253. ]

_They Bear a Bitter Fruit: the Reactions Against Them_

Deism in its reaction against Religion as merely revelation and in itsendeavour to find a rational basis for faith set God apart from Hisworld, detached, unheeding and offering no real recourse to a travailinghumanity between whom and Himself it built a rigid fabric of impersonallaw. The Individualism of the eighteenth century was partly a reactionagainst old despotisms of Church and State--and a Declaration ofIndependence. It was in part a pride of accomplishment and a newaffirmation of the self-sufficiency of the questing reason. There was init also a sound recognition of the worth of personality of which theworld then stood in need and which has since supplied a foundation for asaving passion for education and human well-being. But Individualism aspractically applied by the first three-quarters of the nineteenthcentury--unexpectedly reinforced as it was by aspects ofDarwinism--stressed the right of the strong and the doom of the weak. Itmade competition the law of economic development, the survival of thefittest the goal of a life of struggle. 

Consciously or unconsciously the politics, industry and religion of thenineteenth century were greatly influenced by these outstandingconceptions. No need to say how utterly they have broken down. They havemade for the deepening strife of classes and of nations, they haveessentially defeated the bright promise of a time which seemed to havemore to hope for than almost any other great period of history. 

And yet they were never unchallenged. They were challenged by theessential spirit of Christianity; they were challenged by the poets whofound that they could shape no songs out of such stuff as this; theywere challenged by philosophers who sought to build for themselves andfor us a world more free and true; they were challenged by a group ofgreat novelists who created out of the wealth of their imaginationcharacters and situations in which love and human worth had their wayin spite of a thousand obstacles. They were challenged by prophets of abetter world, the Ruskins and Carlyles who soundly rated the ethics ofselfishness and the political economies of competition and the politicsof self-assertion and who stirred deeply the more sensitive of theirtime. And finally they were challenged, and here we begin to approachagain the genesis of New Thought, by a philosophic movement which foundits point of departure in certain great aspects of earlier thinkingwhich had been much obscured by the difficult forms in which it had beenstated: the supremacy, that is, of the soul over all its surroundings. 

Now this return to what we may call the creative and controlling powerof spiritual forces is the key to the modern approach to life. We do notunderstand, it may be, the meaning of our own terms. Spirit is a vagueenough word but we do know that the initiative is with desire andpurpose and understanding. These are positive and masterful; they are byno means free; they are conditioned by the vaster order of which theyare a part, none the less our human world is plastic to their touch andour material world as well. Carlyle has chanted all this gustily enoughbut there is kindling truth in his stormy music. "Thus, like some wildflaming, wild thundering train of heaven's artillery does thismysterious mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick succeedinggrandeur through the unknown deep. Earth's mountains are levelled andher seas filled up in our passage. Can the earth which is but dead in avision resist spirits which have reality and are alive?"

_New England Transcendentalism. Quimby Again and the Dressers_

Curiously enough this quotation from a book which nowadays nobody likelyreads save perhaps in some college course on early Victorian literature, brings us within sight of the beginnings of New Thought. A little groupof English and American thinkers, part philosophers, part poets, partrebels against the established order, anticipated trained students intheir return upon the higher and more positive side of an olderphilosophy. They made much of the inner life, its powers and itspossibilities; they affirmed the creative power of the soul; theyconceived life to lie plastic to the touch of vision and desire; theythought themselves to be standing upon the threshold of a new world. They were impatient of discipline; they dreamed impossible things andgave their dreams the authority of reality. They were hard enough tounderstand and they sorely tried practical plodding folk, but theykindled their time and released forces which are yet in action. 

New England, through a group of adventurous thinkers of whom Emerson wasthe most distinguished, responded strongly to Transcendentalism. Anothergroup, as has been said, responded strongly to mesmerism and spiritism, which were also a part of the ferment of the time in which ChristianScience and New Thought (I use New Thought here in the technical sense)find their source. And finally, Quimby, who is a rather unexpectedlyimportant link in a long chain, --important, that is, to the student ofmodern cults--reacted against mesmerism, felt and thought his way towardsome understanding of the force of suggestion in abnormal states, applied his conclusion to faith and mental healing and gathered abouthim--as has been said before--a little group of disciples who havebetween them released far-reaching movements. 

Mrs. Eddy and the Dressers were the outstanding members of this littlegroup of disciples. Mrs. Eddy soon dissociated herself from the othersand she supplied in "Science and Health" a distinctive philosophy to hermovement. She organized it into a church; she imposed upon it adistinctive discipline. No little of the power of Christian Science isdue to this narrow rigidity which is itself the projection of thepersonality of Mary Baker Eddy. But Christian Science did not carry withit the whole of the group which had come under Quimby's influence, norindeed all of those who came under Mary Baker Eddy's influence. Therewas during all the formative period of these modern cults a perpetualprocess of schism. 

We have as a result, then, two divergent movements related inunderground ways, though as marked in difference as in resemblance, bothof them beginning about the same time, both of them reactions againstaccepted religious forces and validations, both of them with a markedtherapeutic content, both of them adventures in the conduct of life. 

In the summary which follows I am in debt to Dresser's recent "Historyof the New Thought Movement. " The name New Thought was chosen as thetitle of a little magazine devoted to mental healing, published in 1894in Melrose, Mass. "The term became current in Boston through theorganization of the Metaphysical Club in 1895. About the same time itwas used by Mr. C. P. Patterson in his magazine _Mind_ and in the titleof two of his books. " Other names were suggested--in England, HigherThought; in Boston, Higher Life; in New York the little group was for atime known as the Circle of Divine Ministry; in the west the movementwas known as Divine Science or Practical Christianity. There were groupsalso which called themselves the Home of Truth or the Society of SilentUnity. 

_New Thought Takes Form_

New Thought, as has been said, lacks the definite direction whichChristian Science has always had. Its organizations have grown upquietly, more or less irregularly and have had always a shiftingcharacter. "The first New Thought Society with a regular leader andorganization in Boston was the Church of the Higher Life established in1894. "[62] The Metaphysical Club was an outgrowth of the New Thoughtgroup in Boston. Dresser gives a list of the original members, chieflysignificant through the presence among them of some of Quimby'sdisciples and others whose books have since held a high place in NewThought literature. There were manifest connections between themovement and liberal (particularly Unitarian) theology. 

[Footnote 62: All citations in this section are from Dresser's "Historyof New Thought, " unless otherwise indicated. ]

The first New Thought convention was held in Boston in 1899 (there hadbeen earlier conventions of the Disciples of Divine Science--a relatedmovement--in western cities) and the second in New York City in 1900. The New York convention was the first to make any general statement ofthe "purposes" of the League. We find on the New York program one SwamiAbhedananda, lecturer on the Vedanta philosophy. Here is an earlyindication of the return of Eastern religions upon the West which isalso one of the marked characteristics of the religious development ofour time. We do not need to follow through in detail the list ofsuccessive conventions with their topics and their speakers. The groupis not so large but that the same names reappear. There are markedattempts in the earlier conventions to associate leaders in recognizedschools of philosophy and theology with the movement. One does notdiscover this tendency in the later convention lists. 

The local groups throughout the country have had varying fortunes. Theyhave from time to time changed their names and naturally their leaders. The west has responded perhaps more strongly than the Atlantic seaboard. The movement is particularly strong on the Pacific Coast. There are noavailable statistics and generalizations are of doubtful value. TheCincinnati and Kansas City groups are offered by Dresser as typicalorganizations, but they seem on the whole to be exceptional rather thantypical. The strength of the New Thought movement is not in itsorganization but in its influence. "In England as in America interestwas aroused by Christian Science, then came a gradual reaction and theestablishment of independent branches of the movement. " "It isdifficult, " says Dresser, "to obtain information pertaining to theinfluence of New Thought literature in foreign languages. " The moresignificant New Thought books, however, have been variously translatedand widely sold. New Thought leaders sometimes advise their disciples toretain their old church associations and the movement has naturallytended to merge in religious liberalism generally and to become only anaspect of the manifold religious gropings of a troubled time. 

In the Constitution and By-Laws of the New Thought Alliance, publishedin 1916, the purposes of the society are "to teach the infinitude of theSupreme One, Divinity of Man and his Infinite possibilities through thecreative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice ofthe Indwelling Presence which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity. " We discover here the same tendency toward thedeification of capital letters which we have already noted in ChristianScience. 

_Its Creeds_

In 1917 the International New Thought Alliance went further than at anyother time before in the direction of a creed and set forth thefollowing series of affirmations: "We affirm the freedom of each soulas to choice and as to belief, and would not, by the adoption of anydeclaration of principles, limit such freedom. The essence of the NewThought is Truth, and each individual must be loyal to the Truth hesees. The windows of his soul must be kept open at each moment for thehigher light, and his mind must be always hospitable to each newinspiration. 

"We affirm the Good. This is supreme, universal and everlasting. Man ismade in the image of the Good, and evil and pain are but the tests andcorrectives that appear when his thought does not reflect the full gloryof this image. 

"We affirm health, which is man's divine inheritance. Man's body is hisholy temple. Every function of it, every cell of it, is intelligent, andis shaped, ruled, repaired, and controlled by mind. He whose body isfull of light is full of health. Spiritual healing has existed among allraces in all times. It has now become a part of the higher science andart of living the life more abundant. 

"We affirm the divine supply. He who serves God and man in the fullunderstanding of the law of compensation shall not lack. Within us areunused resources of energy and power. He who lives with his whole being, and thus expresses fullness, shall reap fullness in return. He who giveshimself, he who knows, and acts in his highest knowledge, he who trustsin the divine return, has learned the law of success. 

"We affirm the teaching of Christ that the Kingdom of Heaven is withinus, that we are one with the Father, that we should judge not, that weshould love one another, that we should heal the sick, that we shouldreturn good for evil, that we should minister to others, and that weshould be perfect even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. These are notonly ideals, but practical, every-day working principles. 

"We affirm the new thought of God as Universal Love, Life, Truth, andJoy, in whom we live, move and have our being, and by whom we are heldtogether; that His mind is our mind now, that realizing our oneness withHim means love, truth, peace, health and plenty, not only in our ownlives but in the giving out of these fruits of the Spirit to others. 

"We affirm these things, not as a profession, but practice, not in oneday of the week, but in every hour and minute of every day, sleeping andwaking, not in the ministry of the few, but in a service that includesthe democracy of all, not in words alone, but in the innermost thoughtsof the heart expressed in living the life. 'By their fruits ye shallknow them. '

"We affirm Heaven here and now, the life everlasting that becomesconscious immortality, the communion of mind with mind throughout theuniverse of thought, the nothingness of all error and negation, including death, the variety of unity that produces the individualexpressions of the One-Life, and the quickened realization of theindwelling God in each soul that is making a new heaven and a newearth. "

We discover in this creed a more distinct recognition of ideals andtruths which inherited Christianity supplied than in the earlierstatements of purpose. In the annual address of the President there isdistinct reference to the relation of the New Thought gospel to thechurches. "I am asked often: What is the relation of this movement tothe Church? This is not a new religion. It is not an institution seekingto build itself up for the mere sake of the institution. We do not askanybody to leave the church. We ask them to become better members oftheir churches than before. New Thought is designed to make peoplebetter and more efficient in whatever relation of life they may findthemselves. In other words: 'New Thought teaches men and women only theold common-sense doctrine of self-reliance and belief in the integrityof the universe and of one's own soul. It dignifies and ennobles manhoodand womanhood. ' The main idea on which Christianity is founded is thatof communion with God, that of worshipping God in spirit and in truth. This is the very corner-stone of those modern movements that recognizemen and women as the living temples of the God within. .. . I predict thatthis new interpretation and new understanding will become universal inthe new age which is now dawning. "

A further paragraph, however, reveals the synthetic character of themovement. "It is the realization in practical affairs of the teachingsnot only of the Nazarene, but of every other great religious teachersince the world began; for in their essence these teachings arefundamentally alike; and the New Thought and other new spiritualmovements are but the efforts to apply, in our relations one withanother, these simple and sublime truths. "

_The Range of the Movement_

I have quoted at length from these programs, affirmations and this oneaddress to indicate the range of the movement as it has found officialexpression. We must look, however, to the literature of the movement asa whole for a full understanding of its reach and influence. Theliterature in general falls into three classes: (1) books concernedmostly about healing; (2) books which instruct as to character, spiritual states and fullness of life; (3) what one may call successbooks which apply New Thought to business and the practical conduct oflife. The lines of demarcation between these three types of books is, ofcourse, not clear and there is a material which is common to all ofthem, but the distinction thus suggested is real. 

As a principle of healing New Thought differs from Christian Science inalmost the whole range of its assumptions. It does not deny the realityof matter, not the reality of suffering, nor does it distinguish, asdoes Christian Science, between the Divine Mind and the mortal mind. There are, according to New Thought, healing forces which may be trustedto do their remedial work in us, if only we surrender ourselves to themand let them have their way. There is nothing in New Thought which quitecorresponds to the "demonstration" of Christian Science. It would seemto an impartial observer that Christian Science asks of its disciplesan intensity of positive effort which New Thought does not demand. Dresser, for example, believes all suffering to be the result ofstruggle. Directly we cease to struggle we cease to suffer, provided, ofcourse, that our cessation is in the direction of relaxation and a trustin a higher power. In some regions, however, Christian Science and NewThought as therapeutic agents work along the same line, but whereChristian Science denies New Thought ignores. Here New Thought makesmore use of psychological laws; it follows James generally in itspsychology, as it follows Emerson in its thought of the over-soul, though in this region Emerson's detached serenity of faith is given bodyin an insistence upon the divine immanence for which New Thought is indebt to the suggestions and analogies of modern science. 

New Thought makes much of the shifting of attention and its disciplinesare rather the disciplines of the mystic than the disciplines of theChristian Scientist. It seeks in substance to ascertain the laws of mindin action and then, through the utilization of this knowledge, to securehealth, happiness and prosperity. It makes much, of course, of thecentrality of mind both in well-being and pain. It hardly goes so far asto say that pain is an error in belief, but it does say that pain is amatter of consciousness and that as we are masters of consciousness weare masters of pain. It believes in thought transference and absenttreatment, but it is perhaps more conservative in the cases which it iswilling to undertake than Christian Science and recognizes thelimitations of the healer. 

_The Key-Words of New Thought_

Its key-words are Harmony, Realization, Affirmation and Poise. Just hereNew Thought is a strangely interwoven web. It makes much of "vibration"and "friction. " It is evidently under the spell of the wave theory oflight and heat. It is most dependable in its analysis and application oflaws of mental action, most undependable in trying to account for therelation of mind to body and in its explanation of the physicalphenomena of disease. Fatigue, for example, "is evidently due to thecalling of power into a new direction. It [evidently the power] comesinto contact with dense matter, with an uncultivated portion of thebeing, physical as well as mental, and meeting with resistance frictionof some sort is the natural result. " One has only to compare a statementlike that with Cannon's careful study of bodily changes under emotionalstates, to see the difference between speculation controlled by analogyand the illuminating experimental methods of modern science. 

When Dresser adds that "we shall eliminate disease not by fighting it, not by studying its causes, or doctoring its physical effects, but byseeing the wisdom of the better way, " he is on dangerous ground, for ifwe are not to study the causes of disease but to take as our guide theserene generalizations of a speculative mind we are shutting in ourfaces one of the doors by which we enter into that knowledge of the mindof God, of which New Thought makes so much. How shall we know the mindof God except as we ask endless patient and careful questions of everyrevelation of the divine method, whether in sickness or health?

New Thought, however, takes a far more constructive view of sufferingthan Christian Science. For New Thought suffering is at leastdisciplinary and instructive: it compels reflection: it brings us to aknowledge of the law. It is certainly, therefore, just and it may bekind. Indeed, New Thought occasionally goes so far as to say thatsuffering is also a revelation of love and must be so accepted andentertained. Its general conclusions in this region are far more safethan its insistence upon vibration and friction and its spacioustechnicalities. 

When Dresser says that there is a difference "between ignoring atrouble, between neglecting to take proper care of ourselves and thatwise direction of thought which in no way hinders while it most surelyhelps to remedy our ills, " he is on perfectly safe ground. When he addsthat there is a strong reason for believing that "there is a simple, natural way out of every trouble, that kind nature, which is anothername for an omniscient God, is ever ready to do her utmost for us" he isspeaking with a wise and direct helpfulness, though here as generallyNew Thought errs on the side of too great a simplification. There is away out of every trouble but it is not always simple, it is oftenlaborious and challenging. We have accomplished marvels in the matter oftropical sanitation but the way out has been anything but simple. It hasinvolved experimentations which cost the lives of physicians who offeredthemselves for humanity as nobly as any soldier on any battlefield; itinvolved the sweat of hard driven labour digging drainage ditches, therebuilding of the foundations of cities and a thousand cares andsafeguards. If New Thought wishes to dismiss such a process as this withthe single adjective "simple" it may do as it pleases, but this is notsimplicity as the dictionary defines it. 

_Its Field of Real Usefulness_

All that way of thinking of which New Thought is just one aspect isfatally open to criticism just here. It ignores the immense travail ofhumanity in its laborious pilgrimage toward better things and it is fartoo ready to proclaim short-cuts to great goals when there never havebeen and never will be any short-cuts in life. None the less, trust andquietness of mind and soul and utter openness to healing, saving forcesare immense healing agents and in its emphasis thereupon New Thought hasrecalled us to that which in the very intensity of life's battles we arein the way of forgetting. And beyond doubt, in that obscure range ofdiseases which are due to the want of balanced life--to worry, fear, self-absorption and over-strain--the methods of New Thought have adistinct value. 

In general, as one follows the history and literature of New Thought onefinds that, though it began with a group more interested in healing thananything else, healing has come to play a progressively less importantpart in the development of the movement and the larger part of itsliterature deals with what one might call perhaps the laws of mentaland spiritual hygiene. The principles implicit in New Thought as ahealing cult carry of their own weight into other regions. It isimportant enough to get well--that goes without saying--but it is moreimportant to keep well. Good health on the whole is a kind ofby-product. We suffer as distinctly from spiritual and mentalmaladjustments as from physical. We suffer also from the sense ofinadequacy, the sense, that is, of a burdening disproportion between ourown powers and the challenge of life. New Thought has addressed itselfincreasingly to such states and problems as this. Here it ceases to be acult or a method of healing and has become a most considerable influenceand here also it in general takes the direction of and is identifiedwith what is truest in the Christian religion, what is sanest and mostclear visioned in present-day thinking. The typical books just here areTrine's "In Tune with the Infinite" and a similar literature. 

_Its Gospel of Getting On_

Another application of New Thought is in the direction of personalefficiency. There is a considerable literature in this region. It doesnot specifically call itself New Thought but it is saturated with theNew Thought fundamentals and has distinctly the New Thought outlook. Marden is the most popular and prolific writer in this connection andthe titles of his books are suggestive--"Keeping Fit, " "Selling Things, ""The Victorious Attitude, " "Training for Efficiency, " "Getting On, ""Self-Investment, " "Be Good to Yourself, " "He Can Who Thinks He Can, ""Character, " "Opportunity, " "An Iron Will. " Something like this has, ofcourse, been done before but the modern efficiency literature movesalong a wider front than earlier books and makes a fuller use of the newpsychology. All this literature dwells strongly upon the driving powerof a self-assertive personality strongly controlled by will, singlevisioned and master of its own powers. It suggests lines of approach bywhich other people's wills can be overcome, their interest aroused ortheir coöperation secured. 

Quotation is almost impossible--there is such an abundance of materialand much of it is commonplace. It takes a deal of padding to makeshelves of books out of the familiar and generally accepted truismswhich are the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "Beatitudes" of this gospelof personal efficiency. Keep fit, keep at it, assert yourself, neveradmit the possibility of failure, study your own strength and weaknessand the strength and weakness of your competitor and success is yours. Look persistently on the bright side of every situation, refuse to dwellon the dark side, recognize no realities but harmony, health, beauty andsuccess. 

It is only just to say that success is generously defined and thedisciples of this New Thought are asked also to live in the finersenses--the recognition of beauty and friendship and goodness, thatis--but on the whole the ideal character so defined is a buoyantoptimist who sells his goods, succeeds in his plans and has his own waywith the world. It is the apotheosis of what James called "The Religionof Healthy-Mindedness"; it all fits easily into the dominant temper ofour time and seems to reconcile that serving of two masters, God andGetting On, which a lonely teacher long ago thought quite impossible. 

Naturally such a movement has a great following of disciples whodoubtless "have their reward. " So alluring a gospel is sure to have itsown border-land prophets and one only has to study the advertisements inthe more generally read magazines to see to what an extent all sorts ofshort-cuts to success of every sort are being offered, and how generallyall these advertisements lock up upon two or three principles whichrevolve around self-assertion as a center and getting-on as a creed. Itwould be idle to underestimate the influence of all this or, indeed, tocry down the usefulness of it. There is doubtless a tonic quality inthese applications of New Thought principles of which despondent, hesitating and wrongly self-conscious people stand greatly in need. 

_The Limitations and Dangers of Its Positions_

But there is very great danger in it all of minimizing the difficultieswhich really lie in the way of the successful conduct of life, difficulties which are not eliminated because they are denied. And thereis above all the very great danger of making far too little of thatpatient and laborious discipline which is the only sound foundation uponwhich real power can possibly be established. There is everywhere herean invitation to the superficial and, above all, there is everywherehere a tendency toward the creation of a type of character by no meansso admirable in the actual outcome of it as it seems to be in theglowing pages of these prophets of success. Self-assertion is after alla very debatable creed, for self-assertion is all too likely to bring usinto rather violent collisions with the self-assertions of others and togive us, after all, a world of egoists whose egotism is none the lessmischievous, though it wear the garment of sunny cheerfulness andproclaim an unconquerable optimism. 

But at any rate New Thought, in one form or another, has penetrateddeeply the whole fabric of the modern outlook upon life. A justappraisal of it is not easy and requires a careful analysis andbalancing of tendencies and forces. We recognize at once an immensedivergence from our inherited forms of religious faith. New Thought isan interweaving of such psychological tendencies as we have alreadytraced with the implications and analogies of modern science. The God ofNew Thought is an immanent God, never clearly defined; indeed it ispossible to argue from many representative utterances that the God ofNew Thought is not personal at all but rather an all-pervading force, adriving energy which we may discover both in ourselves and in the worldabout us and to which conforming we are, with little effort on our ownpart, carried as upon some strong, compelling tide. 

The main business of life, therefore, is to discover the direction ofthese forces and the laws of their operation, and as far as possible toconform both character and conduct, through obedience to such laws, intoa triumphant partnership with such a master force--a kind of conqueringself-surrender to a power not ourselves and yet which we may not knowapart from ourselves, which makes not supremely for righteousness(righteousness is a word not often discovered in New Thought literature)but for harmony, happiness and success. 

_It Greatly Modifies Orthodox Theology_

Such a general statement as this must, of course, be qualified. Even themost devout whose faith and character have alike been fashioned by aninherited religion in which the personality of God is centrallyaffirmed, find their own thought about God fluctuating. So great a thingas faith in God must always have its lights and shadows and its changingmoods. In our moments of deeper devotion and surer insight the sense ofa supreme personal reality and a vital communion therewith is most clearand strong; then there is some ebbing of our own powers of apprehensionand we seem to be in the grip of impersonal law and at the mercy offorces which have no concern for our own personal values. New Thoughtnaturally reflects all this and adds thereto uncertainties of its own. There are passages enough in New Thought literature which recognize thepersonality of God just as there are passages enough which seem toreduce Him to power and principle and the secret of such discrepanciesis not perhaps in the creeds of New Thought, but in the varyingattitudes of its priests and prophets. One may say, then, that the Godof New Thought is always immanent, always force and law and sometimesintimate and personal. However this force may be defined, it carriesthose who commit themselves to it toward definite goals of well-being. The New Thought of to-day reflects the optimistic note of the scientificevolution of a generation ago. It is not exactly "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world, " but it is the affirmation of streams oftendency whose unfailing direction is toward happiness and success. 

If an element of struggle be implied in the particular sort of salvationwhich New Thought preaches, it is not at least clearly brought out. There has been amongst us of late a new and a very dearly boughtrecognition of the element of struggle which seems to be implicit in alllife. The optimistic evolutionary philosophy in which New Thought rootsitself is on the whole justified neither by history nor the insight ofthose who have been most rich in spiritual understanding, nor, indeed, by the outcome of that philosophy in our own time. The happy confidencethat we do not need to struggle, but rather to commit ourselves toforces which make automatically for happiness and well-being, has onlyinvolved us more deeply in a struggle where in some ways the smughappiness and well-being of representative New Thought literature seemmore remote than ever. 

This elimination of the element of moral struggle and the need fordeliverance which has so greatly coloured the older theologies gives adistinct character to New Thought theology. There is no place in it fora scheme of redemption; there is no place in it for atonement, save asatonement may be conceived as a vicarious sharing of suffering incidentto all struggle for better things; there is no place in it for the oldanthropologies of Christian theology. It has on the whole little to sayabout sin. Says Allen, in a very thoughtful short article on New Thoughtin Hastings' "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, " "New Thoughtexcludes such doctrines as the duality of man and God, miracles in theaccepted sense, the forgiveness of sins and priestly mediation. It seeksto interpret the world and nature as science has recorded them, but alsoto convey their finer and esoteric meanings to the human understanding. The fundamental purpose of religion and science is the same--namely, thediscovery of truth. " "New Thought does not teach the moral depravity ofman. Such thoughts demoralize and weaken the individual. Miracles, inthe accepted sense, New Thought does not conceive as possible in auniverse of law. The only miracles are phenomena not understood, butnevertheless the result of law. It applies the pragmatic test to everyreligion and philosophy. Are you true? What do you give to a man tocarry to his daily task?" "New Thought recognizes no authority save thevoice of the soul speaking to each individual. Every soul can interpretaright the oracles of truth. "

_Tends to Become a Universal and Loosely-Defined Religion_

Worship becomes, therefore, contemplation rather than adoration, and avast deal of the liturgical material which Christianity specifically hasheretofore supplied becomes useless for this cult. Christian hymnologywould need much editing before it would serve New Thought purposes; thewhole conception of prayer would need to be altered. Naturally, then, onits more distinctly religious side New Thought is at once fluctuatingand incomplete. It is the proclamation, to quote one of its spokesmen, of a robust individualism and, in the individual, mind is supreme. Rightthinking is the key to right living. New Thought affirms the limitlesspossibilities of the individual. Here perhaps it is more loose in itsthinking than in any other region. It makes free use of the word"infinite" and surrounds itself with an atmosphere of boundless hope asalluring as it is vague. 

The interest of New Thought is most largely in the present tenses oflife; its future in an eternal progress which should, of course, implyimmortality. New Thought is hospitable to truth from whatever sourcederived. It is particularly hospitable to the suggestions of orientalreligions and, as far as it has taken form as a distinct religiousmovement, it is becoming more and more markedly a kind of syncretism, aputting together of religious elements drawn from widely universalsources and it patently seeks nothing less than a universal religiousfellowship in which the values of all true faith are recognized andwhich is to be under the control of what science has to say about theworld without and psychology of the world within. In a sentence NewThought is an outstanding aspect of the unconquerably religious in humannature, seeking to subdue to its own ends and inform with its own spiritthe new material which science, psychology and comparative religion haveput at our service in the last two generations. 

If New Thought diverges from the accepted Christian theology in manyways, it runs parallel in other regions with what is enduringly true inthe Gospels, and it runs parallel also with not a little of thatendeavour after theological reconstruction which is loosely known as theNew Theology. We are generally under a compulsion to reconstruct ourcreeds and adapt our religious thinking to whatever is true about us inour understanding of our world and its history and its mechanism and thelaws of our own lives. Theology must take account of a creativeevolution and a humanity which has struggled upward from far-offbeginnings along a far-flung front and the findings of Science and theintimations of Psychology. 

It will need a deal of pioneering to find roads through these newregions and such adventurous souls as seek new paths, with a daringdisregard for ancient landmarks and a true passion to find religiousmeanings in new facts and forces, are really serving us all. There isthe danger, however, that in the very freedom of their speculation theymay be too impatient of old experiences and hallowed certainties, forthese old experiences themselves are deeply rooted and testify torealities which we may be compelled to let in by the window, once wehave put them out at the door. 

IX

THE RETURN OF THE EAST UPON THE WEST

THEOSOPHY AND KINDRED CULTS

_Historic Forces Carried Early Christianity West and Not East. TheFar-Reaching Results of This Process_

Christianity in its beginning belonged neither to the East nor the West;it was born where they met and its subsequent development was greatlygoverned by the direction of the dominant tides of historicaldevelopment. But from the beginning of the Christian era the maincurrents of human action flowed West and they carried Christianity withthem. It is, therefore, outstandingly an occidental development. This isnot to minimize the influence of the East in the earlier phases ofChristianity. There was doubtless a measure of give and take, someblowing of the winds of the spirit in changing directions across vastregions and a confused time, which carried the germinal forces from onereligion to another. But in the main, Christianity, to use Gardner'sfine phrase, was baptized into the forms and forces of the West. I sayin the main, for Asia Minor was in the time of St. Paul the meetingplace of manifold religions and his first Gentile converts brought withthem into their new faith a very great deal of what their old faiths hadmade them. 

There was, generally, in the Apostolic world a very great longing for aspiritual deliverance and a mystic temper which easily took over andtransformed those elements in Christianity which lent themselves tomystic interpretations. Something of this we discover in the PaulineEpistles themselves; Paul's use of the word "mystery" shows how headapted his teaching to the understanding of those to whom he addressedhimself. To quote Gardner: "In the growth and spread of popularsuperstition, if we may call them by so harsh a name, we may welldiscern a gradual preparation for Christianity. .. . These religions standtoward Christianity, to continue my biological comparison, as the wingsof a penguin stand toward those of an eagle, and it is surely no slighton Christianity to say that it met the blind longings of a pagan nationand showed them a path toward which they had, for long generations, beentrying to find their way. The religious needs which were veryimperfectly met by the initiations and ceremonies and prayers of thecults of the pagan saving deities found a complete and perfectsatisfaction from faith in an exalted Christ. "[63]

[Footnote 63: "The Growth of Christianity, " Gardner, p. 136. For fullertreatment with suggestive detail see Fraser "The Golden Bough, " chapter37. ]

Christianity could not do this really very great thing without at thesame time being affected by that which it, in a measure, took over andcompleted. The influence of Asia upon Christianity is, therefore, avery real influence. One can only wonder what would have happened hadthe course of empire been East instead of West. Christianity might thenhave been carried into India and China and through long centuries beengiven so distinctly an oriental content as to have taken on a characterradically different from its Western form. But this did not happen. Tofollow Gardner's figure still farther, it was baptized into Greekphilosophy and Roman imperialism and the power of the nascent nations ofwestern Europe, and into the medieval spirit, and so we have become itsheirs. More than that, the East took its own way, uninfluenced by theWest, until two entirely different types of culture, civilization, religion and approach to reality had been developed, as far apart as theEast is from the West, and each, until almost our own time, substantially uninfluenced by the other. 

_The West Rediscovers the East; the East Returns Upon the West_

Given the contacts of the modern world this massive isolation ofcultures could not continue. The East and the West were bound to meetand religion was bound to be affected by their meeting. WesternChristianity has for more than a hundred years now been sending itsmissionaries to the Orient and oriental religions are beginning to sendtheir missionaries to the West. More justly the return of the East uponthe West is not so much in a missionary propaganda, though there is ameasure of that, as in a more subtle indoctrination of Westernspeculation by the fascination and mystery of the Eastern cults. It isnot possible to follow this process in detail but it has gone on longenough now for us to begin to see the outcome of it and to appraise itsforce. It began with New Thought. One discovers oriental names on theprograms of New Thought conventions; the Vedanta Philosophy wasexpounded by East Indian speakers at the Greenacre conference in Mainein the late nineties; B. F. Mills was lecturing on Oriental Scriptures in1907; and a lecture on the Vedanta Philosophy appears on the program ofthe second convention of the International Metaphysical League held inNew York City in the year 1900. The New Thought movement in Englandnaturally reflected the same tendency to look for light to Easternspeculation even more markedly than the American movement. 

All this was natural enough because New Thought, once divorced frominherited Christianity and committed to pure speculation about thesources and meanings of life, was sure to find out that the Orient hadbeen doing just this for a thousand years. Two things happened. First, New Thought welcomed Eastern teachers to its conventions in the hope ofreceiving thereby some measure of enlightenment, and second, many ofthese seekers, finding that the East had a wealth of speculationcompared with which the West is poor indeed, took over the Eastern cultsbodily, gave themselves up to their study and became their ardentdevotees and missionaries. 

Generalizations are always dangerous and though the East has, until theWest began to exploit it, remained practically unchanged, the West haschanged so often that whatever one may say about it must immediately bequalified. But, on the whole, Eastern and Western life are organizedaround utterly different centers. The West in its present phase ispredominantly scientific. Our laboratories are perhaps thedistinguishing hall-mark of our civilization. We are always askingquestions of the outside world; we are hungry for facts; we are alwaysseeking to discover the law and direction of physical force; we havetaken small account, comparatively, of our own inner states, but we havetaken immense account of the universe of which we are a part and theforces which play around us. Our realities are what we touch and see. Wehave given to our sight an immense increase of searching power throughthe microscope and telescope, but we are slow to venture beyond whatthey reveal to us. We have increased the sensitiveness of our touchthrough the instruments of our laboratories. We have organs to sensiblyregister the vibrations of an etheric force and even to weigh light. Butwe are slow to recognize any range of reality not thus revealed to us. 

We have gained in such ways a really illuminating understanding of thephysical universe; we have formulated its laws, chronicled its sequenceand made it in a marvellous way the instrument of our materialwell-being. If we have speculated at all it has been rather in thedirection of the ultimate nature of matter and force, as these havesupplied us material for speculation, than in any other direction. Wehave been generally and soundly suspicious of conclusions which cannotbe verified by the scientific method, and so have built about ourselvesrestraining limitations of thought which we are wholesomely unwilling topass. We have found our real joy in action rather than meditation. Ourscientific achievements have supplied material for our restless energyand our restless energy has urged us on to new achievement. 

True enough, there has been of late signs of a changing temper. We arebeginning to discover that science has marked limitations; there areranges of reality of which our laboratories can make no possible reportwhich we are beginning to take into account. But in a large way thematured Western outlook upon life has been conditioned by the scientificinterpretation of the universe. 

_Chesterton's Two Saints_

The East has taken an entirely different line; its laboratories havebeen the laboratories of the soul. The East has had little concern aboutoutside things; it has had an immense concern for its own inner life. The East has made little attempt to master outer forces; it has beengenerally content to let them have their way with it, realizing, maybe, that after all what the outside world can do for the inner life isnegligible compared with what the soul can do for itself. Race andclimate and the sequence of history have all conspired to produce thistemper. The history of the East is a strange combination of drive andquiescence; its more vigorous races have had their periods of conquestand fierce mastery, but sooner or later what they have conquered hasconquered them and they have accepted, with a kind of inevitablefatalism, the pressure of forces which they were powerless to subdue totheir own weakening purposes. They have populated their lands to thelimit and accepted the poverty which a dense population withoutscientific resource, on a poor soil and in a trying climate, inevitablyengenders. The more helpless have fallen back upon fate and acceptedwith a pathetic resignation their hard estate, asking only to be freedfrom the weariness of it. "It is better, " says an Eastern proverb, "tosit than to stand, it is better to lie than to sit, it is better tosleep than to lie, and death is the best of all. "

There is an immensity of weariness and disillusionment in such aninterpretation of life, which needs no comment. But the Eastern mind issubtle and speculative, possessing a peculiar penetrating power; and, for the want of any other field in which to act, it turned in uponitself. 

Chesterton has both hit and missed the immense difference between theEast and the West in one of his brilliant paragraphs. [64] "No two idealscould be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral anda Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at everypoint; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhistsaint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always hasthem very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmoniousbody, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint'sbody is wasted to crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. Therecannot be any real community of spirit between forces that producedsymbols so different as that. Granted that both images areextravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a realdivergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhistis looking with a peculiar intentness inwards; the Christian is staringwith a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily weshall find some interesting things. "

[Footnote 64: "Orthodoxy, " p. 243. ]

But to follow Chesterton's own method, the saint with the open eyes maystill be blind while the saint with his eyes shut may really see a vastdeal, and the East has seen much. Whether what it sees be true or not, is another matter, but there is no denying the range of his conjecture. The Eastern saint has sought to answer for himself and in his own waythose compelling questions which lie behind all religion--Whence? andWhither? and Why? He, too, has sought to come into right relations withthe power which manifests itself in the universe and he has sought, withan intensity of effort to which the West is strange, for a realcommunion with the power he has discovered. And above all, he has soughtdeliverance. 

_Why the West Questions the East_

He has not been so conscious of the need of forgiveness, sinceforgiveness plays no great part in his understanding of the sequences oflife, but he is anxious enough to be set free from pain and wearinessand at his best he has traced the relation of moral cause and effect farmore analytically than his Western brother. He has, indeed, introducedgreatly speculative elements in his balancing of life's accounts, butthe West has done that also, for the accounts of life persistentlyrefuse to be balanced unless something beyond ordinary experience istaken into account. The longing of the East for deliverance has, on thewhole, however, been less theological and more simple than the longingof the West. The West has been led to turn to the East for teaching anddeliverance through a combination of forces. I have noticed already thevery direct way in which New Thought, once committed to free speculationabout life and God, found congenial guidance in the Eastern cults, butother elements enter. The West has begun to share something of thedisillusionment of the East; so many things which promised to deliver ushave seemingly failed us. Our sciences have immeasurably enlarged ourknowledge and increased our power; they have added to our materialwell-being; they have worked their miracles for us; but they havebrought us neither peace nor true happiness. They have instead addedtheir own disturbances to our other perplexities and they haveultimately simply extended the frontiers of the mysterious and given anew and vaster quality to our problems. 

Our democracies and our humanitarian movements have shown us that thekeys both to liberty and progress are still in human nature and not informs of organization and government. As our civilizations have grownolder and particularly as they have wasted themselves in war, someshadow of the age-old weariness of the East has begun to fall across ourWestern world. We have also reacted strongly against materialism inthought and life; we have begun to see, as has been said, how the needand force of personality have the right to assert themselves against thedominance of things. We are beginning to recognize the right of religionand philosophy to suggest terms to science, and all these tendencieshave combined to produce a considerable group of people who, havingfound, for one reason or another, no real satisfaction in theirinherited Christianity, have welcomed the Eastern solution of theproblems of life, or else have positively turned to the East in the hopeof discovering what Western Christianity has not been able to give them. One should add also that the pure love of speculation which is one ofthe phases of modern thought has made an opening in the West for theEast. If unlimited speculation is the main business of life, the Easthas certainly everything to offer us, and for warning, as we shallpresently see, as well as for guidance. 

_Pantheism and Its Problems_

The older Eastern religions are, to begin with, Pantheistic. We haveseen how religion generally in its development takes form and contentfrom its governing conception of God. We have seen also that there arethree governing conceptions of God: He is conceived as Transcendent orImmanent, or else He is simply identified with the range and force ofthe universe. Pantheism is generally the creation of brooding wonder anduncritical thought; Pantheism feels rather than thinks; it acceptsrather than seeks to explain. It may be devout enough but its devotionis passive rather than active. Pantheism is never scientific in theaccepted sense of that term; it has little concern for law; it explainsby personalizing the forces with which it has to deal; it is akin to thetemper which finds some animating spirit in all natural phenomena. Theflow of waters, the growth of things, the drift of clouds across the skyare all, for Pantheism, simply the revelation of the action of someindwelling spirit or other, without which they could neither exist norgo on. 

At its worst Pantheism issues in a grotesque mythology and aninconceivable multiplication of divinity; the gods in the Hindu Pantheonare numbered by the thousands. At its best Pantheism issues in a kind ofmystic poetry and creates a devotee sensitive as Tagore to the fugitivegleams of beauty through the murk of things, voicing his prayers andinsights in rare phrases which are, on the whole, in arresting contrastto the actuality of life about him. Western devotion has been caught bythe mystic and poetical character of Pantheism and is, on the whole, strangely blind to its actual outcome in the life of its devotees. 

We all feel the suggestion of it in certain of our tempers. If we shouldtake out of much of our finest poetry suggestions akin to thesuggestions of Pantheism at its best, we should leave even Westernpoetry strangely poor, and we have beside, particularly in thecontemplation of rare natural beauty, a feeling of kinship with thespirit which clothes itself in dawn and twilight, or speaks through therhythmic beat of sea waves, or lifts itself against the skyline in farblue mountain summits, which helps us to understand this old, old faith. And if modern cults had done nothing more than appropriate the poetry ofPantheism they would have lent only a touch of oriental colour to thesomberness of Western life. 

But Theosophy and kindred cults have gone farther, since Pantheismitself must go farther. Directly you have identified creation and thecreative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are underbonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to tryto explain the ways in which a God, who is just to begin with all thatthere is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minuteand sometimes ungodlike ways. So Pantheism has its own scheme, not ofcreation, for there is no place in Pantheism for creation, but rather ofemanation. Eastern thought substitutes for the cosmogony of the OldTestament which simply carries the world back to a creative God andseeks to go no farther, and for the methods of Western science whichcarries creation back to ultimate force and is unable to go any farther, an entirely different system. 

_How the One Becomes the Many_

A paragraph in Mrs. Besant's "The Ancient Wisdom" (page 41) may help ushere. "Coming forth from the depths of the One Existence, from the Onebeyond all thought and all speech, a Logos, by imposing on Himself alimit, circumscribing voluntarily the range of His own Being, becomesthe manifested God, and tracing the limiting sphere of His activity thusoutlines the area of His universe. Within that sphere the universe isborn, is evolved, and dies; it lives, it moves, it has its being in Him;its matter is His emanation; its forces and energies are currents of Hislife; He is immanent in every atom, all-pervading, all-sustaining, all-evolving; He is its source and its end, its cause and its object, its centre and circumference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation, it breathes in Him as its encircling space; He is in everything andeverything in Him. Thus have the Sages of the Ancient Wisdom taught usof the beginning of the manifested worlds. "

It is not, of course, fair to say that here is something entirelydifferent from the line of Western scientific and philosophic thought orwholly alien to elements in modern Christianity. [65] The real problem ofmodern Theism is to connect what science discovers with what faithassumes. The broader generalization of science resolves action andexistence into the unities of an underlying and self-conserving forcewhich grows more and more subtle and tenuous as we follow it frommolecules to atoms, from atoms to eons and electrons, and even discernbeneath these something more impalpable than themselves, and there mustbe some way in which a creative power conceived by faith in terms ofpersonality has released the forces which have built themselves into theuniverse. The difference is, however, that Christian Theism refusescompletely to identify God and His universe. 

[Footnote 65: Indeed this is a better commentary on the prologue to theGospel of John and certain passages of Colossians than most of theorthodox theologies, and the self-limitation of God is the key to themoral freedom of the individual. ]

There is, after all, a profound distinction between creating andbecoming. Theosophy undertakes to explain for us how "the One beyond allthought and all speech" has become us and our universe. It attempts alsoto provide a way by which we, who are entangled, to our pain and sorrow, in the web of things thus woven, may escape from it and lose ourselvesagain in the One. It takes the wheel for its symbol in more senses thanone. Everything is a turning and returning and we ourselves are boundupon the wheel, carried down or up and finally to be set free, only bythe acceptance of a certain discipline of life. 

Theosophy, then, is both speculative and practical. Its speculationstake an immense range necessarily; it is no simple thing to follow theOne from the depths of His hidden existence to our earth-born lives andthe forces which flow about them. Only an expert deeply versed inEastern literature would be able to say whether Mrs. Besant follows herEastern masters faithfully in reporting their conclusions, but she hasplainly availed herself of many of the terms and suggestions of modernscience in interpreting them to us. If one could use a figure borrowedfrom electricity, the One is "stepped-down" through a series of planesand manifestations. Theosophy makes much of sevens--no use to askwhy--and bridges the gulf between ultimate and present realities by aseries of seven planes in which what is coarsest in the plane abovebecomes the germ of what is finest in the plane beneath. Even so, theOne does not directly touch even the highest of these seven planes. (Theosophy is, first of all, a study in descents and not in ascents;ascent comes later. ) There are between the One and the topmost planethree emanations (but perhaps we would better let Mrs. Besant speak tous herself): "The self-unfolding of the Logos in a threefold form: thefirst Logos the root of all being, from Him the second manifesting thetwo aspects of life and form, then the third Logos, the universal mind, that in which all archetypically exists, the source of beings, the fountof fashioning energies. "[66]

[Footnote 66: "The Ancient Wisdom, " p. 41. ]

_Evolution and Involution_

It would seem to the uninitiated that all this is a kind of smoke-screenof words to conceal our real ignorance of what we can never know andreally have no need to know. It is evidently just an attempt to bridgethe abyss between the immaterial and the material. If Theosophy wishesto bridge this abyss with conjecture, well and good, but its conjecturesreally leave us more deeply perplexed than we should be if we franklyrecognized and accepted the limitations of our ignorance. Once withinsight of the topmost of her seven planes, Mrs. Besant goes on a littlemore definitely though she confesses "of what occurs on the two higherplanes of the universe, the seventh and the sixth, we can form but thehaziest conception. " Each plane has what she calls its own "spiritmatter"; this spirit matter becomes coarser as we descend; each plane isan emanation from the plane above it and the spirit matter of each planewinds one more veil around those emanations of the immaterial One inwhom or which the whole process took its beginning. 

Theosophy does not speak of evolution as it attempts to account for ourmaterial world, it speaks of involution. Here it reverses what is mostdistinctive in modern Western religious thought as far as modern Westernreligious thought has accepted evolution. For us evolution, if we seekto give it a Theistic content, is God making manifest, in the vastascent of form and existence, an always fuller revelation of Himself. Our familiar phrase "the self-revelation of God" posits a power whichcan never for a moment be contained in all that is, but which may alwaysbe more clearly known as we follow His creative record from stage toascending stage. A grass blade is a richer revelation than a crystal, abird than a grass blade; personality is almost infinitely richer thanthe lower forms, some personalities are more perfectly the instrumentsof the divine self-revelation than others, and Christian faith acceptsin Jesus Christ the supreme self-revelation of God in terms of humanexperience. 

_Theosophy Undertakes to Offer Deliverance to the Entangled Soul_

But Theosophy reverses all this. As the One comes down from emanation toemanation and from plane to plane He is always more deeply entangled inthe veil of things, until on our last and lowest plane He is seven timesenwrapped and smothered. We must not, however, confuse this last andlowest plane with our little world, or even our universe; these are butsensible aspects of it and they are really the manifestation of thedeeply enwrapped Divine trying to struggle up and out again and sobuilding our realities about us and eventually bringing us, with all ourconscious powers, into being. (Here the theosophist has more in commonwith the evolutionist than one or two of the preceding paragraphs wouldseem to indicate. ) If we follow the figure of the wheel our presentplane, the last and lowest of them all, is really the turning point ofthe wheel; now it begins to turn back upon that from which it descended, and according to Theosophy our practical human task is so to availourselves of its upward movement as to be carried back with it towardthe high planes of perfect being. 

Theosophy undertakes to account for personality as it accounts for oursensible universe and along much the same line of speculation. Just asthe whole physical plane on which our world exists has really somewheredeep wrapped up within it some emanation of the One from whom everythingflows out, so our true selves, which have really come down from the Oneand should thence return, are wrapped up so deeply as also to be nearlost and smothered with, nevertheless, the power to get themselvesunwrapped. Our wrappings are our bodies, but we do not begin tounderstand Theosophy if we think of body in the ordinary sense; ourphysical body is only one and that the coarsest of the seven veils, forthere are seven here also, in which the true soul is enmeshed. We havereally seven bodies and we are not any one of them though each of themis useful and each one of them puts us in touch with a certain order ofexistence. Some of these bodies are mortal, others of them belong to thetruly enduring order. 

Now we are lost here unless we recognize the profound difference betweenall our usual ways of thinking or talking and the wisdom of Theosophy. Theosophy begins at the top and comes down, at least until it reachesour present world; it also begins at the inside and works out. We thinkof our physical bodies as the instruments, on one side at least, throughwhich the physical world communicates with us, but for the theosophistthey are only instruments through which we communicate with the world. Not quite so, however, for Theosophy recognizes the give and take ofexperience. The soul may slip out of the physical body in sleep andit--our physical body--is at the best a stupid, imprisoning, misleadingsort of a husk which has its practical uses but ought by no means to betaken too seriously. [67] Its coarse matter may be refined by disciplineand diet and apparently the physical body of a vegetarian is a finerinstrument than the physical body of one who feeds on the flesh ofanimals. 

[Footnote 67: For a striking modern phrasing of this see EdwardCarpenter's Free Verse "The Stupid Old Body. "]

_But Becomes Deeply Entangled Itself_

The physical body has also an etheric double which duplicates in a moresubtle way the constitution of the physical body. This is the vehicle ofthe life force, whatever that means. The physical body and its doubleare in a rough way the vehicles of the give and take of physicalexistence, but for the experiences of pain and pleasure and for thedwelling place of the passions, desires and emotions, we have an astralbody. Here the theosophist makes much use of vibrations and colours, andapparently our changing play of emotion is reflected in a play of colourwhich puts the chameleon to shame and makes us in our most excitedmoment rivals of the rainbow itself. The astral body shows upon occasionbrowns, dark reds and greens and their combinations, lit from time totime with flashes of scarlet. Our better feelings reveal themselves infiner colours; rose indicates love, blue, religious feeling, yellow, intelligence, and violet, spirituality. The Theosophist believes that wecan be trained to see all this and illustrates it in coloured plateswhich are, to the uninitiated, not over convincing. Beside the body ofphysical existence and the astral body we possess also a mental body. This is the seat of thought and mental action. In a sentence, maybe, thetheosophist is trying to say that we have a body for each phase ofpersonality through which we come into contact with the finer realitiesof the ascending planes of existence, and that the matter of thesebodies is more subtly refined as we pass from mere sensation to higherspiritual states. 

So within the astral body there is the mental body which, says Mrs. Besant, is of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer thanthe physical. This is the body which answers by its vibrations to ourchanges of thought. The mental body may be refined by fittingdisciplines as it is coarsened by evil thoughts. These thoughts maybecome "veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body incurableduring its period of life. " These bodies we discard in due time, thephysical at death and the astral when ready to enter the heaven world. What becomes of the mental body Mrs. Besant does not say. 

Beyond these are bodies which belong to man's timeless existence, curiously named and obscurely defined. There is apparently a causal bodywhich is possibly the vehicle of will and, more involved still, asuper-spiritual body which is the reality of God deep within us, and thecarrier and vehicle of our supreme and enduring personal values. Allthis is a curious enough mingling of psychology, a subtle materialism, and unbounded speculation; it is equally beyond proof and denial, thoughfor the proof of it the theosophist offers the testimony of those whosesenses are so refined by peculiar disciplines as to see in and aboutphysical form a play of light and colour which are themselves therevelation of mental and emotional states. We literally go about, according to this testimony, "trailing clouds of glory" or of gloom. While for the denial of it there is the deep-seated protest of Westernreason, that personality, complex as it is, cannot possibly be sobafflingly complex as this. 

_The West Accepts Suffering as a Challenge and Looks to PersonalImmortality for Victory_

We are, therefore, according to the theosophist, emanations from theDivine; deeply enveiled and much enshrouded within us is a timeless andchangeless self descended from the mysterious All which lies back of allthings and under high compulsion to seek again, in some vast turning ofthe wheel of Being, that from which we sprang. Theosophy becomes moreunderstandable in its practical reaction upon life, for this many veiledself is deeply involved in forces and states to which it is not reallyakin, and since it suffers greatly in being so involved the end ofexistence is, in discipline and ascent, to be set free from the pain andweariness of conscious existence, and to be absorbed in the changelesspeace of that ultimate reality out of which we have issued and backagain to which we are destined to go. We cannot be insensible to thevast scope of such a speculation as this for in one form or anotherthere are, in all religion and in the deeper yearnings of life, elementsakin to it. 

The order of which we are a part bears hard upon the soul. No one whomeditates deeply upon the strangeness of human destiny can fail torecognize the arresting estate of sensitive personality enmeshed in lawsand forces which drive on with so little apparent consideration forthose who are caught in the turning of their wheels, or ridden down intheir drive. Western faith has generally seen in this situation achallenge to personality to assert its own supremacy over the impersonaland subject its encompassing order to the high purposes of the soul. Ifwe are wounded in the fight we take our wounds as good soldiers; if theforces which face us are challengingly strong we fall back upon ourdeeper resources and in the end assert our own vaster powers. 

We accept the conditions of the struggle as a part of the discipline oflife and in our braver moments win from the fight itself those elementsof personal steadfastness which, matured in character, give moralmeaning to the endeavour, and though we anticipate an ultimate releaseand blessed compensation for the present travail of our souls, we findthat release and those compensations in a personal immortality whichattends the termination of the individual life in the present order, andcontinues that life conscious, free and triumphant in an immortal order, and even there we ask neither to be released from effort nor deniedprogress. We challenge the fortunes of the Unknown in the poet's phrase, and seek "other heights in other lives, God willing. "

_The East Balances the Accounts of Life in a Series of Reincarnations_

But just as the East casts the glamour of its speculation over theprocesses by which we have come to be where and what we are, so it caststhe glamour of its speculation over the process of our release. TheWest stakes everything on the issue of one individual life even if deathends it, or else it assumes a conscious continuity of life rich inmemory and persistent in individuality in whatever progress lies beyondthe grave. Those whom Dante saw ascending from terrace to terrace of theMount of Purgation were in all stages continuously and truly themselves. They knew the faults for which they made atonement and looked back withunclouded vision along all the stages by which they had climbed. TheEast makes little of the continuity of individual life and everything ofthe sequence of individual lives. It offers for the solution of ourproblem of ultimate destiny and also for its solution of the problem ofpain and sorrow and manifest inequality in human states, two simple andunescapable laws--the law of moral consequence and the law ofreincarnation. The East and the West both believe that "whatsoever a mansoweth that shall he also reap" but the West believes he gathers hisharvests of pain or punishment in a continuity of conscious existence, the vaster part of which is lived beyond death, with no rebirth and withno travelling again the light or shadowed ways of earth and time. TheChristian West believes also in redemption which is just that sharing ofGod in the process which makes faith and repentance definite and savingelements in the struggle of the soul. 

The East believes in a series of reincarnations, each reincarnate statetaking its character from the quality of the life before. The fact thatthe doors of recollection are shut and locked between each incarnateexistence makes no difference to the East. If a man has lived well andjustly and followed his light, he will hereafter be born higher up; ifhe has loved darkness because his deeds are evil, he will be born intosome low estate; he may descend into the beast or ascend into the saint. He will pay for present injustice with future suffering--

 "Or reach a hand through time to catch The far-off interest of tears"

even though he have no conscious remembrance of the faults for which heatones, or the sorrow for which he is recompensed. If he is steadfastthrough countless rebirths, the slow turning wheel will bear him higherand higher until he begins to ascend the successive planes, discoveringin each plane for which he has fitted himself a new wealth and realityof existence, until at last he is lost in the Infinite Existence and hisstruggle is ended. 

Perhaps the word "struggle" as here used is wrong. Deliverance for theEast is not so much struggle as acquiescence. For the theosophist desireis the master mischief maker. Desire leads us in wrong directions, complicates our spiritual problems and thrusts us against the turn ofthe wheel. We are rather, according to the theosophist, to reduce desireto its simplest terms, thereby freeing ourselves from restlessness, above all taking care not to hurt or embitter others. 

_Theosophy Produces a Distinct Type of Character_

There is no denying that here is a faith capable of producing adistinctive type of character. It tends at its best toward an extremeconscientiousness and an always excessive introspection; it creates alsoa vast and brooding patience. "In countries where reincarnation andkarma [the law of Cause and Effect] are taken for granted by everypeasant and labourer, the belief spreads a certain quiet acceptance ofinevitable troubles that conduces much to the calm and contentment ofordinary life. A man overwhelmed by misfortunes rails neither againstGod nor against his neighbours, but regards his troubles as the resultof his own past mistakes and ill-doings. He accepts them resignedly andmakes the best of them. .. . He realizes that his future lives depend onhis own exertions and that the law which brings him pain will bring himjoy just as inevitably if he sows the seed of good. Hence a certainlarge patience and philosophic view of life tending directly to socialstability and to general contentment. "[68]

[Footnote 68: "The Ancient Wisdom, " Besant, p. 273. ]

If such a faith as this be informed with humaneness and be deeplytempered with the principle of sacrifice, it may, and does, result in adistinct type of real goodness. It is possibly a good faith for helplessand more or less despairing folk, though it likely creates many of theevils from which it desires to escape. The very reach and subtlety andeven splendour of its speculation will make a strong appeal to minds ofa certain type. 

Two elements in the whole system doubtless account for what hold it hasupon the Western mind. It does offer, to begin with, a coherentexplanation of the problem of pain and sorrow. As we have seen more thanonce in this study, Western Christianity has been deficient just here. The accepted explanations of the shadowed side of life have not beengreat enough to meet the facts. Practically every cult we have studiedhas found its opportunity just here. Christian Science solves theproblem by denying the essential reality of pain and disease. NewThought believes in an underlying and loving good to which life may beso attuned as to bring us generally into the current of health andhappiness. Theosophy accepts pain, sorrow and all unhappy forces andexplains them as the inevitable result of wrong action either in this ora previous existence. 

_Theosophy a "Tour de Force" of the Imagination_

Christian Science saves the justice and affirms the love of God bymaking Him just a God with apparently no concern for and noparticipation in the shadowed side of life. New Thought saves the loveand justice of God by discovering in pain and unhappiness our lack ofharmony with Him. Theosophy meets the whole shadowed order along itsfull front and explains everything in terms of compensation. Now thereis much in this to appeal to our modern temper. Directly we recognizethe scales in which the consequences of our actions are weighed as beingso sensitive that not even a thought can be thrown in the one balancewithout disturbing the equilibrium, directly we recognize ourselves asinvolved in a sweep of law from whose consequences there is no possibleescape, we have at least a consistent scheme in which there is room forno evasion, and if we balance the manifold inequalities of one life bywhat has been done or left undone in some previous life, we are alwaysable to add weight enough to the scales to make them hang level. Trueenough, there is nothing to guide us here but imaginative ingenuity, butit is always possible to imagine some fault in a previous existencewhich we pay for in pain or loss or disappointment, or some good deeddone in a previous existence which accounts for our happy fortune inthis. And so justice is saved if only by a tour de force of theimagination. (Mrs. Besant, for example, explains the untimely death of achild as a penalty due the parents for unkindness to a child in anearlier incarnation. )

The speculative aspects of Theosophy also appeal to tempers which loveto dream without accepting the laborious discipline of a truly reasonedspeculation. To quote a phrase of Macaulay's quoted in turn by WilliamJames in one of his letters, there is a type of mind "utterly wanting inthe faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from aplausible supposition, " and there has been amongst us of late a markedincrease of this type of mind. There has been up to our own time nogreat amount of such speculation as this in the West. It is not nativeto the occidental temper and it has been held in control by ourscientific approach to the facts of our world and our experiencestherein. We have demanded for our speculations generally thedemonstration of fact and this has heretofore held us to a rathernarrow range, but that widening of the frontiers of the possible whichhas attended the new psychology with its emphasis upon the subconscious, along with the rather baffling character of psychic phenomena, hasopened the flood gates and released a tide of speculation which goes farbeyond the proved fact and accepts no limits but its own ingeniousaudacity. We have already seen how evident deficiencies in thediscipline of present-day education and the loose state of mind too muchin evidence amongst us has contributed to all this. There are everywherea great number of perplexed people who want to believe something andfind it far easier to believe in dreams and guesses and cloud-builtsystems than in restraining facts or even the rather clearlydemonstrated realities of the moral order, and such as these have founda wealth of material in Eastern speculation. 

_A Bridge of Clouds_

In trying to appraise the truth of Theosophy we have to disentangle thesystem and the needs and the seekings which lead its adherents to acceptit. These needs and seekings are, after all, near and familiar; they areonly our old questions Whence? and Whither? and Why? Theosophy is atleast the attempt to really answer some of the questions which Westernscience is either content or compelled to leave unanswered. The creativepoint of contact between personality and matter and force is deeplyenwrapped in mystery. Orthodox Christianity has been content to affirmthe facts of creation without asking any questions at all as to itsmethods. It has affirmed the omnipotence of the Creator and has found inHis omnipotence a satisfactory resting place. God is great enough to dowhat has been done and the detail of it is rather an affair for God thanman. Scientific speculation generally has gone back as far as it can goin the resolution of its forces and laws and recognized its ownlimitations, leaving the rest to the theologian and the philosopher. Theresult has been a gap which has not been bridged over. Theosophy hasundertaken to bridge that gap. But, examined more carefully, one seesthat the abyss has been crossed by nothing more solid than a fabric ofcloudy speculation. True enough these speculations are ingenious andtouched with suggestive light, but they are strangely insubstantial. After all they do absolutely nothing more than our Western affirmationof the immanence of God in life and force and law, and our Westernthought has the advantage alike in simplicity, in scientific basis andreverent self-restraint. 

We might as well recognize, and be done with it, that there arequestions here which in all human probability are insoluble. There areelements of mystery in life and the universe beyond our present andlikely our future power to definitely resolve. In the end faith can donothing more than rest in God and accept as an aspect of life itself thenecessary limits of our position. Our organized knowledge all tooquickly brings us to regions where faith and faith alone completes theinquiry. But on the other hand, a faith which too far outruns either inthe reach or audacity of its speculation those elements which organizedknowledge supplies and reason validates, loses itself in futilities orelse misleads us altogether. Eastern speculation is too far beyondeither ordered knowledge or right reason to be of any practical use inthe fruitful conduct of life. Believing too much does just as much harmas believing too little. 

Theosophy's seven planes and ascending emanations and sevenfold veilsand all the rest really explain nothing. On the other hand they tempttheir faithful to take conjecture for reality; they create a credulousand uncritical temper; they are hostile to that honest dealing with factwhich is just one condition of getting on at all. A brave confession ofignorance is often more truly reverent than knowing too many thingswhich are not so. As we approach more nearly the reality of things asthey are we find them always unexpectedly simple. The burden of proof isalways upon the murky and the complex. Those who try to escape thedifficulties in which our deeper understanding of the world order andour own personalities involve us, by taking refuge in Eastern occultismare on the wrong line. 

_The Difficulties of Reincarnation_

The same criticism holds true of Reincarnation. It is involved inhopeless difficulties. There are apparent injustices and inequalities inlife--so much is beyond debate--but we have in general, if we are honestenough to follow it through, the clue to even these. We are all partsof a struggling and, we trust, ascending order, an order which on thewhole is not so greatly concerned for the individual as we are concernedfor ourselves. We are hampered by our ignorance and we are deeplyinvolved one with the other. The orthodox theology which blameseverything upon sin as an abstraction is not convincing, but sin as theprojection of wrong desires, through self-will, into the field of humanaction is a fact to be constantly reckoned with. The individual andsocial consequences of it are enormous, nor can they be confined eitherto one individual or one generation. Heredity continues weakness as wellas strength. A vast deal of our bitter reaping is due to the wrong orfoolish sowing of others, though fortunately we share the good as wellas the bad. The laws of heredity will account for a vast deal in any onegeneration; the laws of social action and reaction for a great deal ofthe rest, and there is finally not a little for which we ourselves areresponsible. A good many of our problems ought to be approached from thepoint of view of the well-being of humanity generally and not our ownindividual destiny. 

We may safely trust our individual destiny to brave and unselfishliving. I ought not to test what I do or leave undone by its effect uponme in some future reincarnation; I ought to test it by the effect whichit has now upon the world of which I am a part, upon the generationwhich is to follow me and upon the quality of my own present life. Trueenough, the theosophist and myself find ourselves here in substantialagreement as to many of the things which a man ought practically to doto secure a happier future, but I maintain that the motives just namedare far more solid and worthy motives than the camouflaged selfishnessof Theosophy, and they are certainly in far deeper accord with theascertained facts of life. If we recognize that the more shadowed sideof life is partly the result of social and individual developmentconditioned by weakness, ignorance and sin, if we recognize that thepresent reaps what the past has sown, if we recognize that we suffer forthe faults of others and that no one of us may hope to climb far untilhis neighbour climbs with him, if we recognize that pain and sufferingare disciplinary, illuminating, educative, and finally, if we recognizethat we do possess the power to take all the more difficult elements inexperience and subdue them to an increased wealth of personality, wehave really all the elements in hand for the solution of the problem ofpain and sorrow in terms of action and understanding, and we do not needa series of reincarnations to help us out. 

Reincarnation really explains, as it claims to explain, neither theexceptional individual nor the apparently unmerited sufferings of theindividual, and it has beside inescapable difficulties of its own. Ithas to parallel the course of human existence with a range of supernalexistence for which there is absolutely no proof; it has to numericallyequalize birth and death--and these are not equal in an increasingterrestrial population--or else it has to assume, as it does of course, on other planes a storehouse of souls from which to draw. And more thanthat, it involves itself in a perfect tangle of heavenly bookkeeping. Here is the best Mrs. Besant can do to explain the difficulties ofreincarnation. "We have seen that man during his passage to physicaldeath loses, one after the other, his various bodies. .. . These are alldisintegrated and their particles remixed with the materials of theirseveral planes. .. . At this stage, then, only the man himself is left, the labourer who has brought his harvest home and has lived upon it tillit is all worked up into himself. The dawn of a new life begins. "[69]

[Footnote 69: "The Ancient Wisdom, " p. 202--passim. ]

To condense, he now proceeds to build up for himself a new body for hiscoming life on the lower mental level. "This again exactly representshis desire nature, faithfully reproducing the qualities he evolved inthe past; . .. Thus the man stands fully equipped for his nextincarnation. .. . Meanwhile action external to himself is being taken toprovide him with a physical body suitable for the expression of hisqualities. .. . All this is done by certain mighty spiritual Intelligencesoften spoken of as the lords of Karma because it is their function tosuperintend the working out of causes continually set going by thoughts, desires and actions. They hold the threads of destiny which each man haswoven, and guide the reincarnating man to the environment determined byhis past. The race, the nation, the family thus determined, what may becalled the mould of the physical body . .. Is built within the mother'swomb by the agency of an elemental, the thought of the Karmic lordsbeing its motive power. " The difficulties which this statement evadesare enormous, its conjectures are even more enormous. 

This is the subversion of all the facts of biology and heredity to acapricious scheme, built up just to answer a few practicalquestions--Why do we differ? Why do we suffer? Why are we happy? Surelythere are far more simple and reasonable answers to these questions thanthe answer of Theosophy, and the willingness of so many people to restin such an answer as this can prove only one of two things--the capacityof the mind for credulity or the arresting failure of those whosebusiness it is to interpret life to the perplexed, to have even beguntheir task. 

_Immortality a Nobler, Juster and Simpler Balancing of Life'sAccount-Book_

If there be a want of opportunity in our present existence for a truebalancing of the scales of justice, and if some future existence beneeded to make things right, then the Christian doctrine of immortalityhas an immense advantage over the reincarnations of Theosophy. We haveno right to underestimate the difficulties of a reasonable faith inimmortality, but they are simplicity itself as compared with thedifficulties of reincarnation, for reincarnation must answer everyquestion which the possibility of immortality raises and answer evenmore difficult questions of its own. It is far simpler to believe thathaving survived the shock of death we go on with the same essentialindividuality we had before death, than to believe that having survivedwe are sent back again through the gates of birth and are reallyreincarnated in another individuality. More than that, the Christianbelief in immortality is more ethical. The action and reaction of lifehave real meaning for me only as I know and remember. No theosophicevasion can take the force out of this. 

If I consciously connect to-day's pain with yesterday's pain with thefolly or fault of a previous existence of which I am really unconscious, the chain has been broken and no speculative question can supply themissing link. Very likely the accepted Christian doctrine of thefinality of life after death has given Theosophy an opportunity in theWest. Protestantism particularly has allowed absolutely no place afterdeath for repentance, has offered no new chance to the adventuring soul;its Hell and its Heaven have been final states. Catholicism has easedthe strain of this with purgatory, a belief wholly without Scripturalbasis, but nevertheless evolved in answer to great necessities of life. We need neither purgatory nor reincarnation; we need only therecognition of what is so centrally a part of any conception ofimmortality as to make one wonder why we have so greatly missed it; thereasonable confidence, that is, that we really go on very much as weleft off here. 

If there be in a future existence--and there must be if there be afuture existence--any room for repentance born of a clearer recognitionof fault and new and holier purposes born of a clearer understanding ofthe true values of life, then we shall go on in a truly moral process ofgrowth, availing ourselves always of the teachings of experience andworking toward the true well-being of our souls, and if the mercy andjustice of God be not the figment of our imagination those who have beenhardly dealt with here will be given new opportunity, the deficient andthe handicapped released from what weighed them down will find a newdeparture, and the justices of eternity complete what time began. Allthis will be accomplished not in a series of existences, separated onefrom the other by abysms of forgetfulness, but in a rememberedcontinuity of life deepening through endless growth. If this be onlyfaith and speculation it is at least a far more reasonable faith andspeculation than the alternative which Theosophy offers. Theosophy is aside issue in the real solution of the problems of life. 

_Pantheism at Its Best--and Its Worst_

Finally, though this is possibly unfair, Eastern Pantheism generallymust be tested by its fruits. We ought not, if we are to deal justlywith it, to ignore its better side. The East at its best has been strongin a type of life wanting in the West; the East has been rich inpatience and gentleness and in consideration for every kind of life, even the ant in the dust or the beast in the jungle. The East at itsbest has weighed conduct in delicate balances and traced the play ofcause and effect in character far, far beyond the West; it has beencontent with simple things and found its true wealth in the inner life. It has willingly, for the sake of truth and goodness, subjected itselfto disciplines, some of which are admirable, others of which areloathsome. It has at its best ventured everything for the well-being ofthe soul, even when it has misconceived that well-being. It has hadlittle of the hard driving quality of the West. Not a little of theteaching of Jesus fits in better with the temper and devotion of theOrient than the competitive materialism of the Occident. It is easilypossible to pass not a little of the Gospels through the interpretationof Eastern mysticism and find therein arresting correspondences. Forexample, a little book called "At the Feet of the Master" by a youngIndian student, has in it a wealth of insight and an understanding ofthe balanced conduct of life which is wanting in a good many of theWestern interpretations of life, but none the less, things must bejudged by their massed outcome and the massed outcome of EasternPantheism does not commend itself. 

The larger part of the religious literature of the East is upon adistinctly lower level than those parts of it which are brought to us byits devotees, and when Pantheism--and the basis of all Easternspeculation is Pantheistic--comes down from its high places and beginspractically to express itself in worship and the conduct of the crowd, then it is such as to give us pause. What Kipling calls "the sculpturedhorrors" of the carved fronts of the temples in Benares are no accident;they are simply the logical outcome of a faith which lifts the whole tothe level of the divine and has nothing beyond to correct what is bywhat ought or ought not to be. Almost inevitably Pantheistic religionsunduly exalt those powers which make for fertility of field and theincrease of life. As they do this they have on their side the elementalforces in human nature. When we begin to make gods of what after allmust be sternly subordinated to higher things, and the East has donethis in spite of its mystics and its dreamers, then we are not only indanger of sculpturing symbolic horrors on the fronts of our temples butof setting up therein strange altars to strange gods who are bestworshipped by strange rites. All this, inevitably enough, has given toEastern worship a more than earthly character, and has invested with thesanction of religion forces which it must always be the business ofreligion to subordinate and control. 

Along with all this has gone a grotesque mythology and an inconceivablemultiplication of divinity. Since no one but an expert can hope tounderstand the complexities of a faith like this, the East has developeda priestly class which bears harder upon its devotees and at the sametime more contemptuously separates itself from them than perhaps anypriestly class in the world. If the East is to return upon the West insubstituting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sternerforms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it iswhich, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altarsamongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the Westwithout recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself ofWestern science and informs itself with what Christianity has given tothe West. If these were taken out of it it would be hopeless. Since, therefore, its speculations carry us beyond reason or science, since itssolution of the problems of life is far too complex, since whatever isgood in it may be found more richly and simply in what we alreadypossess and since the practical outcome of it in the East itself is anarrested civilization which has many depths but few heights, one mustinevitably conclude that Theosophy has no real meaning for those whopossess already the knowledge which we have so laboriously gained andthe faith and insight which Christianity has brought us. 

X

SPIRITUALISM

Practically all the newer cults are quests in one general direction butdown more or less specific roads. Christian Science and New Thought areendeavours after health and well-being and the endeavour also toreconcile the more shadowed experiences of life with the love andgoodness of God. Theosophy and kindred cults are quests for illuminationand spiritual deliverance along other than the accepted lines ofChristian "redemption. " Spiritualism is practically the quest for thedemonstration of immortality through such physical phenomena as prove, at least to those who are persuaded by them, the survival of discarnatepersonality. 

All these movements involve in varying degrees the abnormal or thesupernormal. They imply generally another environment for personalitythan the environment which the ordered world of science supplies, andother laws than the laws of which it takes account. They are one inaffirming the mastery of the psychical over the physical. They eitheraffirm or imply faculties which do not depend upon the senses for theirmaterial; they suggest a range of personality which, if the facts whichthey supply are sound, demands a very considerable recasting of ouraccepted beliefs about ourselves. 

Christian Science and New Thought confine themselves largely to thepresent term of life, though Christian Science affirms strongly enoughthat death is an error of the mortal mind. New Thought places a shiftingemphasis upon immortality. Spiritualism centers wholly upon thephenomena of the discarnate life, upon the power of the discarnate tocommunicate with us and upon our power to receive and interpret theircommunications. 

Spiritualism, or Spiritism, the name its adherents prefer, is, however, by no means so simple as this definition of it. It may be anything fromthe credulity which accepts without question or analysis the trick of amedium, to the profound speculation of Meyer or Hyslop or the newadventures in psychology of Émile Boirac and his French associates. Itmay be a cult, a philosophy or an inquiry; it may organize itself informs of worship and separate itself entirely from the churches. It mayreinforce the faith of those who remain in their old communions. Spiritism has a long line of descent. The belief that the spirit mayleave the body and maintain a continued existence is very old. Mr. Herbert Spencer finds the genesis of this belief in dreams. Sinceprimitive men believed themselves able, in their dreams, to wander aboutwhile the body remained immobile and since in their dreams they met andspoke with their dead, they conceived an immaterial existence. Thespirit of a dead man, having left the body, would still go on about itsbusiness. They, therefore, set out food and drink upon his grave andsacrificed his dogs, his horses or his wives to serve him in hisdisembodied state. All this is familiar enough and perhaps the wholematter began as Mr. Spencer suggested, though it by no means ends there. 

The animism which grew out of this belief characterizes a vast deal ofearly religion, penetrates a vast deal of early thinking. Primitive manlived in a world constantly under the control of either friendly orhostile spirits and the really massive result of this faith of his isregistered in regions as remote as the capricious genders of Frenchnouns and the majestic strophes of the Hebrew Psalms, for the gendersare the shadowy survivals of a time when all things had their spirits, male or female, and the Psalms voice the faith for which thunder was thevoice of God and the hail was stored in His armoury. It would take usfar beyond the scope of our present inquiry to follow down this line inall its suggestive ramifications. Animism, medieval witchcraft and theconfused phenomena of knocks, rappings and the breaking and throwingabout of furniture and the like reported in all civilized countries forthe past two or three centuries, supply the general background formodern Spiritualism. (The whole subject is fully treated in the firstand second chapters of Podmore. )

_The Genesis of Modern Spiritualism_

Modern Spiritualism does not, however, claim for itself so ancient anancestry. In 1848 mysterious knockings were heard in the family of JohnD. Fox at Hydesville, N. Y. They appeared to have some purpose behindthem; the daughters of the family finally worked out a code: three rapsfor yes, one for no, two for doubt, and lo, a going concern wasestablished. It is interesting to note that mysterious noises had beenabout a century before heard in the family of the Wesleys in EpworthRectory, England. These noises came to be accepted quite placidly as anaspect of the interesting domestic life of the Wesleys. It has usuallybeen supposed that Hattie Wesley knew more about it than she cared totell and, as far as the illustrious founders of Methodism wereconcerned, there the matter rests. 

But the Fox sisters became professional mediums and upon these simplebeginnings a great superstructure has been built up. The modern interestin Spiritualism thus began on its physical side and in general thephysical phenomena of Spiritualism have become more bizarre and complexwith the growth of the cult. Raps, table tiltings, movements of articlesof furniture, playing upon musical instruments, slate writing, automaticwriting, of late the Ouija Board, materialization, levitation, apparentelongation of the medium's body, are all associated with Spiritism. Itwas natural that the voice also should become a medium of communication, though trance mediumship belongs, as we shall see, to a later stage ofdevelopment. 

Incidentally the movement created a kind of contagious hysteria whichnaturally multiplied the phenomena and made detached and criticalattitudes unduly difficult. For reasons already touched upon, Americahas been strongly predisposed to phases of public opinion which in theirintensity and want of balance have the generally acceptedcharacteristics of hysteria. Some of them have been religious, greatawakenings, revivals and the like. These in their more extreme form havebeen marked by trances, shoutings and catalepsy and, more normally, by apopular interest, strongly emotionalized, which may possess a realreligious value. Other religious movements have centered about thesecond coming of Christ and the end of the world. Many of these peculiarexcitements have been political. The whole offers the psychologists afascinating field and awaits its historian. [70] Yet the result is alwaysthe same. The critical faculty is for the time in abeyance; publicopinion is intolerant of contradiction; imposture is made easy andcharlatans and self-appointed prophets find a credulous following. Movements having this genesis and history are in themselves open tosuspicion. 

[Footnote 70: Sidis has a résumé of Social Epidemics in part three ofhis work on the "Psychology of Suggestion. "]

_It Crosses to England and the Continent_

The American interest in Spiritualism from 1848 to 1852 belongsdistinctly to this region. The Fox sisters have been generallydiscredited, but what they began carried on. In 1852 a Mrs. Hayden and alittle later a Mrs. Roberts introduced raps and table turnings toEngland. There, and more particularly on the Continent, Spiritualism metand merged with a second line of development which in turn reacted uponAmerican Spiritualism, and, in America, released movements on thesurface wholly unrelated to Spiritism. In France to a degree and inGermany strongly Mesmerism lent itself to spiritistic interpretations. Iquote Podmore, who is commenting upon the trance utterances of a Mrs. Lindquist: "It is to be noted that the ascription of these somnambulicutterances to spirit intelligences was in the circumstances not merelyeasy but almost inevitable. The entranced person was in a stateobviously differing very widely from either normal sleep or normalwakefulness; in the waking state she herself retained no recollection ofwhat happened in the trance; in the trance she habitually spoke of herwaking self in the third person, as of some one else; the intelligencewhich manifested in the trance obviously possessed powers of expressionand intellectual resources in some directions far greater than anydisplayed by the waking subject. Add to this that the tranceintelligence habitually reflected the ideas in general and especiallythe religious orthodoxy of her interlocutors; that on occasion sheshowed knowledge of their thoughts and intentions which could notapparently have been acquired by normal means; that she was, inparticular, extraordinarily skillful in diagnosing, prescribing for, andoccasionally foretelling the course of diseases in herself andothers--the proof must have seemed to the bystanders complete. "[71]

[Footnote 71: "Modern Spiritualism, " Podmore, Vol. I, p. 77. ]

_The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship_

We have here plainly enough the beginnings of trance mediumship. Itneeded only unstable personalities, capable of self-induced trancestates, so to widen all this as to supply the bases of spiritisticfaith and the material for the immensely laborious investigation of theSociety for Psychical Research. In the main, however, French interest inMesmerism and animal magnetism took a more scientific turn and issued inthe brilliant French studies in hypnotism. Spiritualism has made littleheadway in Catholic countries. The authority of the Church is thrown sostrongly against it as to prohibit the interest of the credulous and thepenetrating minds of the southern European scientists have been moreconcerned with the problems of abnormal personality than the continuedexistence of the discarnate. 

The interest in Germany took another line. There was less scientificinvestigation of hypnotism and trance states as abnormal modificationsof personality and far more interest in clairvoyance and spiritexistence. Men whose names carried weight accepted the spiritisticexplanation of phenomena ranging from broken flower pots to ghosts. Verylikely the German tendency toward mysticism and speculation explainsthis. Jung followed Swedenborg and the mystics generally in affirming apsychic body, but was a pioneer in associating it with the luminiferousether in a range of speculation which in our time supplies anhypothetical scientific basis for the environment of the discarnate. (SoSir Oliver Lodge. ) Podmore concludes that the foundations of modernSpiritualism were laid by the German magnetists of the first half of thenineteenth century. 

The movement developed along these lines till 1875. Once broadly inaction it touches at one point or another the whole region of theoccult. Many spiritualists found in Theosophy, for which existence isthe endless turning of a wheel, a cycle of death and rebirth, apseudo-philosophic support for their belief. Spiritualism appealednaturally to the lovers of the mystic and the unusual and it associateditself, to a degree, with extreme liberalism in the general developmentof religion. (On the whole, however, as far as religion goes, Spiritualism has created a religion of its own. ) Its advocates werelikely to be interested in phrenology, advanced social experiments, ormodification of the marriage laws. Spiritualistic phenomena themselvesbecame more varied and complex; trance mediumship became a professionwith a great increase of performers; slate writing was introduced andfinally materialization was achieved. All this might mean that thespirits were growing more adept in "getting through, " the mediums moreadept in technique, or else, which is more likely, that latent abnormalaspects of personality were being brought to light through suggestion, imitation and exercise. But no concerted effort was made by trained andimpartial observers to eliminate fraud, collect data and reachdependable conclusions. This has been finally attempted by the Societyfor Psychical Research and the results of their laborious investigationsare now at the service of the student of the occult. 

_The Society for Psychical Research Begins Its Work_

The weight which attaches to the names of many English and someAmerican members of the Society, the carefully guarded admission of someof them that there is in the whole region a possible residue ofphenomena which indicate communication between the living and thediscarnate and the profoundly unsettling influence of the war, reallyaccount for the renewed interest in Spiritualism in our own time. In1875 a few Englishmen, one of them a famous medium--StaintonMoses--formed a Psychological Society for the investigation ofsupernormal phenomena. (In general all this account of the history ofSpiritualism is greatly condensed from Podmore and Hill and the readeris referred to their works without specific reference. )

This first group dissolved upon the death of one of its members--thoughthat would seem to have been a good reason for continuing it--and in1882 Professor (afterward Sir) William Barrett, who had already donesome experimenting and had brought hypnotism and telepathy to the noticeof the British association for the advancement of science, consultedStainton Moses with the view of founding a society under better auspicesand the Society for Psychical Research was organized, with ProfessorHenry Sidgwick as first president. The Society undertook, according toits own statement:

 1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, otherwise than through the recognized sensory channels. 

 2. The study of hypnotism and mesmerism, and an inquiry into the alleged phenomena of clairvoyance. 

 3. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on testimony sufficiently strong and not too remote, of apparitions coinciding with some external event (as for instance a death) or giving information previously unknown to the percipient, or being seen by two or more persons independently of each other. 

 4. An inquiry into various alleged phenomena apparently inexplicable by known laws of nature, and commonly referred by Spiritualists to the agency of extra-human intelligences. 

 5. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects. [72]

[Footnote 72: "Spiritualism, " Hill, p. 100. ]

They sought also "to approach these various problems without prejudiceor prepossession of any kind and in the same spirit of exact andunimpassioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so manyproblems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated. "

As a matter of fact the region is the most obscure which inquiry hasever been called to enter. A noble rationality pervades the whole normalmaterial order, causes can be controlled, effects anticipated, lawsformulated and above all, the hypotheses of science are, if true, alwayscapable of a luminous and splendid verification. The disciplinedintellect moves through it all with a sense of "at-homeness" which isitself a testimony to profound correspondences between the human mindand the order with which, during its long, long unfolding, it has beenassociated in intimacies of action and reaction too close to beadequately set forth in words. But the mind does not rest easily in theregion which Spiritism claims for its own. 

_The Difficulties It Confronts_

Of course this is to beg the whole question. The more scientificallyminded spiritualists might fairly enough answer that they are attemptingto discover the laws of the occult and reduce an anarchical system toorder, that our feeling of strangeness in these regions is only becauseof our little contact with them. There are, they claim, undevelopedaspects of personality which we have had as yet little occasion to use, but which would, once they were fully brought into action, give us thesame sense of rapport with a super-sensible order that we now have inour contact with the sensible order. The crux of the whole contention isprobably just here and in view of what has heretofore been accomplishedin discovering and formulating the laws of the physical universe and inreducing an immense body of apparently unrelated facts to order, thereis doubtless possible a very great systematization of psychicalphenomena, even the most obscure. Nor may we readily set bounds to themeasure of human development. But at any rate the statement with whichthis paragraph began is true. The region which the Society for PsychicalResearch set out to explore is obscure and is, as yet, so far fromyielding to investigation that the investigators are not even agreed asto their facts, let alone the conclusions to be drawn from. 

The proceedings of the Society literally fill volumes (thirty-two); itwould require a specialist to follow them through and an analysis hereimpossible, rightly to evaluate them. When such careful investigators asHill and Podmore, dealing with the same body of fact, differ constantlyand diametrically in their conclusions, it is evident that the facts sofar collected have not cumulative force enough to establish in thegenerality of disciplined minds a substantial unanimity of conviction. There are far too many alternatives in the interpretation of the factsand, in general, the personal equation of the investigator colours theconclusions reached. Of course this is, in a measure, true in everyfield of investigation, but it is outstandingly true in psychicalresearch. 

_William James Enters the Field_

For some years the Society was mainly occupied with hypnotism andthought transference, with occasional reports on "apparitions, hauntedhouses, premonitions, automatic writing, crystal vision and multiplepersonality. " Professor William James' experiment with Mrs. Pipercarried the Society over into the field of trance mediumship. James hada sound scientific interest in every aspect of the play of humanconsciousness and was earlier than any of his contemporaries awakened tothe psychological value of abnormal mental states. He also loved fairplay. He made his first report on Mrs. Piper in 1886. He was unable, hesaid, "to resist the conviction that knowledge appeared in her tranceswhich she had never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, earsand wits. .. . What the source of this knowledge may be, I know not, andhave not a glimmer of explanatory suggestion to make, but from admittingthe fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. "

In a letter to Flourney dated August 9, 1908, James says of laterinvestigations: "It seems to me that these reports open a new chapter inthe history of automatism. .. . Evidently automatism is a word that coversan extraordinary variety of fact. " The reports of Mrs. Piper's sittingsfill a large place in the Society's records. Dr. Richard Hodgson andProfessor Hyslop were finally led to accept her trance utterances andwritings as spiritistic revelations. Podmore, after a most carefulanalysis, concludes that "Mrs. Piper's trance utterances indicate thepossession of some supernormal power of apprehension, at least thecapacity to read the unspoken and even unconscious thoughts and emotionsof other minds. "[73] He is willing to admit that if any case in thewhole history of Spiritualism points at communication with the spiritsof the dead, hers is that case, but he adds, "to other students of therecords, including the present writer, the evidence nevertheless appearsat present insufficient to justify the spiritualistic view even of aworking hypothesis. " "I cannot point to a single instance in which aprecise and unambiguous piece of information has been furnished, of akind which could not have proceeded from the medium's own mind, workingupon the materials provided in the hints let drop by the sitter. "[74]

[Footnote 73: "Modern Spiritualism, " Podmore, Vol. II, pp. 342-343. ]

[Footnote 74: "Modern Spiritualism, " Podmore, Vol. II, p. 345. ]

_The Limitations of the Scientist in Psychical Investigation_

It is impossible in this study to follow through the records of theSociety. A representative group of its members, some of them men whosenames carry weight in other regions, have been led by theirinvestigations to adopt the spiritistic hypothesis. Significantly, however, it is generally the scientist and not the psychologist whocommits himself most strongly to Spiritism. He is strongly impressed, aswas Sir William Crookes, by phenomena of one sort or another which donot come under his laws, and he assigns to them causes which liealtogether out of his field. Indeed the temper and training of thescientist handicap him in all psychical investigations. He has only oneof two alternatives: to explain what he sees in terms of what hislaboratories have told him, or else in terms of forces with which he isnot familiar. His training in careful experimentation may fit him totest and isolate physical phenomena, but if they cannot be explained interms of the forces and laws with which he is familiar his conclusionsare no more authoritative than the conclusions of any other reasonablyintelligent man. He may, therefore, lend the weight of a great name toconclusions--or conjectures--entirely outside his own province. Theelement of trickery in the ordinary professional séance isnotorious. [75] The ordinary physical phenomena of spiritism have almostwithout exception been duplicated by conjurers--many of whom havemystifying tricks of their own no medium can duplicate and even the mostunusual phenomena, such as Home's apparent ability to handle fireunburnt and his levitation can be paralleled in savage rites or theperformance of Indian fakirs, to which no professedly spiritisticexplanation is attached. In many instances a trained conjurer would befar more apt to detect fraud than a trained scientist. He would at leastknow where to look for a probable explanation. 

[Footnote 75: Carrington, "The Psychical Phenomena of Spiritualism, " pp. 6 and 7. ]

_The Society for Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing to TheirInvestigations_

If the explanations of the whole group of phenomena is not in the knownresident forces about us it is presumably in powers or aspects ofpersonality not yet fully known. Here the psychologist is a betterwitness than the scientist and it is significant that psychologists havebeen slower to accept the spiritistic hypothesis than the scientist. Hyslop is an exception but the extent to which Hyslop has of late gonein some of his reported utterances would seem to indicate that he haspassed far beyond the bonds of the scientific. And indeed, the wholetendency of those who let themselves go strongly with the spiritistictide is exactly in this direction. It ought, however, to be said thateven these members of the S. P. R. Who have become spiritistic havegenerally been savingly conservative in their conclusions. 

At any rate, the work of the Society for Psychical Research has givenintellectual standing to what was before a sort of hole and corneraffair under suspicion twice: first, because of the character of thoseinvolved, second, because of the character of what they revealed. It isdifficult for one not predisposed toward the occult and even stronglyprejudiced against it to deny in alleged spiritistic phenomena achallenging residuum which may in the end compel far-reachingmodifications in the conclusions both of science and psychology. By oneset of tests this residuum is unexpectedly small. One of the canons ofthe S. P. R. Is to reject the work of any medium once convicted orstrongly suspected of fraud. There is a vast literature in this regionthrough whose outstanding parts the writer has for a good while now beentrying to find his way, often enough ready to quote the Pope in the Ringand the Book. 

 "I have worn through this sombre wintry day With winter in my soul . .. Over these dismalest of documents"

The reports of sittings cover weary pages of murky statement; thedescriptions of the discarnate life are monotonously uniform andgoverned almost without exception by old, old conceptions of planes andspheres. There is always a preponderance of the trivial--though theadvocates of spiritism claim, and the justice of this claim must beallowed, that this is inevitable and that only through the veridicalcharacter of the inconsequential can the consequential be established. Moreover, the impartial student working over the records should at leastrecognize the pathetic importance which those, believing themselves tobe in touch with their own dead, naturally attach to even the mosttrivial instances. This sense of really being in touch, itself entirelysubjective, probably carries over ninety-nine out of every hundred whofinally become spiritists. It would be foolish to ignore thecontributive force of this sense. In one form or another it is the lastelement in our recognition of our friends, and it never can be judgedexternally. But on the other hand a recognition of the unwarrantedlengths to which--with lonely longing behind it--it may carry even thebest poised minds, must give us pause in accepting any conclusion thusreached. 

_The Very Small Number of Dependable Mediums_

Spiritistic literature is endlessly diffuse, but on the other hand themore dispassionate students rest their case on an unexpectedly smallbody of undiscredited evidence. Mrs. Piper, Home and Stainton Moses arethe mediums with whom the case of the S. P. R. Really stands or falls. Home was never detected in fraud and was non-professional. Sir WilliamCrookes' experiments in these physical phenomena were carried on withhim as medium. His work, however, was generally done for a small groupof already convinced followers and their testimony, while sincere andgenerally consistent, may often have been influenced in ways of whichthey themselves were not conscious. Podmore thinks them to have beenunduly suggestible and offers hallucinations as an alternativehypothesis. Stainton Moses was respected in his private life, a teacher, a clergyman and a private tutor. His specialties were the introductionof a great variety of articles--apports as they are called--at hissittings, levitation, table-tipping and automatic writing and the directvoice. His control was known as "Imperator" and this ghostly commanderfills a large place in the S. P. R. Literature. "Imperator" had a stronghomiletic instinct (remember that Moses was a clergyman) andcommunicated first and last through automatic writing, a considerableexposition of the spiritualistic creed, the larger part of which couldhave been preached from any liberal pulpit with no other effect on thehearers than to win their assent to blameless commonplaces--or, possibly, put them to sleep. 

Mrs. Piper affords the strongest evidence of what Podmore calls "Somesupernormal power of apprehension" in the entire history of trancemediumship. She was for years under the constant observation of acapable group by no means unanimously sympathetic with the spiritistichypothesis, and has never been detected in fraud. She contributed a verygreat amount of information to her sitters which she apparently couldnot and did not obtain from known sources. There are no physicalphenomena in connection with her work. The records of her séances fill alarge place in the proceedings of the S. P. R. And the case for spiritismcould be more safely rested with her than any other medium. 

But the point here is that these three--Home, Moses and Mrs. Piper--supply the larger part of material which the really trainedinvestigators of the last forty years are at all willing to takeseriously. If there have been only three mediums in forty years who havecommanded the general confidence--and Podmore does not feel absolutelysure of Home--of the group whose judgment the rest of us have to dependupon, we have a situation in which the average untrained seeker dealingwith the average medium can have no sound confidence at all. The wholeregion is shot through and through with uncertainties, deceits andalternative hypotheses. 

_Spiritism a Question of Testimony and Interpretation_

It is all fundamentally a matter of testimony. We have, or we have not, a body of fact for which we are in debt to observation. The observationmay be first hand--as in Sir Oliver Lodge's sittings where he reportswhat he saw and heard. It may be second hand as the cases reported inthe larger part of the authoritative literature of psychic phenomena. (Second hand, that is, for the authors and those who depend upon them. )Trustworthy observation is probably more difficult here than in anyregion of investigation. The whole situation is unfavourable; low lightsand high emotion, the instinctive tendency to read into the facts adesired content even in watching them, the possibility of hallucinationsand forms of hypnosis, all combine to render human testimony unreliableand introduce errors of observation. Nowhere can we be less sure of ourfacts and even when the facts are admitted the interpretation of themstill remains, and here the room for difference is equally great. Atbest we are dealing with forces not yet subdued to law, phenomena forwhich normal experience supplies no parallel. It is all a region ofintimations and possible permissions, but never for a moment ofinevitable conclusions. One must go slow enough in offering any opinionat all. The writer recognizes and accepts, to begin with, apreponderance of dependable testimony for physical phenomena not to beexplained in terms of any force with which science is now familiar. 

In this he goes beyond Podmore who would eliminate all physicalphenomena from the problem, and fully as far as Carrington. But SirWilliam Crookes never admitted entire error in this region, [76] and theconclusions of Geley (though he cites in part Eusapia Palladino, who ismore or less discredited) point in the same direction. His studies ofmaterialization are so vivid as to be uncanny and his photographs aseries of documents which still await explanation. [77] There would seemto be a possible exercise of personal force not dependent upon muscularpull or pressure, bodily movements operating against known laws and eventhe building of this mysterious force into complete or fragmentarybody-like forms. 

[Footnote 76: See Carrington, "The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, "p. 377. ]

[Footnote 77: Geley, "From the Unconscious to the Conscious. "]

On the psychical side there is dependable evidence for informationconveyed by supernormal means across considerable spaces--possibly longdistances and the power to secure and report information not gained inany normal way. These are bare statements capable of greatamplification. But they cover the ground. 

_Three Possible Explanations of So-Called Spiritistic Phenomena_

Admitting the facts, there are three possible explanations. First, theDaimonistic. There are, according to this theory, in the unseenworld--wherever and whatever that may be--an order of beings akin toourselves, either less or more highly developed, mischievous or benign. This is an old, old belief; it has pervaded animistic religions, fathered witchcraft, persisted in the belief of demoniac control, enriched folk lore, filled the friendly silences of the night withterror and haunted humanity. Now it has found its renaissance in thefull blaze of Twentieth Century Science. 

"It seems not improbable, " says Sir William Barrett, "that many of the_physical_ manifestations witnessed in a spiritualistic séance are theproduct of human-like but not really human intelligence--good or baddaimonia they may be, _elementals_ some have called them, whichaggregate round the medium; drawn from that particular plane of mentaland moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental andmoral plane of the medium. "[78] This is, with little enough alteration, the very point from which we set out in the remote dawn of our endeavourto interpret the mystery of the world about us. The only difference isthat Sir William has his daimon for a tipping table and the savage hadhis for a flowing spring. Sir William may be right but primitive man waswrong. The whole trend of science heretofore has been to eliminatecapricious and isolated elements from observed phenomena and includethem in a sweep of law for whose operation the resident forces in theuniverse and human personality are seen to be sufficient. Thedaimonistic hypothesis has always up to this time been proved not onlyunnecessary but positively misleading. It belongs to a region whereproof and disproof are equally impossible, but the weight of experienceand especially all our truer understandings of ourselves and our world, dearly bought through the intellectual travail of our race, are againstit. To accept it is really to turn back the clock and populate theunseen again with the creation of our fears or our fancies. It is at thebest the too easy solution of a challenging problem, at the worst anaspect of that renaissance of superstition which is one of the strangestcharacteristics of our own time. 

[Footnote 78: "On the Threshold of the Unseen, " p. 113. ]

The second explanation is spiritistic. There are unseen presences butthey are the discarnate who seek in the more trivial phenomena to bringthemselves to our attention and in the more important to assure us oftheir continued existence and satisfy their longing and ours in renewedpersonal contacts. Given a faith in immortality, this explanation isnatural enough--even inevitable. If the discarnate still live they mustremember and desire. Death does not end affection on our side. It shouldnot end affection on their side. There must be, moreover, what one maycall a discarnate status--an order, that is, of relationships andactivities in which discarnate personality realizes and expressesitself. Our racial curiosities about the state of the dead arequenchless. Every religion has its creeds, its dreams, its assurances. From the Nirvana of the Buddhist to the ardent paradise of theMohammedan, faith and longing have built their structure and peopled itwith their dead. Great ranges of literature are coloured by suchspeculations. Christian hymnology is instinct with them and not a littleof our noblest poetry. We have set our hells over against our heavensand opposed their terror to celestial splendours. Modern Spiritualismhas to head it the whole drive of such speculations as these. For if thegenerality have been content to leave the solution of the very greatdifficulties which any faith in immortality involves, to thedemonstrations of eventual experience, and rest in what is really thepoetry of their faith, others either more curious or more credulous seekthe testimony of the senses. Such as these naturally find what they seekin the phenomena of trance mediumship. They believe that the discarnateare constantly seeking to penetrate the veil between their order andours and avail themselves of every opportunity to recall themselves tothe memory of the incarnate. 

_Myers' Theory of Mediumship_

F. W. H. Myers undertakes to describe how this may be done from the pointof view of the spirit. "Seeking then for some open avenue, it discernssomething which corresponds to a _light_--a glimmer of translucency inthe confused darkness of our material world. This 'light' indicates a_sensitive_--a human organism so constituted that a spirit cantemporarily _inform_ or _control_ it, not necessarily interrupting thestream of the sensitive's ordinary consciousness; perhaps using a handonly, or perhaps, as in Mrs. Piper's case, using voice as well as hand, and occupying all the sensitive's channels of self-manifestation. "

There are, naturally, in all this unescapable elements of speculation. As a matter of fact anything which we may imagine about the discarnatelife may be almost unbelievably wide of the mark. Memory more thananything else is the binding force in personality. We know ourselves tobe in the morning what we were when we went to sleep the night before, simply because memory reassembles immediately the continuing elements ofour individual existences. More than that, we are greatly helped by oursurroundings; everything which meets us in the morning has associationsby which memory is served and, therefore, by the almost automaticprocess of putting together what we remember and surrendering ourselvesto the suggestions of what we see and meet we find our places in awaking, working world and go about our business. 

If we were to awake in a totally strange world where nothing was in anydegree at all similar to the world in which we went to sleep, we mightfind ourselves so sadly puzzled as to doubt our own identity, eventhough memory persisted in its identifying suggestion. And if inaddition to this we found ourselves without the contribution of physicalsensation to which we have always been used--sightless, soundless, touchless--one can easily imagine a shock in the face of which even themost strongly centered personality would give way. And yet such changesas this probably only faintly indicate the adjustments which thediscarnate are called upon to meet. It is as if we were asked to argueor to imagine from one dimension to another. 

These are difficulties, of course, which attend any conception ofimmortality, but we usually escape them by refusing to follow throughwhat they involve and taking refuge in a free poetic imaginationsustained by faith and enriched by tradition. In the face of all thisMyers' supposition, ingenious as it is, can do no more than repeat themore prosaic assumption which is the basis of spiritism, and that isthat the discarnate naturally desire to communicate with those whom theyhave left, one hardly dares say behind them for even that simple wordintroduces suppositions which may have no meaning at all, and wouldnaturally avail themselves of any possible opportunity. The wholeprocess, if it be a process, must lie in the region of suggestion. Ifthere be a telepathy between the living it is not impossible that thereshould be a telepathy between the living and the discarnate. 

_Telepathy: Between the Living or the Living and the Discarnate?_

There might be thus a kind of eager pressing of the departed againstthe doors which had been shut and not quite locked behind them, takingthe form of more or less obscure suggestion to which the medium would besensitive and so recreate in ways at which we can only guess some hintof the voice or presence of the discarnate. The suggestion would comefrom the other side. The form in which it is given to our world would bethe contribution of the medium. As far as there is any possibleexplanation of the facts of trance mediumship as a revelation from thedead it is somewhere here. 

Telepathy between the living is fairly well enough established to makethis a not impossible hypothesis, and even materialization might beaccounted for in the same way. Sir Oliver Lodge is inclined to discoverin the luminiferous ether an environment in which discarnate personalitycould function. But this is pure supposition, though others have adoptedit. Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive work on Monism andChristian Theism. But he suggests the ether only as a help to theimagination in meeting the difficulties of an immortal existence--theold Heaven and Hell having been made astronomically and geologicallyimpossible. But if Einstein should upset the hypothesis of the ether allthis would go the way of the Heaven and Hell of Dante. 

We cannot eliminate, however, in a supposition so vague as this thecontributive elements supplied by the friends themselves to whom thecommunication is supposed to be addressed and by whom it is certainlyinterpreted, for if the trance medium is open to suggestion from thediscarnate side, the medium must be equally open to suggestion from theliving, a suggestion likely to be very much stronger, more distinct, more compelling. 

The real crux of the whole problem is the disentanglement of thesepossible lines of suggestion and the assignment of them to their truesources. We may, the writer believes, eliminate as far as theirevidential value is concerned, all physical phenomena. In doing this weneed not necessarily deny the reality of some of the physical phenomenabut the larger part of the residue which might possibly be left afterthe elimination of fraud on the part of the medium and unintentionalmisrepresentation on the part of the witnesses is so utterly meaninglessas to have no value at all. The only physical phenomena which can haveany direct bearing on spirit communication are the tappings and tabletippings which can by a deal of ingenuity be made to spell out a messageor answer questions yes or no. The same question as to the source of thesuggestion enters here. Even if we admit the taps to spell out amessage, we have still to decide from whom the message comes and themessages alleged to be contributed through the voice are so much morefull and intelligible as to leave the whole question standing or fallingwith the credibility of voice trance mediumship. 

_Controls_

The usual machinery of a séance creates suspicion. Most mediums havecontrols. Nothing is more capricious than these controls. They may bepeople who really never existed at all. The genesis of Mrs. Piper'scontrol, Dr. Phinuit, is suggestive. "It would appear that Mrs. Piper in1884 had visited for advice a professional clairvoyant whose leadingcontrol claimed to be a Frenchman named Finné, or Finnett. "[79] WhenMrs. Piper was later seen by William James, a French doctor hadsucceeded in obtaining almost exclusive control and his name wasreported to be Phinuit. Beyond debate, as far as name goes, here is akind of transmuted suggestion. The Finnett of the French clairvoyant, who may or may not have really lived, becomes the Phinuit of Mrs. Piper, for whose existence there is apparently no testimony at all. 

[Footnote 79: Podmore's "Modern Spiritualism, " Vol. II, p. 333. ]

The controls have sometimes been Indians and indeed almost any one mayappear as a control--Longfellow, for example, or Mrs. Siddons, or Bachor Vanderbilt. In a region where disproof and proof are equallyimpossible this element of capricious control is suspicious. It is muchmore likely to be some obscure casting up of the medium's mind, throughlines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, than torepresent the personalities so named. In Raymond the control is oneMoonstone, or a little Indian girl called Freda or Feda, who speaks ofherself in the third person and who reports a great many silly things ina very silly way. 

It is possible, of course, to say that these thus named are spiritmediums as necessary for the transfer of suggestion from the discarnateorder as mediums seem to be in the incarnate order, and that abnormalpersonalities are as much needed on one side as the other through theabnormality of the whole process. But this is patently to beg thequestion. There is room in the whole process for the trivial, even theinconsequential. As the advocates of spiritism have urged, identification very often turns on apparently trivial things but it isdifficult to justify the very great element of the capricious andactually foolish which enters so largely into the records of allsittings. It would seem as if death robbed grave personalities of theirgravity, the strong of their force and the wise of their wisdom, andthis is so hard to believe as to make us wonder whether we are notreally dealing with something which belongs to an entirely differentregion and is open to an entirely different line of explanation. 

But beyond such considerations as these, which may or may not haveforce, there remains the graver question still--the question of theidentification of the sources from which the intelligible residue ofcommunications is received. If we fall back upon suggestion there arealways two general sources of suggestion--the incarnate and thediscarnate, and among the incarnate themselves there are manifoldsources of suggestion. The sitter may be unconsciously supplying thematerial which the medium is receiving, recasting and giving back again, or the medium may be reporting what is received from other incarnatesources than the sitter. (This, of course, when we have eliminated allthat might possibly be contributed by the medium. )

_The Dilemma of Spiritism_

Anything, therefore, which is known to the living may be the source ofthe medium's information. Only those things, therefore, which areutterly unknown to the living anywhere, which cannot possibly have beenknown by the medium himself or herself, can be finally and conclusivelya testimony to communications from the dead. But unless the informationthus received is known to the living, its truth or falsity can never beproved or disproved. This is the dilemma which spiritism is finallybrought to face and from this dilemma there is absolutely no escape. Itdoes not forbid the conclusions which may be drawn from a seemingpreponderance of evidence, but it does forbid absolute certainty, for, to repeat, if the information is to be verified it must be verified bythe living, which proves that some one does possess it and may havecommunicated it--if we assume such communication to be possible--to themedium. On the other hand, if no one at all possesses the information, then we may never be sure that it is real information, or anything elsethan a creation of an excited imagination. 

There is one test here which, if it were really made under absolutelydependable conditions, conditions, that is, in no wise open to suspicionor misunderstanding, might be final. If a message written before deathand so sealed as to be unknown to any one save the one who wrote it, could be correctly reported, it would have, everything else beingright, an immense force. (Though even here clairvoyance--for which, onthe whole, there is a pretty dependable evidence--might afford the trueexplanation. ) F. W. H. Myers left such a message as this. In January, 1891, he sent Sir Oliver Lodge a "sealed envelope, in the hope thatafter his death the communication contained in the envelope would beable to be given by means of a medium. Many different messages obtainedby a well-known medium, Madame Verrall, and coming supposedly fromFrederick Myers, led them to believe that they represented thiscommunication. The envelope was opened in December, 1904, and 'it wasfound that there was no resemblance between its actual contents and whatwas alleged by the script to be contained in it. '"[80] If there is anyauthentic case of this final test being successfully maintained, thewriter does not know it. There are instances of hidden articlesdiscovered, but these tests by no means possess the same force oftestimony. 

[Footnote 80: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future, " p. 278. ]

We may assume, then, that we have no absolute demonstration of spiritcommunication. We have only a very complex group of phenomena capable ofvarying explanations. Any fair-minded student of the whole subject mustrecognize that men who have had ample opportunity for first handinvestigation, not hasty in their conclusions and in some instances ofvery great intellectual force, have taken an opposite view. They havefelt the testimony to be both sound and sufficient. There is anunescapable personal equation here which probably finally determinesdivergent attitudes. As has been said before, those generally who haveaccepted the spiritistic explanation have been led to do so throughcommunications in which they discovered some personal note or touch, towhich they themselves would be hospitably susceptible and which wouldhave far less weight with those whose affections and previousassociations were not thus involved. This does not necessarily provetheir conclusions to have been false. Perhaps just this personal elementis necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexingand even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely inthe face of spiritism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as thecredulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything which comesthrough. 

_The Influence of Spiritism Upon Its Adherents_

There are other considerations which bear more or less indirectly uponthis difficult matter, but which have their weight. In general, thosewho have whole-heartedly accepted spiritism have been unable thereafterto maintain the balanced detachment which they urge upon others. Theytend to become unduly credulous; they force their explanation beyond itsnecessary limits; they tend to become persons of the idée fixe type;they become sponsors for extravagant stories, and, in general, leadthose who are influenced by their position or name far beyond the limitswhich impartial investigation, even on the part of those sympathetic, has as yet justified. Those descriptions of the discarnate state, moreover, which reach us through mediums are undependable. 

There is a machinery of planes and spheres and emanations andreincarnations which is not at all peculiar to spiritism but belongs tothe fringes of the occult in every manifestation of it, which isperpetually recurrent in modern spiritualistic literature. We are on thefrontiers of a region where the reason which steadies us in thepractical conduct of life and guides us in an order with which we arefamiliar through age-old inheritances, has no value at all. Our veryterminology ceases to have any meaning. A generous creative imaginationmay build for itself what cities it will of habitation, furnish them asit desires and try to conceive, as it has power, the experiences andprogressions of the discarnate, but to invest these imaginations withevidential accuracy is to break down all the limits between thedependable and the undependable. 

And finally, though this is rather a commonplace observation than anaspect of our investigation, there is little to be gained in thenecessary business of solid living by such an interweaving of the twoworlds as spiritism carries with it. One life at a time is plainlyenough all that we are equal to. Those who surrender themselves to suchconclusions and inquiries are in very great danger of being so detachedfrom the actualities of the present order as to become themselves errantand eccentric spirits, finding their true interests in endless séancesand investigations which have no practical bearing upon life as it nowis. 

_The Real Alternative to Spiritism_

The writer's observation of the effect of much going to mediums uponthose whom he has personally known leads him to distrust the wholematter and possibly to react too strongly against it. A discriminatingcritic has said that Spiritualism is not Spiritualism at all, but asubtle materialism, in that it is the effort to verify the reality ofthe spiritual in terms of the material. It is, therefore, just one moreunexpected aspect of the hard skepticism of the time, which trustsnothing it cannot hear, or see, or touch. A faith which is not solidlyestablished in reason, which does not continue and complete in its ownregions what we know and understand, is a cloud-built faith, but afaith, on the other hand, which refuses to adventure beyond the limitsof the senses is a faith too largely empty of any noble content. 

If the phenomena under examination, then, cannot be explained in termsof animism and if the spiritistic hypothesis is gravely open toquestion, what explanation is left? In what follows the writer has beengreatly influenced by the suggestion of the students of abnormalpersonality generally, and partly by the work of certain Frenchmen who, with French logic and brilliancy of insight, are working towardfar-reaching psychological restatements and even to recasting of theaccepted scientific understandings of matter and force. Maeterlinck sayssomewhere in substance that our universe is as tightly sealed as asphere of steel and that whatever happens inside must be explained interms of its own resident forces, and, in general, the whole of scienceand the weight of experience are on Maeterlinck's side. Of course thisassumes that a good many things have been put inside this sphere tobegin with. Speaking in terms of religion, this does not shut God out ofthe world, but it does shut up life and experience to conformity withtheir own laws and forces them to explain their phenomena in terms oftheir own content. 

In a sentence, just as the resident forces of the outside world havebeen heretofore sufficient, in the measure that we have been able todiscover them, to explain all the phenomena of the outside world, it isreasonable to believe that the content of personality is sufficient toexplain all personal phenomena, whether normal or abnormal, and that itis to ourselves and not to the discarnate that we have to look for theexplanation of the phenomena of alleged spiritism. 

_The Investigations of Émile Boirac_

The men who are working along this line, particularly Geley and ÉmileBoirac, by no means deny the phenomena, but they offer another solution. Boirac, particularly, finds his point of departure in hypnotism andsuggestibility. Now here is a continuation of the line of approach andinterpretation which cleared up the whole confused matter of mesmerism. We have already seen how the French investigators found the explanationof what Mesmer and those who followed him have been able to accomplish, not in magnetic influence or any such thing, but in the remarkablechanges produced in personality by exterior or autosuggestion, and justas this was the key to the phenomena of mesmerism, it is more likelythan anything else to prove the key to the explanation of the phenomenaof spiritualism, for these are really nothing more than simply aspectsof the trance state, however induced. 

It is not necessary to follow, in this connection, Boirac's analysis ofthe phenomena attendant upon the trance state, or to consider histheories as to hypnosis itself. He believes that there are in ourpersonalities hidden forces which, in the normal conduct of life, arenot brought into action. They are no necessary part of our adjustment toour working environment; on the whole they complicate rather thansimplify the business of living and they are best--though this is nothis statement but the writer's conclusion from the whole matter--theyare best left unawakened. What we are normally is the outcome of theadjustment of personality to those creative and shaping forces inresponse to which life is most happily and usefully carried on. But whenthe waking self and normal self is for the moment put in abeyance andnew forces are evoked from the "vasty deep" of our souls, we are capableof an entirely different set of manifestations. First of all, thoseusually associated with the hypnotic state which do not need to befurther considered here--a great docility to suggestion, unconsciousnessto pain and the like. We have also the possibility of powers whichBoirac calls magnetoidal. "These appear to involve the intervention offorces still unknown, distinct from those that science has so fardiscovered and studied, but of a physical nature and more or lessanalogous to the radiating forces of physics: light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc. "[81]

[Footnote 81: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future, " p. 24. Some recentFrench investigations seem to indicate that this force--Myers'Telekinesis--operating through barriers, changes the magnetic propertiesof that through which it passes. Carrington, the most skeptical studentin this region, is inclined to admit its existence. See "The PhysicalPhenomena of Spiritualism, " p. 359. ]

Under this general head he considers Animal Magnetism, what is knowngenerally as mesmerism, the power, that is, to create hypnotic states inothers; the phenomena of Telepathy "comprising numerous varieties, suchas the transmission or penetration of thought, the exteriorization ofthe sensitiveness, psychometry, telepathy, clairvoyance or lucidity, etc. , " and finally states "where physical matter appears to exert overanimate beings, especially human beings, an action that does not seem tobe explicable by any physical or chemical properties already known. " Hebelieves also that there is in human beings a radiating influencesusceptible of being exercised at a distance over other animate beingsor else upon inanimate objects. He finds in trance mediumship all theelements which enter into any hypnotic state. "The trance is producedand developed spontaneously, without the intervention of any visibleoperator, under the sole effect of the nervous and mental conditions inwhich the medium is placed, and among which the _belief in spirits_ andthe expectation of their intervention would appear to play aconsiderable part. "[82] The italicized words "a belief in spirits" areextremely significant. In the entranced personality there is thesuggestion, already strongly established, that whatever is experiencedduring the trance will be due to spirit intervention or revelation. Thisintroduces the element of expectant attention. We know on the physicalside of what expectant attention is capable. It becomes a real factor inall faith healing; it may produce, either for the better or the worse, far-reaching changes in physical states and it is perfectly possible forsuch an expectant attention once fully in action in the trance--given ofcourse, to begin with, the attitude and interests of the medium in awaking state--to create all the machinery of controls, revelation andthe like, which characterize trance mediumship. 

[Footnote 82: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future, " p. 271. ]

Boirac finds, therefore, in spiritism a complex determined by certainparticular nervous and mental states into which there enter, in one formor another, almost all the facts of abnormal psychology and he believesthat science, faithful to the principle of economy, should consider thealleged phenomena of spiritism, until proved to the contrary, reducibleto facts of the preceding orders. He does not call the spiritistichypothesis impossible; he does believe it ought not to be called inuntil every other explanation has been examined and found inadequate andhe is not inclined to believe that we have as yet exhausted otherpossible explanations. 

One man's authority here is by no means final. F. W. H. Myers has takeninto consideration many of the facts upon which Boirac dwells and on thewhole has reached a different conclusion. But, in general, the moredeeply we advance into the region of abnormal personality and thephenomena of hypnotic and related states, the more reason there seems tobe for believing that there are resident in human personality powerswhich, if at once evoked and released, are sufficient to account for allmediumistic revelations without assuming that they come from thediscarnate. 

_Geley's Conclusions_

Geley has gone much farther in some directions here than any one else. He is more concerned with the physical phenomena. He has a strikingseries of photographs of materialization, the authenticity of which itis difficult to doubt. He finds an ascending series in abnormalpsychology from neuropathic states to mediumship with gradations whichintensify the abnormal or the supernormal, but in which the continuityof development is never broken. His analyses here are both keen andsuggestive and tend to confirm the conclusions of other students that wehave resident in human personality elements which are adequate to theexplanation of any phenomena which have been as yet presented. 

As far as the physical phenomena go, he cites experiments which seem toreveal "threads of substance and rigid rods, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, proceeding from the fingers of the medium" andserving as a real mechanism for the movement of distant and sometimesquite heavy articles. He argues from this that there is a possibleexteriorization of power which may itself be governed by ideas andbelieves also that such facts as this will eventually compel us torecast our conceptions of matter and force and profoundly affect biologyand all evolutionary theories. The whole matter is necessarily obscure, but such studies do give a new direction and a larger significance toour whole subject matter. 

In substance the spiritistic hypothesis is inadequate; it is too simple, too easy. We are evidently only upon the threshold of the whole subject. All conclusions are necessarily inconclusive; there is no region inwhich one has less right to be dogmatic. The bearing of it all uponimmortality seems to the writer to be not at all where the spiritistsplace it. If human personality has in itself such latent powers, ifthere are these extensions of a mysterious force which operate beyondour normal mechanism, if there are contacts of consciousness deeper thanconsciousness itself in which information is given and received outsidenormal methods of communication, we are led to conceive that what forwant of a better name we call spirit has an unexpected range and force. We are by no means so shut in by the walls of the material and thesensible as we have heretofore supposed. There is a transcendence ofspirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give uspause. If, in the murky ways which have been brought to our attention, spirit can transcend matter, we have at least one more reason foraffirming its supremacy and one more suggestion of a force or a realitywhich may be able to survive even the dissolution of matter itself. Inother words, here is a line of testimony, richly suggestive, though byno means clear, to the power of the soul to make its own conditions, andwhat is immortality but just this?

The phenomena of so-called spiritism, while not as yet justifyingSpiritualism, certainly make a dogmatic materialism increasinglydifferent. Those of us who are as anxious for a sustaining faith inimmortality as any of our comrades in the great quest may possibly be, but who are as yet unwilling to accept their conclusions, maynevertheless find in this subject matter which is common both to us andto them, the permission to believe that that which is most distinctlyourselves possesses enduring possibilities. If it may from time to timebreak through in curious ways the walls which now shut it in, may it notin some very real way pass through the gate which Death opens and stillcontinue in such a richness of consciousness and identity as to organizefor itself another life beyond the grave?

_The Meaning of Spiritism for Faith_

Faith may find its permissions and witnesses in many regions. The writerbelieves that faith in immortality finds an added permission in thisregion also. Beyond debate, there are laws which we now but dimlydiscern and possible forces which only now and again touch the coasts ofour present experience, as tides which sweep in from distant andmysterious seas. Beyond debate, we may not confine the interplay of mindwith mind to purely physical channels, and under exceptionalcircumstances effects may be produced whose causes we have not yet beenable to tabulate. Our conscious lives are rooted deeper than we dream. They reach out in directions which we do not ourselves know. It may wellbe, therefore, that they ascend to heights whose summits we do not see, and possess a permanence independent of the body which they inhabit, orthe things of seeming sense which surround them, and it may be also thatwhat is now occult and perplexing and capricious may in the futurebecome as truly an organized science as the alchemy and the astrology ofthe Middle Ages have become the chemistry and astronomy of our own time. Beyond this one may assert the wholesome commonplace that the mainbusiness of living is in the region of the known and the normal. It isfor our own well-being that the veil hangs dark between this world andthe next. An order in which there was constant passing and repassingwould be impossible. It would be either one thing or the other. It doesdemoralize us to be always searching after the secrets of the unseen. Might it not demoralize those who have passed through the veil to bealways trying to come back? Surely the most fitting preparation for whatawaits us hereafter is the brave conduct of life under those laws andconditions which are the revelation of the whole solid experience of ourrace. Beyond this it is difficult to go and beyond this it is notnecessary to go. 

XI

MINOR CULTS: THE MEANING OF THE CULTS FOR THE CHURCH

_Border-land Cults_

The cults which we have so far considered are the outstanding forms ofmodern free religious movements, but they do not begin to exhaust thesubject matter. Even the outstanding cults have their own border-lands. New Thought is particularly rich in variants and there are in allAmerican cities sporadic, distantly related and always shiftingmovements--groups which gather about this or that leader, maintainthemselves for a little and then dissolve, to be recreated around othercenters with perhaps a change of personnel. The Masonic Temple inChicago is said to be occupied on Sundays all day long by larger orsmaller groups which may be societies for ethical culture or with somesocial program or other, or for the study of Oriental religions. Onewould need to attend them all and saturate himself far more deeply thanis possible for any single investigator in their creeds or theircontentions to appraise them justly. Their real significance is neitherin their organization, for they have little organization, nor in theircreed, but in their temper. They represent reaction, restlessness andthe spiritual confusion of the time. They can be explained--in part atleast--in terms of that social deracination to which reference hasalready been made. They represent also an excess of individualism in theregion of religion and its border-lands. 

An examination of the church advertisement pages in the newspapers ofNew York, Detroit, Chicago or San Francisco reveals their extent, theirvariety and their ingenuity in finding names for themselves. On Sunday, February 25th, the Detroit papers carried advertisements of Vedanta, Spiritist and Spiritualist groups (the Spiritist group calls itself "TheSpirit Temple of Light and Truth"), The Ultimate Thought Society, TheFirst Universal Spiritual Church, The Church of Psychic Research, ThePhilosophical Church of Natural Law, Unity Center, The Culture ofIsolan, Theosophy, Divine Science Center, and Lectures on DivineMetaphysics. Their leaders advertise such themes as: The OpulentConsciousness, The Law of Non-Attachment, Psychic Senses andSpirituality, The Continuity of Life, The Spiritualism of Shakespeare, The Voiceless Code of the Cosmos, The Godlikeness of Divine Metaphysicsin Business. Their themes are not more bizarre, it must be confessed, than some of the topics announced for the orthodox churches. (Indeed thechurch advertisement page in cities whose churches indulge generously indisplay advertisements is not altogether reassuring reading. ) But, ingeneral, this list which can be duplicated in almost any large city istestimony enough to a confusion of cults and a confusion of thought. Asfar as they can be classified, according to the scheme of this study, they are variants of New Thought, Theosophy and Spiritualism. If theywere classified according to William James' "Varieties of ReligiousExperience" they would be seen as mystical rather than rational, speculative rather than practical. 

Fort Newton, who speaks of them perhaps more disrespectfully than theydeserve as "bootleggers in religion, " finds in these lesser movementsgenerally a protest against the excessively external in the life of theChurch to-day and a testimony to the quenchless longing of the soul fora religion which may be known and lived out in terms of an innerexperience. But this certainly is not true of all of them. 

_Bahaism_

There is, however, one other larger and more coherent cult, difficult toclassify, which deserves a more extended notice. That is Bahaism, which, as it is now taking form, is a leaven rather than a cult. It is anattempt after spiritual unity and the reduction of religion to verysimple and inclusive forms and a challenge to the followers of religionswidely separated on the surface to be more true to what is deepest intheir faith. It has a long and stirring history and curiously enough isdrawn from Mohammedan sources. Its basal literatures are Arabic andPersian, "so numerous and in some cases so voluminous that it wouldhardly be possible for the most industrious student to read in theirentirety even those which are accessible, a half dozen of the best knowncollections in Europe. "

We find its genesis, historically, in certain expectations long held byPersian Mohammedans akin to Jewish Messianic expectations held beforeand at the time of Christ. There has been, we know, a tradition ofdisputed succession in Mohammedanism ever since the death of theprophet. Persian Mohammedans believed the true successor of Mohammed tohave been unjustly deprived of his temporal supremacy and they trace along line of true successors whose divine right would some day berecognized and reëstablished. Perhaps we might find a parallel hereamong those Englishmen who believe that the true succession of theEnglish throne should be in the house of the Stuarts, or those royalistsin France who champion the descendants of one or the other formerreigning houses. But the Persian faithful have gone farther than that. They believe that the last true successor of Mohammed who disappeared inthe tenth century never died, but is still living in a mysterious city, surrounded by a band of faithful disciples and "that at the end of timehe will issue forth and 'fill the earth with justice after it has beenfilled with iniquity. '" A parallel here would be the old stories ofFrederick Barbarossa who waits in his cave for the proper time to comeforth and reassert his imperial power. This curious Persian belief hasworked itself out in a time scheme much like the time schemes of otherApocalyptic beliefs, the detail of which is difficult enough. 

But in substance this hidden and true successor of the prophet has hadfrom time to time those through whom he reveals himself to the faithfuland makes known his will, and these are known as Babs or gates; "thegate, that is, whereby communication was reopened between the hidden oneand his faithful followers. " The practical outcome of this would be thatany one who could convince Persian Mohammedans that he was the Bab or"gate" would possess a mystic messianic authority. Such a confidenceactually established would give him an immense hold over the faithfuland make him a force to be reckoned with by the Mohammedan world. 

_The Bab and His Successors_

As far as our own present interest is concerned, the movement dates from1844 when a young Persian merchant announced himself as the Bab. If weare to find a parallel in Christianity he was a kind of John theBaptist, preparing the way for a greater who should come after him, butthe parallel ends quickly, for since the Mohammedan Messiah did notappear, his herald was invested with no little of the authority andsanctity which belonged to the hidden one himself. The career of thefirst Bab was short--1844 to 1850. He was only twenty-four years old atthe time of his manifestation, thirty when he suffered martyrdom and aprisoner during the greater part of his brief career. The practicaloutcome of his propaganda was a deal of bloody fighting betweenantagonistic Mohammedan factions. The movement received early thatbaptism of blood which gives persistent intensity to any persecutedmovement. His followers came to regard him as a divine being. After hisexecution his body was recovered, concealed for seventeen years andfinally placed in a shrine specially built for that purpose at St. Jeand'Acre. This shrine has become the holy place of Bahaism. 

During one period of his imprisonment he had opportunity to continue hiswritings, correspond with his followers and receive them. He was thusable to give the world his message and we find in his teachings the germof the gospel of Bahaism. Before his death he named his successor--ayoung man who had been greatly drawn to him and who seemed by his youth, zeal and devotion to be set apart to continue his work. To this youngman the Bab sent his rings and other personal possessions, authorizedhim to add to his writings and in general to inherit his influence andcontinue his work. This young man was recognized with practicalunanimity by the Babis as their spiritual head. Owing to his youth andthe secluded life which he adopted, the practical conduct of the affairsof the Babi community devolved chiefly on his elder half-brotherBaha'u'llah. What follows is a confused story of schism, rival claimantsand persecution but the sect grew through persecution and the control ofit came in 1868 into the hands of Baha'u'llah. 

During the greater part of his life Baha'u'llah was either an exile or aprisoner. From 1868 until his death in 1892 he was confined with seventyof his followers in the penal colony of Acca on the Mediterranean coast. Meanwhile the faith which centered about him changed character; he wasno longer a gate or herald, he was himself a "manifestation of God"with authority to change all earlier teaching. He really universalizedthe movement. Beneath his touch religion becomes practical, ethical, less mystic, more universal. He was possessed by a passion for universalpeace and brotherhood. He addressed letters to the crowned heads ofEurope asking them to cooperate in peace movements. It has beensuggested that the Czar of Russia was influenced thereby and that we maythus trace back to Baha'u'llah the peace movement which preceded thewar. 

Pilgrims came and went and through their enthusiasms the movementspread. After his death there was the renewal of disputes as to theproper succession and consequent schisms. The power came finally intothe hands of Abdul-Baha who was kept under supervision by the Turkishgovernment until 1908. He was freed by the declaration of the NewConstitution and carried on thereafter with real power a worldwidepropaganda. He had an unusual and winning personality, spoke fluently inPersian, Arabic and Turkish and more nearly than any man of his timefilled the ideal rôle of an Eastern prophet. He died in November, 1921, and was buried on Mt. Carmel--with its memories of Elijah andmillenniums of history--his praises literally being sung by a mostcatholic group of Mohammedans, Jews and Eastern Christians. 

_The Temple of Unity_

Bahaism as it is held in America to-day is distilled out of the writingsand teachings of Baha'u'llah and Abdul-Baha. Naturally enough, in thepopularization of it its contradictions have been reconciled and itssubtleties disregarded. What is left fits into a variety of forms and isin line with a great range of idealism. The twelve basic principles ofBahaism as announced in its popular literature are:

 The Oneness of Mankind. Independent investigations of truth. The Foundation of all religions is one. Religion must be the cause of unity. Religion must be in accord with science and reason. Equality between men and women. Prejudice of all kinds must be forgotten. Universal Peace. Universal Education. Solution of the economic problem. An international auxiliary language. An international tribunal. 

A program inclusive enough for any generous age. These principles aresubstantiated by quotations from the writings of Abdul-Baha and theteachings of Baha'u'llah. Many things combine to lend force to itsappeal--the courage of its martyrs, its spaciousness and yet at the sametime the attractiveness of its appeal and its suggestion of spiritualbrotherhood. Since the movement has borne a kind of messianicexpectation it adjusts itself easily to inherited Christian hopes. Thereare real correspondences between its expected millennium and theChristian millennium. 

How far its leaders, in their passion for peace and their doctrine ofnon-resistance and their exaltation of the life of the spirit, are indebt to the suggestions of Christianity itself, or how far it is a newexpression of a temper with which the Orient has always been more insympathy than the West, it would be difficult to say, but in some waysBahaism does express--or perhaps reproduces--the essential spirit of theGospels more faithfully than a good deal of Western Christianity as noworganized. Those members of Christian communions which are attracted toBahaism find in it a real hospitality to the inherited faith they takeover. It is possible, therefore, to belong to the cult and at the sametime to continue one's established religious life without any very greatviolence and indeed with a possible intensification of that life. 

It is difficult, therefore, to distinguish between Bahaism as it is heldby devout groups in America, so far as ethics and ideals go, from muchthat is distinctive in the Christian spirit, though the influence ofBahaism as a whole would be to efface distinctions and especially totake the force out of the Christian creeds. 

Chicago, or rather Wilmette, is now the center of the movement inAmerica and an ambitious temple is in the way of being constructedthere, the suggestion for whose architecture is taken from a temple inEskabad, Russia. This is to be a temple of universal religion, symbolizing in its architecture the unities of faith and humanity. "Thetemple with its nine doors will be set in the center of a circulargarden symbolizing the all-inclusive circle of God's unity; ninepathways will lead to the nine doors and each one coming down thepathway of his own sect or religion or trend of thought will leave atthe door the dogmas that separate and, under the dome of God's oneness, all will become one. .. . At night it will be brilliantly lighted and thelight will shine forth through the tracery of the dome, a beacon ofpeace and unity rising high above Lake Michigan. "

This study has led us into many curious regions and shown to whatunexpected conclusions the forces of faith or hope, once released, maycome, but surely it has revealed nothing more curious than that the old, old controversy as to the true successor of Mohammed the prophet shouldat last have issued in a universal religion and set the faithful tobuilding a temple of unity on the shores of Lake Michigan. 

If this work were to be complete it should include some investigation ofthe rituals of the cults. They are gradually creating hymns of theirown; their public orders of service include responsive readings withmeditations on the immanence of God, the supremacy of the spiritual andrelated themes. In general they dispense with the sacraments; they haveno ecclesiastical orders and hardly anything corresponding to theCatholic priesthood or the Protestant ministry, though the ChristianScience reader has a recognized official place. They meet inconferences; they depend largely upon addresses by their leaders. Spiritualistic movements organize themselves around séances. They usesuch halls as may be rented, hotels, their own homes; they have notgenerally buildings of their own save the Christian Science templeswhich are distinctive for dignity of architecture and beauty ofappointment in almost every large city. 

_General Conclusions; the Limitations of the Writer's Method_

It remains only to sum up in a most general way the conclusions to whichthis study may lead. There has been a process of criticism and appraisalthroughout the whole book, but there should be room at the end for somegeneral statements. 

The writer recognizes the limitations of his method; he has studiedfaithfully the literature of the cults, but any religion is always avast deal more than its literature. The history of the cults does notfully tell their story nor does any mere observation of their worshipadmit the observer to the inner religious life of the worshippers. Lifealways subdues its materials to its own ends, reproduces them in termsof its own realities; there are endless individual variations, but theoutcome is massively uniform. Religion does the same thing. Itsmaterials are faiths and obediences and persuasions of truth andexpectations of happier states, but its ultimate creations are characterand experience, and the results in life of widely different religionsare unexpectedly similar. Both theoretically and practically the truerunderstanding or the finer faith and, particularly, the higher ethicalstandards should produce the richer life and this is actually so. Butreal goodness is everywhere much the same; there are calendared saintsfor every faith. 

There is an abundant testimony in the literature of the cults to raregoodnesses and abundant devotion, and observation confirms thesetestimonies. Something of this is doubtless due to their environment. The Western cults themselves and the Eastern cults in the West arecontained in and influenced by the whole outcome of historicChristianity and they naturally share its spirit. If the churches needto remember this as they appraise the cults, the cults need also toremember it as they appraise the churches. Multitudes of Catholics andProtestants secure from a religion which the cults think themselveseither to have corrected or outgrown exactly what the cults secure--andmore. Such as these trust God, keep well, go happily about theirbusinesses and prove their faith in gracious lives. There is room formutual respect and a working measure of give and take on both sides. 

The writer is inclined to think the churches at present are moreteachable than the more recent religious movements. For a longgeneration now the churches have been subject to searching criticismfrom almost every quarter. The scientist, the sociologist, thephilosopher, the publicist, the discontented with things as they are andthe protagonist of things as they ought to be, have all taken their turnand the Church generally, with some natural protest against being madethe scapegoat for the sins of a society arrestingly reluctant to makethe Church's gospel the law of its life, has taken account of its ownshortcomings and sought to correct them. The cults are as yet lessinclined to test themselves by that against which they have reacted. Butthis is beside the point. The movements we have been studying can onlybe fairly appraised as one follows through their outcome in life andthat either in detail or entirety is impossible. But it is possible togain from their literature a reasonable understanding of theirprinciples and interrelations and this the writer has sought to do. 

_The Cults Are Aspects of the Creative Religious Consciousness of theAge_

Certain conclusions are thus made evident. These movements are thecreation of the religious consciousness of the time. They are aspects ofthe present tense of religion. Since religion is, among other things, the effective desire to enter into right relationships with the powerwhich manifests itself in the universe there are two variants in itscontent; first, our changing understanding of the power itself andsecond, our changing uses of it. The first varies with our knowledge andinsight, the second with our own changing sense of personal need. ThoughGod be the same yesterday, to-day and forever, our understandings of Himcannot and ought not to be the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Ourfaith is modified by, for example, our scientific discoveries. When thefirmament of Hebrew cosmogony has given way to interstellar spaces andthe telescope and the spectroscope plumb the depths of the universe, resolving nebulæ into star drifts, faith is bound to reflect the change. The power which manifests itself in the universe becomes thereby avaster power, operating through a vaster sweep of law. Our changedunderstandings of ourselves must be reflected in our faith and ourethical insights as well. And because there is and ought to be no end tothese changing understandings, religion itself, which is one outcome ofthem, must be plastic and changing. 

What we ask of God is equally subject to change. True enough, the oldquestions--Whence? Whither? and Why? are constant. As we know ourselvesto be living in a world which is less than a speck in an immensitywherein the birth and death of suns are ephemeral, we may rightlydistrust our own value for the vaster order. We shall, therefore, themore insistently ask Whence? and Whither? and Why? But, none the less, there is always a shifting emphasis of religious need. Our own time ismanifestly more concerned about well-being in the life that now is thana happy issue in the life which is to come. Temperament also qualifiesexperience. The mystic seeks conscious communion with God as an end initself; the practical temper asks the demonstration of the love of Godin happy material conditions. In general, action and reaction governthis whole region. The Puritan was supremely concerned about his ownsalvation and the struggle consequent thereto; his descendants werechiefly interested in the extension of knowledge and the conquest of thephysical order and we react against this in a new return upon ourselvesand the possibilities of personality. 

Now these changing understandings of the power which manifests itself inthe universe on the one side and our own changing senses of need on theother, give to religion a constantly fluctuating character and what ismost distinctively religious in any period must be the outcome of thecombination of these two variants. What an age asks of the God whom itknows colours the whole of its religious life. These cults and movementsdo not wholly represent the creative religious consciousness of ourtime, of course; a great deal of that same creative religiousconsciousness has given new quality to the organizations and orthodoxiesof the churches. But within the frontiers of historic Christianity ithas been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than an actualadventure in the making of religion. The cults and movements have notbeen thus limited. They have challenged old understandings, broken awayfrom the older organizations and taken their own line, using suchmaterial as seems proper for their purpose. 

They are not wholly independent of the past; some of them have taken theimmemorial speculations of the East for their point of departure thoughintroducing therein a good many of the permissions or conclusions ofmodern science and something of the spirit of Christianity itself. Thosetaking their departure from Christianity have claimed rather toreinterpret and modernize it than to supplant it by their own creations. Yet when all this is recognized these cults and movements areparticularly the creation of our own time. So accepted, they revealstrongly the persistence of religion. All these conjectures andconfidences and reachings through the shadows are just a testimony thatfew are content to go on without some form of religion or other. 

All religion has, in one phase or another, gone through much the sameprocess. There has been for every religion a time when it took new formout of older elements, a time when the accepted religions had littleenough sympathy for and understanding of what was taking place aboutthem while those committed to new quests were exultant in theconsciousness of spiritual adventure and discovery and heard the morningstars sing together for joy. What is thus begun must submit always tothe testimony of time. In the end a religion is permanent as it meetsthe great human needs and adjusts itself to their changing phases. It isimperial and universal as it meets these needs supremely. If in additionit be capable of organization, if there be within it room for expansion, and if, on the whole, it justifies itself by the outcome of it in lifeand society it will persist, and if it persists through a long period oftime and creates for itself literatures, dogmas and authorities, itbecomes as nearly fundamental as anything can be in this world. Itcreates cultures, shapes civilizations, colours art, establishes idealsand fills the whole horizon of its devotees. 

If a religion is to endure it must meet a wide range of need; it must beplastic and yet invest itself with the sanctions of History. For theconservative it must possess the note of authority and at the same timepromise freedom to the liberal. It must persuade the forward-lookingthat it holds within itself the power to meet changing conditions. Itmust offer a satisfying experience to the mystic and the practicallyminded and deliverance to the despairing. It must be able to build intoits structure new sciences and philosophies and yet it must touch thewhole of life with some sense of the timeless, and above all, it mustinclude the whole of life, nor depend upon particularized appeals orpassing phases of thought. Historic Christianity has more nearly met allthese tests than any other religion, for though under the stress ofmeeting so great a variety of needs and conditions it has organizeditself into forms as different as Latin Catholicism and the Society ofthe Friends, so losing catholicity of organization, it has securedinstead a catholicity of spirit and a vast elasticity of appeal whichare the secret of its power and the assurance of its continuing andenduring supremacy. 

_Their Parallels in the Past_

Now by such tests as these what future may one anticipate for such cultsas we have been studying? Are they likely to displace the historic formsof Christianity, will they substantially modify it, or will they wearaway and be reabsorbed? Evidently one of these three things must happen. This is not the first time in the Western world that historic andauthoritative Christianity has been challenged. We should have, perhaps, to go back to the fourth century to find an exact parallel and then weshould find in the vast and confused movement of Gnosticism anunexpected parallel to a great deal of what is happening about us. Gnosticism was the effort of a reason excessively given to speculation, undisciplined and greatly unrestrained by any sense of reality topossess and transform the Church. Various forces combined to build itsfabric of air-born speculation and though for the time it gave thepatristic Church the hardest fight of its existence, the discipline ofthe Church was too strong for it. Its own weaknesses proved eventuallyits undoing and Gnosticism remains only as a fascinating field of studyfor the specialist, only a name if even so much as that for thegenerality of us and valuable chiefly in showing what speculation may dowhen permitted at will to range earth and sky, with a spuriousrationalism for pilot and imagination for wings. 

There have been, beside, in the history of the Church many othermovements possessing a great staying power and running in some cases forgenerations alongside the main current of religious development, untilthey finally disappeared with the changing centuries. Arguing from suchhistorical precedents as these one might easily assume a like fate forthe Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed herefor there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neitherfailed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure. The expectation of the Catholic Church that Protestantism will spend itsforce and be lost again in the majestic fabric of Latin CatholicChristianity as it is continued amongst us, is as far from realizationto-day, or farther, than at any time in the last 300 years. We need toremember also that conditions change. The right of individual initiativeand judgment once secured in the region of religion is not likely everto be lost. A good many divergent movements have literally been whippedback into line or else put out in fire and blood. Nothing of that sortis likely to happen now. 

No student of history should be blind to the sequence of action andreaction. A period of excessive dependence upon authority may follow aperiod of undue self-assertion, but it is not likely that we shall everfind recreated exactly the conditions of the past or that religion canhereafter be held, as it has heretofore, in relatively well markedchannels under the stress of accepted authorities. Prophecy is hazardousbusiness but it is safe to assume that these modern religious cults andmovements represent the beginnings of a freer, more diffused, lessformal religious faith. The peculiar cults themselves may reach theirterm but the temper which produced them is likely to continue and withother groupings of forces produce something in the future which will atleast be their parallel. 

_The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the ScientificOrganisation of Psycho-therapy_

As far as the fortunes of the distinctive cults themselves go, one'sconclusions may be less tentative. For the most part the foundationsupon which they are built are not big enough to carry an ample andsecure structure. They have been made possible not only by markedlimitations in historic religion itself, but also by contemporaneoustempers which, one may sincerely hope, are self-limiting, and this issaid not through undue prejudice against the cults themselves, butsimply because one is loath to believe that the want of criticalfaculty which has made some of these cults possible will not in the endyield to experience and a really sounder education. Since, moreover, some of them--and Christian Science, preëminently--depend upon faith andmental healing, whatever helps us to a clearer understanding of thenature and limits of psycho-therapy will greatly affect their future. All faith healing cults have heretofore depended very greatly upon theatmosphere of mystery with which they have been able to surroundthemselves. The fact that they have been able to secure results with novery clear understanding of the way in which the results have beensecured has invested them with awe and wonder, so essential to everyreligion. 

But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws, develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all thisis extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. Forthis reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faithand mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just nowstrongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all. 

The intimate association of religion and healing has, on the whole, beengood neither for religion nor health. Of course, this statement willprobably be sharply challenged but it is maintained in the face ofpossible challenge. As far as religion goes it has withdrawn theinterest of the religious, thus influenced, from the normal expressionsof the religious life to border-land regions; it has stressed theexceptional rather than the sweep of law, and the occult rather than theluminously reasonable. Where it has failed in individual cases, as itis bound to fail, it has left those thus disillusioned without any soundbasis for their faith and generally has driven them away from religionaltogether. It has tempted religious teachers to win a hearing by signsand wonders. Even the Founder of the Christian religion grew weary ofthis, as the records show plainly enough, in that He saw His true workto be thereby not helped but hindered, and if this be true of theFounder it is by so much the more true of His followers. 

On the scientific side this temper has hindered honest thinking, laborious investigation and that specialization which is absolutelynecessary to the furtherance of any great division of human effort. Medicine made little progress until it got itself free of the Church. Specifically the average minister is neither by training nor temperamentfitted for healing work and those laymen who have assumed that officehave generally been wanting in balance and self-restraint. This is notto deny the reality of a power not ourselves making for health andwell-being generally, or the power of faith, or the efficacy of prayer. Least of all is God, upon this understanding, to be shut out of life. But the power not ourselves which makes for faith and healing is bestknown through laborious investigation, the discovery of methods andobediences to ascertained law. When we have clearly come to see thenature of psycho-therapy, the occult authority of healing cults will inthe end yield to this understanding and the cults themselves be greatlyweakened or displaced. 

One must recognize, on the other hand, the staying power of anywell-established religious system. Through nurture and those profoundconservatisms which hold more tenaciously in the region of religion thananywhere else, it is possible to continue from generation to generationthe unreasonable or the positively untrue, and this holds in the Churchas well as outside it. None the less, the most coherent systems mustreckon with their own weaknesses. Christian Science may have before it along period of solid going or even marked growth, but its philosophywill at last yield to the vaster sweep of a truer philosophic thought. Its interpretations of historic Christianity will come up again andagain for examination until their fallacies become apparent and itsforce as a system of psycho-therapy will be modified by simpler and morereasonable applications of the same power. 

_New Thought Will Become Old Thought_

New Thought is likely to take a different course but it also will haveto reckon with changing sciences and philosophies. What is New Thoughtto-day will be old thought to-morrow; it will be challenged by newexpressions of the spirit which begot it. It will endure, therefore, only as it is open, flexible and possesses a great power ofaccommodation. But as long as understandings and ideals are fluid, aslong as religion is under bonds to take account of all the elementswhich must be incorporated in it in order to enlarge and continue it, aslong, in short, as the human spirit outgrows fixed forms in any regionthere is likely to be in religion itself something corresponding to theNew Thought of to-day, but this will be true only as New Thought is nota cult at all but something larger--a free and creative movement of thehuman spirit. 

Of all these cults it has made the soundest contribution to religion asa whole. It is also more easily assimilated, more easily absorbed. Itsown distinct field will be limited by the increasing hospitality ofChristian thought to contemporaneous truth. A wholly open-minded churchwill go a long way toward taking from New Thought its raison d'être. Itsfuture depends, therefore, very largely upon the open-mindedness of theolder and more strongly established forms of religion. 

The future of Spiritualism is greatly open to conjecture. We havealready seen the alternatives which Spiritualism is called upon to faceand the uncertainties which attend its conclusions. A fullerunderstanding of the possibilities of abnormal personality and the reachof automatism are likely to work against Spiritualism. If we findascertainable causes for its phenomena resident within personalityitself there will be no need of calling in the other world in order toexplain what is happening in this. On the other hand, if there shouldevidence an increasing and tested body of facts which can be explainedonly in terms of spiritistic communications, Spiritualism will naturallymake headway. But we are certainly standing only upon the threshold of ascientific interpretation of spiritistic phenomena and until the wholeregion has been very much more carefully worked through and far moredependable facts are in hand, one can only say that Spiritism is ahypothesis which may or may not be verified, and attend the outcome. 

It is hard to believe that Theosophy and kindred speculation will everget a strong hold upon the practical Western mind. It owes what force ithas either to an excessive love of the speculative on the part of a few, or else to that particular temper which always wants something else andsomething new, or else to wearinesses and misunderstandings of the moreshadowed side of life. Theosophy is greatly at the mercy of thepositive, practical temper; it will always find a prevailing competitorin the Christian doctrine of immortality. Whatever, moreover, explainsthe apparent inequalities of life in more simple and reasonable termswill cut the roots of it. The movement toward religious syncretism ofwhich Bahaism is just now the expression will not be so easy to disposeof. There will always be a temper impatient of the past, eager forunity, anxious for something big and interpenetrating. Historically thistemper has from time to time emerged, particularly in the latter phasesof Roman paganism, and there is likely to be a larger interchange ofreligious faith and understanding in the future than there has been inthe past. 

In general, this desire for a universal religion, simple and wanting indistinctive characters, follows a weakening of conviction, a loss ofpassion for accepted forms. If anything should deepen again amongst usin religion what corresponds just now to the passion for nationalitythese more general religious quests would suffer. A strong feeling for achurch or a creed or one's own movement would displace them. They have, on the other hand, in their favour the general tendency of all religiontoward simplicity, the reduction of faith, that is, to a few broad andgenerally shared elements. But there is no reason to anticipate a speedybreakdown of what one may call particularist religion and thesubstitution therefor of a faith built up out of many diverse elementsand held in common by widely separated tempers. 

_There is Likely to be Some Absorption of the Cults by a WideningHistoric Christianity_

If the past supplies analogy or suggestion there will be some tendencyfor the cults and movements to be reabsorbed by the dominant religiousforms from which they have broken off. A careful analysis of thisstatement would involve the consideration of a finality of Christianityas now held in the Western world. That is impossible in the range of astudy like this. Any general statement is of course coloured by thetemper of the one who makes it and to a certain extent begs the wholegreat question. But a careful and dispassionate examination ofpresent-day cults would seem to indicate that they really have nothingto offer which the dominant Christianity does not possess eitherexplicitly or implicitly. There is a solidity of human experience behindits forms and creeds which cannot be lightly left out of account. Theyrepresent the travail of twenty centuries and have behind them farolder confidences and hopes. If Christianity should widen itself to thefull limit of its possibilities, it would leave little room for thatwhich seeks to supplant it and would meet the needs which have begottenthe cults in far richer and more reasonable ways. 

As far as the cults are mistakenly distinctive, as far as they cannotstand a careful examination, they represent what must be corrected andcannot be absorbed. Christianity can absorb New Thought far more easilythan Christian Science. Theosophy in its extremer forms it cannot absorbat all. It is more hospitable to the quest for a universal religion forit seeks itself to be a universal religion and can never achieve itsideal unless it takes account of the desire for something big enough toinclude the whole of life, East as well as West, and to make room withinitself for a very great variety of religious tempers. 

_But Christianity is Being Influenced by the Cults_

If Christianity is not to reabsorb the cults in their present form, itmust, as has been said over and over again, take account of them and itis not likely to go on uninfluenced by them. Already it has yielded insome directions to their contentions. If it feels itself challenged bythem it must meet that challenge not so much by intolerance as by thecorrection of conditions which have made them possible, and here itsmost dependable instruments are education and self-examination. There isneed of a vast deal more of sheer teaching in all the churches. Thenecessity for congregations and the traditions of preaching conspire tomake the message of the Church far less vital than it ought to be. Preaching is too much declamation and far too much a following of narrowand deeply worn paths. 

The cults themselves represent a craving for light, especially in theregions of pain and loss. Historic Christianity has lost out because ithas made religion too self-centered, not that the cults are a correctivehere, for they are even more self-centered--that is one of their greatfaults. The individual is not the center of the world; he is part of alarger order concerned for great ends for which his life can only becontributory. The Church and the cults together have forgotten toolargely that life is sacred only as we lose it. We need in the churchesgenerally a braver personal note and a very much largerunself-centeredness. 

It is interesting to note that the movement of the cults, with thepossible exception of New Thought, has been away from rationalism ratherthan in the direction of it. This is a consideration to be taken intoaccount. It would seem on the surface of it to indicate that what peopleare wanting in religion is not so much reason as mysticism and that forthe generality religion is most truly conceived in terms not of theknown but of the unknown. If the Christian Church is to meet thechallenge of the cults with a far more clearly defined line of teaching, it is also to meet the challenge of the cults with a warmer religiouslife, with the affirmation of an experience not so much tested by crisesand conversions as by the constant living of life in the sense of thedivine--to use Jeremy Taylor's noble phrase: in the Practice of thePresence of God. The weakness of the cults is to have narrowed thepractice of the presence of God to specific regions, finding the proofof His power in health and well-being. If we can substitute therefor theconsciousness of God in the sweep of law, the immensity of force, thenormal conduct of life, in light and understanding, in reason as well asmysticism and science as well as devotion, we shall have secured afoundation upon which to build amply enough to shelter devout andquesting souls not now able to find what they seek in the churchesthemselves and yet never for a moment out of line with what is truestand most prophetic in Christianity itself. 

Sir Henry Jones has a paragraph in his "Faith that Enquires" distinctlyto the point just here. "The second consideration arises from thegreatness of the change that would follow were the Protestant Churchesand their leaders to assume the attitude of the sciences and treat thearticles of the creeds not as dogmas but as the most probableexplanation, the most sane account which they can form of the relationof man to the Universe and of the final meaning of his life. Thehypothesis of a God whose wisdom and power and goodness are perfectwould then be tried and tested, both theoretically and practically, and, I believe, become thereby ever the more convincing. The creed would benot merely a record of an old belief to be accepted on authority, but achallenge to the skeptic and the irreligious. The Church, instead ofbeing a place where the deliverances of ancient religious authoritiesare expounded, and illustrated by reference to the contents of one bookand the history of one nation--as if no other books were inspired andall nations save one were God-abandoned--the Church would be the placewhere the validity of spiritual convictions are discussed on theirmerits, and the application of spiritual principles extended; whereenquiring youths would repair when life brings them sorrow, disappointment or failure, and the injustice of man makes them doubtwhether there be a God, or if there be, whether he is good and haspower, and stands as the help of man. Recourse to their certifiedspiritual guides, knowing that full and sympathetic justice will be doneto all their difficulties, ought to be as natural to them as theirrecourse to the physical laboratory or the workshop of the mechanicianwhen an engine breaks down. "[83]

[Footnote 83: "A Faith that Enquires, " p. 82. ]

_Medical Science Should Take a More Serious Account of the HealingCults_

Not only the churches but the schools and particularly Medical Scienceneed to take account of the cults. They constitute perhaps one of thesharpest indictments of present-day education. Many of their adherentsare nominally educated above the average. They have secured for whatthey follow the authority which always attaches, in the American mind, to the fact that those who champion any movement are college bred, andyet the want of clear vision, the power to distinguish and analyze, along with the unexpected credulities which are thus made manifest, seem to indicate arresting deficiencies in popular education. It hasleft us unduly suggestible, much open to mass movement, at the mercy ofthe lesser prophets and wanting in those stabilities and understandingsupon which a sound culture is to be built. When we consider what theyare capable of believing who have had college or university training, wemust conclude either that contemporaneous education is wanting in thecreation of sound mental discipline, or else that we have a strangepower of living in water-tight compartments and separating our faithwholly from our reason. 

The cults which are organized around faith and mental healing at oncechallenge and in a measure indict modern medical science. In manydirections all these movements are reactions against an excessivematerialism; they affirm the power of personality as against itsenvironment, testify that the central problems of life may be approachedfrom the spiritual as well as from the physical and material side. Itwould not for a moment be fair to say that modern Medicine is ignoringthis. There has probably always been a considerable element of mentalhealing in any wise medical practice. But on the whole, the marvelloussuccesses and advances in Medical Science within the last thirty yearsand the very great success which has attended the definition of alldiseases in terms of physical disarrangement has led physiciansgenerally unduly to underestimate or ignore the undoubted power of faithand mind over bodily states. 

Even as a matter of scientific investigation medicine as a whole has nottaken this line of approach seriously enough. The Society for PsychicalResearch has something to teach the medical faculties just here. ThatSociety, as we have seen, set out in the most rigorous and scientificway possible to find out first of all just what actual facts lay behindthe confused phenomena of Spiritualism. They have given a longgeneration to just that. As they have finally isolated certain factsthey have, with a good deal of caution, undertaken to frame hypothesesto account for them and so, with the aid of the students of abnormalpersonality, they are gradually bringing a measure of order into thewhole region. Medical Science on the whole has not done this in theregion of faith and mental healing. We are, therefore, far too uncertainof our facts. A good deal of this is open to correction. If a Societyfor Psycho-Therapeutic Research should be organized, which would followup every report of healings with an accurate care, beginning with thediagnosis and ending with the actual physical state of the patient asfar as it could be ascertained by the tests at their disposal, theycould greatly clarify the popular mind, prevent a vast deal of needlesssuffering, save the sick from frustrated hope and secure for their ownprofession a distinct reinforcement and an increased usefulness. 

_A Neglected Force_

If they thus find--as is likely--that the real force of Psycho-therapyhas been largely overestimated, that imagination, wrong diagnosis andmistaken report as to the actual physical condition have all combined toproduce confidences unjustified by the facts, we should begin to comeout into the light. And if, on the other hand, they found a body ofactual fact substantiating Psycho-therapy they would do well to addcourses therein to the discipline of their schools. [84] The whole thingwould doubtless be a matter for specialization as almost every otherdepartment of medicine demands specialization. Every good doctor is moreor less a mental healer, but every doctor cannot become a specialist inPsycho-therapy, nor would he need to. 

[Footnote 84: But this is already being done. ]

Temperamental elements enter here very largely. But we might at leasttake the whole matter out of the hands of charlatans and thehalf-informed and establish it upon a sound scientific basis. There is, beyond debate, a real place for the physician who utilizes and directsthe elements of suggestion. They have gone farther, on the whole, inthis direction in France and Switzerland than we have in America. Evidently we are standing only upon the threshold of marked advancesalong these lines. Psycho-therapy can never be a substitute for amedical science which deals with the body as a machine to be regulatedin its processes, defended against hostile invasion or reinforced in itsweaknesses, but there is also another line of approach to sickness. Acatholic medical science will use every means in its power. 

_The Cults Must be Left to Time and the Corrections of Truth_

Beyond such general considerations as these there is little to be said. The Christian churches will gain nothing by an intolerant attitudetoward expressions of faith and spiritual adventures beyond their ownfrontiers. Just as there is a constant selective process in answer towhich the historic churches maintain their existences, a selectiveprocess controlled by association and temper, in that some of us arenaturally Catholics and some Protestants, there are tempers which do nottake kindly to inherited organization, authority or creed. Such as theseare seekers, excessive perhaps in their individuality, but none the lesssincere in their desire for a faith and religious contact which willhave its own distinct meaning for their own lives. And if there may seemto some of us elements of misdirection or caprice or unreason in theirquests, it is perhaps in just such ways as these that advances arefinally made and what is right and true endures. 

If nothing at all is to be gained by intolerance, nothing more is to begained by an unfair criticism and, in general, all these movements mustbe left to the adjustments of time and the corrections of truth. 

We began this study by defining religion as the effective desire to bein right relation with the power which manifests itself in the universe. How vast this power is we are just beginning to find out. How various weare in our temperaments and what unsuspected possibilities there are inthe depths of personality we are also just beginning to find out. Thereis possible, therefore, a vast variation of contact in this endeavour tobe in right relation with the power which faith knows and names as God. In an endeavour moving along so wide a front there is room, naturally, for a great variety of quest. When we have sought rightly to understandand justly to estimate the more extreme variants of that quest in ourown time, we can do finally no more than, through the knowledge thusgained, to try in patient and fundamental ways to correct what is falseand recognize and sympathize with what is right and leave the residue tothe issue of the unresting movements of the human soul, and thosedisclosures of the Divine which are on their Godward side revelation andon their human side insight, understanding and obedience. 

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A Topical Survey of the Methodist Protestant Church. $1. 50. 

A history of the Methodist Protestant church from its founding in 1830, pointing out the various links in the chain of circumstances which leadto the organization of the Methodist Protestant Church and thefundamental principles which prompted and justified the movement. Itconstitutes a vigorous and ably-argued plea for "mutual rights"Methodism. 

BIBLE STUDY

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_P. WHITWELL WILSON_

_Author of "The Christ We Forget"_

The _Church_ We Forget. 

A Study of the Life and Words of the Early Christians. 8vo, cloth, net

The author of "The Christ We Forget" here furnishes a companion-pictureof the earliest Christian Church--of the men and women, of like feelingswith ourselves, who followed Christ and fought His battles in the Romanworld of their day. "Here again, " says Mr. Wilson, "my paint-box is theBible, and nothing else--and my canvas is a page which he who runs mayread. "

_C. ALPHONSO SMITH, Ph. D. , LL. D. _

_Head of the Department of English in the U. S. Naval Academy, Annapolis. Md. _

Key-note Studies in Key-note Books of the Bible 12mo, cloth, net

The sacred books dealt with are Genesis, Esther, Job, Hosea, John'sGospel, Romans, Philippians, Revelation. "No series of lectures yetgiven on this famous foundation have been more interesting andstimulating than these illuminating studies of scriptural books by alayman and library expert. "--_Christian Observer. _

_GEORGE D. WATSON, D. D. _

God's First Words

Studies in Genesis, Historic, Prophetic and Experimental. 12mo, cloth, net

Dr. Watson shows how God's purposes and infinite wisdom, His plan andpurpose for the race, His unfailing love and faithfulness are firstunfolded in the Book of Genesis, to remain unchanged through the wholecanon of Scripture. Dr. Watson's new work will furnish unusualenlightment to every gleaner in religious fields, who will find "God'sFirst Words" to possess great value and profit. 

_EVERETT PEPPERRELL WHEELER, A. M. _

_Author of "Sixty Years of American Life, " etc. _

A Lawyer's Study of the Bible

Its Answer to the Questions of To-day. 12mo cloth, net

Mr. Wheeler's main proposition is that the Bible, when wisely studied, rightly understood and its counsel closely followed, is found to be ofinestimable value as a guide to daily life and conduct. To this end Mr. Wheeler examines its teachings as they relate to sociology, labor andcapital, socialism, war, fatalism, prayer, immortality. A lucid, helpfulbook.