Chapter VII: Introduction: II (4)

A young man, who was clearly very far from being of a neurotic or hysterical type, came to me complaining of severe pain in the region of the heart. It had, according to his account, been gradually increasing for some time. It frequently came on after he had run upstairs, and on one occasion had been intense after running to catch a train. It was sometimes accompanied by violent palpitation and breathlessness, and had no relation to food. Would I tell him if his heart was all right? I examined the heart and could find no trace of any abnormal condition. Nor could I find any evidence of anything in the abdomen which would be likely to account for the pain. I told him that his heart was absolutely sound and that there appeared to be nothing to suggest disease anywhere. A rather careful diet would do him no harm. If it did not do any good, it would be easy enough to prescribe a tonic, but I did not think it necessary. I never expected to see him again. Five months later, however, he called and explained with much gravity that he had come to thank me for ‘curing his heart.’ I then remembered the case, and was fairly staggered. ‘But bless my soul,’ I said rather brusquely, ‘there never was anything the matter with your heart.’ ‘No,’ he replied, this time with a quiet smile, ‘I know there wasn’t. All I can say is that from the time you told me it was all right, the pain disappeared, and I have never had any return of it. But, look here, when it was there, _the pain was real_.’

I have no doubt it was. To label all such cases as ‘hysterical,’ ‘neurotic,’ and so on (in the ordinary connotation of these terms) is utterly unscientific. This young fellow was a sensible, cheerful, rather unimaginative youth without a trace of ‘_neurasthenia_’ about him. Yet, by coming to believe that his heart was diseased, he had quite unconsciously so excited the higher centres that the vagus nerve returned exactly the impressions to the brain which would be conveyed by various morbid organic conditions.

Now, in such a case as this (and the number of them must be very large indeed) the parish clergyman has a great scope for quiet, useful work. Let him urge the patient not to dwell on his supposed condition, but go at once to a competent practitioner and find out what exactly (if anything) is the matter. The clergyman will find that (if he has the patient’s consent) the doctor will make no difficulty about affording him the fullest information about the physical condition of the patient, and from their co-operation the happiest results may be expected.

(3) Conversely, there are many cases where a sympathetic doctor would be only too glad to be in touch with a parish clergyman. Occasionally we get at the hospital a note from a clergyman, saying that X. Y. is to call at the Out-Patients’ Department to-day, and that the writer would be glad to know in confidence what is the matter with him. I only wish we had more. If there is no objection raised by the patient, there is no difficulty whatever about entering into the fullest particulars, and in those cases (and they are far from infrequent) where the patient complains of ‘worries,’ a sympathetic adviser on the spot will probably do more to bring about an improvement in the physical condition than all the compounds of iron, strychnine, &c., in the hospital pharmacopœia. The full consent of the patient is, of course, an indispensable preliminary. When this is obtained, the rest is easy enough.

(4) In the same way, when there is a suspicion or fairly clear evidence that health is being undermined by some evil habit, the sympathetic clergyman, who knows the patient well, can do far more for him than the most skilled doctor who has probably only seen him once or twice. Why any clergyman should want to babble about a special ‘gift of healing’ in dealing with these most distressing cases, considering what the evidence on the subject of a ‘gift of healing’ is, I cannot conceive. The unostentatious, healthy influence of a cultured Christian gentleman has a potency which no manipulation or ritual is in the least likely to enhance. If he will equip himself with the necessary information as to the ‘patient’s’ actual physical condition, he can set to work to exercise his influence, with the knowledge that he will probably effect more, so far as a permanent result goes, than all the self-styled ‘healers’ who ever supported scientific misstatements with bad logic, or clouded with frothy verbiage what intellect they possess.

OUR LORD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SICKNESS

BY

W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.

VICAR OF CHEDDAR AND PREBENDARY OF WELLS

OUR LORD’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SICKNESS

BY W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.

(1) Men are commonly influenced by actions and personal example much more powerfully than by abstract teaching; and the Christian tradition conforms to this principle in placing the three Synoptic Gospels in the forefront of the New Testament. For they set before us the mind of Christ in the words and acts of Jesus. Thus when the thoughtful Christian is asked, ‘What is the Gospel view of disease?’ he will be inclined to reply, ‘The question is a difficult one, but we may say with some confidence that our Lord answered it by His miracles of healing.’ A study of these and of their underlying principles may help us towards the definition we seek.

The records are fragmentary. Yet they are warm with living realism. The great facts of our Faith stand out before us in the moving drama of the Synoptic Gospels,[14] just as truly as they are interpreted for us in the spiritual Gospel, the Fourth. Jesus Christ is portrayed as the Son of Man: and whatever else that most significant title denotes, it speaks to us of His human activity, His practical and energetic sympathy with the sins and sorrows of men. And this activity found its exercise in two directions: teaching and healing. The association of the two things is noteworthy, as indicating a great principle. The sins of mankind are not unconnected with their sicknesses; spiritual restoration with bodily relief. A calm of soul may bring rest to the body. He who fulfilled in His earthly ministry the prophetic office was also a ‘Physician of extraordinary achievement.’[15] To render Professor Bousset’s words, though we cannot reproduce their eloquence:

[14] Euseb. H. E. vi. 14. 7. So called first by Clement of Alexandria.

[15] Professor Bousset’s _Jesus_ (3rd ed. 1907, p. 26).

‘How the simple populace must have hailed this Deliverer in every time of need! With what unspeakable confidence they must have thronged him! At his coming, despair lifted its head, dull eyes glistened, weary hands and arms reached forth towards him. They trusted him for everything, all things became possible. Body and soul with all their needs they brought to him for healing. The cries of need and anguish, the confidence which knew no limitations, the craving for help, the faltering prayer, the shouts or sobs of joy, the tears of gratitude--daily he moved in the midst of it all.’

Are we then to conclude that our Lord attached no less importance to the cure of bodily ailment than to the spiritual redemption of men? Much has been written of late years which might seem to imply this. But the whole trend of Christ’s teaching forbids us to emphasise the value of physical well-being at the expense of the master claims of the spirit: witness His words in the Sermon on the Mount about taking thought for the life or the body.[16] And therefore we must avoid mere rhetoric and special pleading.

[16] Matt. vi. 25.

(i) It is plain, at the outset, that our Lord set certain limits to the exercise of His healing activity. What has often been said of miracles in general[17] may be said of the miracles of healing. There is a severe economy in the exercise of such supernatural, or extranatural, powers. This is illustrated by our Lord’s apparent reluctance to work miracles when it is not certain that a true faith asks for it.[18] In other words, the receptivity of men is necessary to the Divine transaction with the sufferer.

[17] E.g. by Dr. Illingworth, _Divine Immanence_, p. 120.

[18] Cp. John iv. 48: ‘Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not
believe.’

Again, He is slow to exercise His power outside the boundaries of Israel, within which He was pleased to confine His work of preaching and healing. Possibly He knew that there He would be welcomed as a mere wonder-working magician. He makes it a condition of His action that the atmosphere should be one of real faith.[19] He could there do no mighty works because of their unbelief.[20] Was it because of the waning faith of the multitudes that, towards the end of His work on earth, the Healing Ministry almost ceases?[21] Whether on this account, or in the desire to escape the demonstrations of popular interest which the miracles evoked, or because the full evidential effect of these ‘signs’ was now almost attained, He restricts His healing, life-giving power to some four cases, one of them the raising of Lazarus. For each and all a special reason can be found.[22]

[19] On this see next chapter, p. 209.

[20] Mark vi. 5, 6; Matt. xiii. 58.

[21] Professor A. B. Bruce, _Miraculous Elements in the Gospels_, p.
265.

[22] Luke xiv. 3: Vindication of the true principle of the Sabbath;
John xi.: Lazarus, His ‘friend,’ the only brother of Martha and Mary;
also Trench’s _Miracles_, p. 434 sq.; Luke xvii. 16: The universality
of His salvation; Mark x. 47: The appeal to the Son of David. (The
Healing of Malchus stands by itself.)

(ii) Christ’s healing activity was therefore strictly limited in scope. It may be asked, Was it a ‘unique manifestation of a unique Personality’[23] or did it differ in degree rather than in kind from the wonderful works of human healers, or, at all events, of healers who have wrought ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’? The latter view by no means commits its advocates to a ‘humanitarian’ view of the Person of Jesus Christ: while it amply satisfies the facts. Again, it is not necessary, for the purpose of the present discussion, to digress into the field of New Testament criticism. Renan, in his ‘Vie de Jésus,’ feels himself constrained to apologise for the miraculous action of Christ, on the ground that ‘the rôle of thaumaturge was unwelcome to him, but was imposed upon him by his contemporaries.’[24] To Loisy, a critic of profounder learning and far more reverent temper, it appears that the miracles were in reality ‘works of mercy ... and not a direct argument in favour of the Messiahship of the Saviour,’ a complexion which was afterwards put upon them more or less unconsciously by the Evangelists.[25] But it is quite consistent with a reverent acknowledgment of the Divinity of our Lord, and an acceptance of the Gospel records in substance as they stand, to hold that the miracles of healing--with the nature-miracles we are not here concerned--were the simple outcome of that all-embracing human pity which, in itself, betokened the expected Messiah; rather than an immediate exercise of Almighty power, and the utterance, within the physical order, of the Eternal Word. We find our Lord proclaiming Himself, in the synagogue of Nazareth, the Fulfiller of that great prophecy of Isaiah in his sixty-first chapter, in which the Messianic mission is set forth in language in which a spiritual and a physical deliverance are inseparably intertwined.[26] Similarly, in answer to the Baptist’s message, the same blending of evangelical teaching and spiritual healing is to be noticed; and, once again, sin and disease stand out as the dominant factors in the condition of this present world.

[23] Illingworth, _Divine Immanence_, p. 119.

[24] Renan, _Vie de Jésus_, p. 264.

[25] Loisy, _L’Évangile et l’Église_, p. 17.

[26] Luke iv. 18: note the double sense in the words

(iii) But if the source of the miracles is thus to be sought in the Sacred Humanity, that Humanity is, after all, the perfect ideal and norm of all humanity. Whatever exceptional powers of genius, whatever special faculties and latent gifts of mind and will have appeared at rare intervals among men, these we should expect to find exemplified, one and all, in the Life of Christ, had that Life come down to us in a complete form. Now, it cannot be questioned that in every age a few individuals have been found, who were endowed with a preternatural therapeutic power, connected generally with a very subtle power of sympathy, but, in some instances, if we may believe what we are told, inherent in a person who had no wish whatever to exercise it.[27] That some such virtue resided in Christ, and accounts for some part of His healing work, need not be questioned. The records may be said to imply it in two passages,[28] that which relates to the act of the woman who touched the hem of His garment in the crowd, and that which speaks of this method of cure as ofttimes repeated. They besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment--and as many as touched were made whole.

[27] See an article by Dr. A. T. Schofield in the _Contemporary
Review_, March 1909, for examples.

[28] Matt. ix. 20 (Mark v. 27); Matt. xiv. 36 (Mark vi. 56); also
Luke vi. 19: Power came forth from Him and healed them all. Cp.
Acts, xix. 11, 12 and v. 15; the Apostles and, apparently, our Lord
sanctioned a sort of sacramental medium of cure to meet the needs of
a simple populace.

It is possible, no doubt, to account for such cures on a purely naturalistic hypothesis, such as that which Keim[29] accepts, viz. that they were cases of faith-healing; a phenomenon which recurs in connexion with nearly every form of religious belief, and in every stage of social development. The influence of the spiritual imagination on the bodily state is undeniable. Everyone knows something about the phenomena of Lourdes and Bethshan, healing resorts which, theologically speaking, lie at opposite poles. In a cruder form the same effects are found in connexion with holy wells and relics of the saints.[30] We may go back to the ancients and find wonderful cures reported in the pagan world, from the shrines of Asclepius (the patron deity of physicians). A blind man touches the altar of Aesculapides (as he was called at Rome) on the island of the Tiber and receives his sight.[31] The Emperors Hadrian and Vespasian used to touch for the ‘King’s evil.’[32]

[29] See Bruce, _op. cit._ p. 275.

[30] See chaps. xxvi. and xxxi. in Rev. Percy Dearmer’s _Body and
Soul_.

[31] O. Weinreich, _Antike Heilungswunden_, p. 63. Scholars will
remember how Plutus recovered his sight by incubation in the temple
of Asclepius in Aristophanes’ play.

[32] Weinreich, p. 75.

But can anyone study the miracles of our Lord as a whole (for we must not lose sight of those wrought upon inanimate nature) and feel that they are sufficiently explained by a familiar truth in psychology, viz. that the religious imagination is able to stimulate the bodily forces, whatever may be the spiritual soil in which that imagination is bred? Faith, or a conscious receptivity in the mind of the patient, was a frequent factor in the healing process; although there is really nothing in the records to make us predicate it of Jairus’s daughter or the centurion’s slave or the nobleman’s son. It is surely remarkable that our Lord held Himself aloof from all those methods of cure which might have suggested the enchanter and magician, particularly in the case of demoniacs. The Jews, like other ancient nations, resorted to the use of exorcism, incantation, and talismans, which owed their potency to their effect on the imagination. Christ does not hypnotise men or throw them into an ecstasy. Where faith is present, He gladly works through it towards the salvation of the whole man. But often there is a mere flicker of faith, a spark in the flax. In the sick room, when the vital forces are enfeebled, the brain clouded, and the spirits depressed by physical malady, it is a rare thing, surely, for the flame of faith to burn brightly and the imagination to glow with the consciousness of an unseen Presence. And the Church would have but little encouragement to invoke for her own ministries the healing Power of her Master, if it could only be enlisted on behalf of such patients as already possessed ‘comfort and sure confidence in their Lord.’ We believe that the Church has something less elusive to offer her people in their hour of need: and we return to the records of Christ’s miracles in order to discover it.

(iv) The value of what is called ‘mental therapeutics’ is no longer contested; it receives, and has received for some time, the careful attention of the medical profession.[33] We approach the subject from the religious standpoint, we base our study of it upon the teaching and practice of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we must discriminate between psychic treatment and spiritual treatment. The former term, if applicable to religious treatment, can also denote forms of mental cure which are unconnected with religion, e.g. the use of hypnotism. But Christ addresses Himself to the Spirit (πνευμα), that highest element of our nature, through which the mystics hold that we have kinship with God, and in unison with which the Holy Spirit attests our Divine sonship. His miracles are works of _spiritual_ healing, they are wrought for the whole man, not only for soul, and certainly not only for body. Christ’s view of healing is relative to His view of disease, His view of disease to His view of human nature. Had he attached to bodily health the supreme importance which it is the tendency of our day to assign to it, and regarded bodily pain as a thing at all costs to be effaced, we must suppose that His whole Life upon earth would have been devoted to the relief of sickness and pain, and that the ‘Healing Ministry’ of His Church would have been far more clearly defined. But no more does He abolish disease than He abolishes pauperism. The tendency of His teaching is to inculcate self-sufficingness (the αὐταρκεία, of St. Paul[34] and the Greek philosophers) in the face of all temporary evils and ailments, the conquest of things material by the spirit, its supremacy in the hierarchy of human nature; in a word, the principle of inner control or autonomy, as the birthright of the human spirit. In his great picture of the Transfiguration, Raphael has caught this contrast between the calm of the heavenly Mount above and the ineffective, agonised distraction of suffering humanity here below, in the person of the lunatic boy and his father. But that heavenly calm of spirit is not the self-centred aloofness of the Stoic. The doctrine of the Incarnation brings the Divine Saviour down to men, lifts man up to the peace of heaven,[35] and at the same time bids him find that peace in fulfilling the bodily duties of his corporate Church life. It will not admit of a selfish quietism. But before this peace of God which Christ proclaims, the worry and ‘fear-thought’ of our overstrung modern age, its neurotic sensationalism and morbid self-analysis, would retire abashed. Christ would teach us that human nature is itself only when it is itself in its completeness, when the physical is truly the instrument of the spiritual. There is no dualism, no schism in human nature as Divinely planned. The voluptuary and the ascetic are both at fault, the former more so because he sins against the higher self. Christ is the Saviour of the whole man, and to the sick He restores ‘perfect soundness,’[36] nor does He refuse to be called the Saviour of the body.[37]

[33] See _British Medical Journal_, June 18, 1910.[**unmatched
footnote]

[34] Philippians, iv. 11.

[35] There is an adumbration of this in the four sublime truths of
Buddhism, which lead a man by the sacrifice of the lower self and the
helping of others to the final extinction of pain. Bishop Westcott’s
_Gospel of Life_, pp. 162, 163. Hardwick, _Christ and other Masters_,
p. 168.

[36] Acts iii. 16: St. Peter and the lame man.

[37] Eph. v. 23.

(v) It is a significant fact that in the Gospels the word for ‘save’ (σῴζειν) is applied to bodily as well as spiritual salvation; it denotes ‘to restore to health or sanity.’[38] A protest may here be entered against the very prevalent opinion that God sent sickness upon man, by an Almighty fiat, in order to discipline him into patience and other Christian virtues. Such a view, crudely stated, has led to much perplexity and distress of faith, and it is not warranted by the teaching of the New Testament. God can bring good out of evil, even in its worst forms. But that is not to say that God by a deliberate act designs and causes evil. More than once in the New Testament sickness is attributed to Satanic agency, in the case of ‘the woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years,’[39] and in that of St. Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh.’[40] Disease is a disturbance of the balance of human powers, mental and bodily, a derangement of faculties and functions. Consider the bearing of this upon life. Modern science teaches us the doctrine of the persistence of matter; in Sir Oliver Lodge’s words, ‘a really existing thing never perishes, but only changes its form’--in the case of our complex human constitution, that change of form is what we call death. It is vital force which maintains that inner harmony which we call health: it is disease, an accident, which impairs it. This derangement and discord is but one instance of that general disturbance of the world’s harmony which sin has introduced. Sometimes, as in the case of the impotent man of St. John v., disease is the direct consequence of sinful conduct. It is the work of the Son of Man to restore harmony and repair the breaches in Nature’s order. And this His healing power on its spiritual, which is its essential, side effects. Incidentally, miracles are ‘signs,’ evidences of the Christian Revelation, but their primary character is that of ‘mighty works’ (δυνάμεις), particular manifestations of that Power (δύναμις) which resides in the Person of the Lord. As such they impressed King Herod, though he attributed their authorship to the Baptist risen from the dead.[41]

[38] E.g. Mark v. 23, 28; vi. 56; James v. 15.

[39] Luke xiii. 16.

[40] 2 Cor. xii. 7.

[41] Mark vi. 14.

(vi) This Healing Power of Christ stands in closest relation to His claim to be ‘the Life of them that believe and the Resurrection from the dead.’ It flows from His Personality. Though that Personality is veiled for us in profound mystery, we know that in It the Human will and the Divine will are in perfect accord; and, therefore, it does not surprise us that, while a place is found in the Saviour’s Life upon earth for weariness and pain, none is found for sickness; for, in all things, He conformed to the Will of God for man, which is health, not sickness. Sickness is a violation of that normal condition which God has appointed for man. When infection and disease entered into the world, we must believe that they were part of that general imperfection which God can only be said to will as a means to an end, or as a passing stage in the evolution of good. God does not send sickness to scourge us, but overrules it to purge us. In saying this, we need not deny the possible place of death in a perfect cosmos; a death which should have been the gradual ebbing of physical vitality, not its sapping and undermining by the malignant forces of disease. We should expect, then, that our Lord’s healing power would be the action of the life-giving Spirit of God upon the spirit of man, from the very fact that in Christ man was brought into living contact with God.

Recent psychology, especially in the investigations of Professor W. James and the late F. W. H. Myers, has thrown a new light upon those recesses of human nature in which our religious experiences take place. We have learned that there is a subconscious self, a submerged portion of our faculties, which responds to spiritual impressions and accepts those suggestions of a Higher Power, to which mind and intellect are sometimes deaf, a ‘subliminal self,’[42] in which religious faith and the inspirations of genius are alike rooted, and which is _en rapport_ with another world than that of the senses. We are reminded of Tennyson’s words:

[42] I.e. a self beneath the margin of consciousness. Mr. Dearmer has
named it the ‘undermind.’

Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--
Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where.[43]

[43] _The Two Voices_

It is through that under-self that mental cures appear to operate.[44]

[44] ‘If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates
through the subliminal door.’--Professor James.

The theory certainly contributes something to our problem, making it conceivable, even to our finite intelligence, how the Divine Life of Christ should enter into man, sick of body and sad of soul, and this quite in the line of the order and natural law of God’s universe. Christ is one with the Father; He came down from Heaven to do the will of the Father; His works are done in the Father’s name (John x. 25). The Father hath given the Son to have life in Himself (John v. 26). The Divine Life is communicated to those who seek it in Christ. We are not to restrict the thought of that Life to the immaterial part of our nature; it is the more abundant life which floods the being of him who ‘liveth unto God.’[45] We may not fathom its hidden processes: like spiritual teaching, spiritual healing can come home only to the ‘spiritual men’ whose minds are ‘in tune with the Infinite.’[46] But some desire for ‘more life and fuller’ is found in every man. Classical scholars will remember the pathetic lines written by the statesman Mæcenas in his last illness:

[45] John x. 10; Rom. vi. 10.

[46] 1 Cor. ii. 14, 15.

Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa ...
Vita dum superest, bene est.[47]

[47] _Seneca_, Ep. 101:

‘What matters crippled hand and halting thigh?
So life be left the cripple, what care I?’

In this universal fact of human nature, this desire to live, which varies infinitely among men from the mere craving of animal existence up to the desire for the life in God, we see man’s response to the Giver of Life.

The appeal of the Good Physician is to human nature, and ‘He knows what is in man.’ He takes a natural emotion or faculty, vitalises and invigorates it. We have had to keep the connexion of spiritual health and physical health constantly before us. There is a parallelism between them which is no mere analogy, but is a sort of pre-established harmony; and therefore a wise interpretation of Scripture has seen in the Miracle an ‘acted parable.’ Thus it is in regard to the ‘desire to live’ which supports our bodily vitality. This categorical imperative or instinctive ‘ought’ of health is a primary instinct. The ‘will to be well’ corresponds with the ‘will to be good’ which is the basis of the moral life.

(2) Bearing these principles in mind, we must turn to a closer examination of some of the miracles, with a view to some practical conclusions in regard to the healing office of the Church of our own day.

(i) Has the age of miracles long ceased? It has long been assumed by religious minds, as a kind of axiomatic truth, that this is so. They have seen in the healing miracles of Christ the unique exercise of a power specifically Divine, a power which was continued for a time, with other extraordinary gifts, to the early Church for reasons which no longer held good when once she had taken firm root in the world. But we have already shown reasons for the opinion that, unique as is our Lord’s Humanity, we are to regard it as conditioned by those laws of nature and material existence which are the expression in the visible sphere of the Creative will. ‘It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren.’[48] And there is strong reason to hold that the true believer will be permitted, in virtue of his fellowship with Christ, to do ‘greater works’ than those which Christ Himself wrought,[49] greater, that is to say, not in a material but a spiritual way. That the works in question were wrought ‘in the spirit’ is unquestioned. Consider what those ‘spiritual’ methods of the Great Healer were. He wrought His mighty works in the Father’s name. Not only does He lay down for others the principle of intercessory prayer, but as Man He exercises it Himself. Of the demoniac boy He says: ‘This kind goeth forth not but by prayer and fasting.’ St. Luke records the fact that He made the importunity of the multitude, who sought His teaching and healing grace, a fresh occasion for retirement and prayer.[50] The same Gospel tells us of a night spent in prayer before the election of the Twelve Apostles.[51] They received His commission to heal and to teach on the succeeding day, which saw also the vast concourse of people resorting to Him once more from all quarters. In the account of the raising of Lazarus it is clearly laid down that Jesus Christ knew the Father’s will in virtue of fellowship with Him in prayer and meditation, and that He exercised His own life-giving powers in accordance with that Will.

[48] Heb. ii. 17.

[49] John xiv. 12.

[50] Luke v. 15, 16.

[51] Luke vi. 12.

Health in itself is an ideal, the perfect harmony of all the elements, the spiritual and the material, which constitutes a man. One of the greatest living authorities writes: ‘Health, like every other such name, is to be used in a relative sense; absolute health is an ideal conception.’[52] This being so, it is apparent to any religious mind that the true concept of the well-being, physical and even mental, of any person is only to be found in the Mind of God. And that is only an abstract way of saying that, if we follow Christ’s example, we shall seek to enter into His fellowship with the Father. In that Divine fellowship we shall be able to pray for the true health and recovery of our sick people. ‘The prayer of faith shall save the sick,’ for faith implies a whole-hearted acceptance of the Will of God for the uncertain future. This gives a man the tranquillity of soul which is no less needed for prayer than for action. Such an one possesses his own soul. Our Lord promises to those, who ‘have faith and doubt not,’[53] that they shall ‘remove mountains,’ a hyperbolic expression, but yet one which seems to claim a certain power of acting upon inanimate nature.[54] Such a power need not carry with it a positive breach of cosmic law. It is impossible for any really reverent mind to wish, even in the supposed interest of his dearest friend, to bend the Will of God to his own desire. Such a rash prayer involves the fatal flaw of that ‘doubting mind’ which is forbidden us, the mind ‘divided’ between God and self. The spirit which unites us to God, that unfathomed inner self, desires the universal good.

[52] Professor Clifford Allbutt, _System of Medicine_, vol. i.,
Intro. p. 22.

[53] Matt. xxi. 21. Cp. James i. 6: ‘Nothing doubting.’

[54] See Dr. Sanday, _Life of Christ in Recent Research_, pp. 223,
224.

Our wills are ours, we know not how:
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

God wills the true health and salvation of each human soul, as He alone can view it, in its relation both to the vast whole of immaterial being and to the order of the material universe. ‘His will He knoweth which way to accomplish.’ Prayer is the act of resignation of our individual desires and thoughts into His all-wise hands. Prayer universalises a personal longing; and so wonderful is the magic of true prayer, fetching up from the deep of our being suggestions, inspirations, forces unperceived by man, that it can never fail to induce a sense of calm, the most favourable for a physical recovery; and many a time it has effectuated that recovery itself. Science may teach the ‘reflex action of prayer’; religion will always find authentic answers to prayer.

Prayer is the spiritual instrument on which our Lord in His Human Nature relies, and on which He encourages His Church to rely--‘a mighty engine of achievement.’[55] His method was grounded in prayer, the prayer of that Divine fellowship, which is His, as it cannot belong to any of the sons of men, and yet in Him, ‘in the Name of Christ,’ the Church must still expect to accomplish the miracles of faith, in proportion to the degree of her own spirituality. Who, indeed, would have looked for miracles of healing in the English Church of the eighteenth century, unless it were among the non-jurors, who actually revived the apostolic rite of unction,[56] and the pious followers of John Wesley?[57]

[55] Sir Oliver Lodge.

[56] The Rev. P. Dearmer, _Body and Soul_, p. 289 sq.

[57] _Ib._ 362, 363.

(ii) But that spiritual power, thus resident in the Healer, has to communicate itself to the subjects of His grace; subjects they must be rather than objects. And His first purpose is to excite the dormant energies of life and action. He does it as a wise physician will do it, by concentrating the patient’s mind upon Himself.[58] This is done by a question, or other means, adapted, with His profound insight into character, to the individual case. In the case of the deaf man who had an impediment, He effected this by isolating him,[59] and then using physical means (with finger and saliva). Exactly parallel is the case of the blind man, which, like the former, is recorded by St. Mark alone.[60] He asks blind Bartimæus, ‘What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’[61] And this is one of several cases in which the sovereign faculty of will leaps forth, and the confession of faith attends it.[62] In the cure of the lame man by St. Peter (in Acts iii. 4, 5) this concentration of the thought of the patient upon the healer is reciprocal (ἀτενίσας ... ἐπει̑χεν).

[58] ‘When the eye of the patient meets the eye of the physician, the
cure begins if it is likely to take place.’--Dr. A. T. Schofield,
cited by Dr. Worcester in _Religion and Medicine_, p. 50.

[59] Mark vii. 33.

[60] _Ib._ viii. 23.

[61] Luke xviii. 41.

[62] John v. 6, 8.

The tonic influence of a healthy personality upon the hysterical, neurotic, and mentally diseased, not to speak of minds depressed in a normal way, is familiar to everyone. In Dinah Morris’s visit of comfort to the widowed Lisbeth, we have a sample of that subtlest perception and ‘subduing influence of the spirit’ which we may call inspiration.[63] In the New Testament it appears at its highest in treatment of those strong cases of dual personality, mental disorder, or hysteria, which we know as demoniacal possession. We cannot here discuss the question, whether the sufferer was the victim of the lower elements in his own nature or of a malignant outside influence (known in the language of the day as a ‘demon’). On the other hand, it has to be remembered that the Jews personified ordinary diseases; and our Lord conformed to popular ideas when ‘He rebuked the fever’ of Simon’s wife’s mother, unless we hold that the evangelist has coloured the record of His action by his own mentality.[64] On the other hand, we know little as yet of the psychological problems of civilised humanity and less of those of half-civilised or uncivilised peoples, such as the Galileans of our Lord’s day. But if we should allow that the demon was merely the sufferer’s lower ego, the marvel of the cure is not lessened. There is a great power of evil in the world; and the lower self was entirely dominated by it until Christ emancipated the man by His sovereign demand upon his spirit. Inner harmony was restored. They find the man ‘sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.’ The bodily and the mental well-being are combined in the cure. The sufferer’s enfeebled will is braced up to respond to the Will of the Healer, that ease shall expel disease. Within the man’s being, as truly as without it, ‘imperavit ventis, et facta est tranquillitas magna.’[65]

[63] G. Eliot, _Adam Bede_, chap. x.

[64] Luke iv. 39: _ib._ viii. 24 raises a parallel question.

[65] Matt. viii. 26.

(iii) An analysis of the miracles of Christ indicates His attitude towards the material and outward means, on which the physician still so largely relies. The letter of King Abgarus to our Lord (preserved by Eusebius), genuine or not, indicates, we may believe, the feature in His treatment which most impressed the men of His day. ‘The story hath reached my ears of Thee and Thy healings as wrought by Thee without drugs and simples.’ Though this was so, He did not eschew the use of material and visible signs, such as clay and saliva, which were adapted to convey to sick folk that ‘mental suggestion’ of returning health, which was His constant method of healing. In the following miracles the use of such material means is recorded: the case of the deaf man with an impediment (Mark vii. 33), of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 24), of the man blind from his birth (John ix. 6), who also was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam. Of the Apostles, on their first mission, it is said that they anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them (Mark vi. 13). Probably this element, which was in frequent medicinal use, was in their hands ceremonial, a symbol of that healing power of their Master which they were allowed in His name to exercise. He Himself is found, in the great majority of instances, to rely on the touch of the hand alone.[66] He knew that it spoke to the heart of a Divine effluence of power as well as a human sympathy. In one of the frescoes of the Creation, on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo has pictured the form of the first man, perfect as a statue, but lifeless until the Finger of God quickens it with a touch. And, after all, a universal instinct associates ideas of sympathy and positive relief with the movement of the hand. Thus in the Greek myth, the distracted Io is comforted by the prophecy of Prometheus that the God would restore her by his touch.[67]

[66] Thus Luke iv. 40; Mark i. 41, vi. 5; Matt. ix. 29; Luke xiii.
13. Mr. Dearmer gives a careful ‘Table of the healing works of
Christ,’ _Body and Soul_, chap. xiii.

[67] _Aesch._, Pr. V. 848, 849.

(iv) The healing of the nobleman’s son, of the centurion’s slave, and that of the Syrophœnician woman’s daughter stand by themselves as instances of ‘absent treatment.’ The strong impression wrought in the mind of the father, the master, the mother, respectively, is conveyed by a sort of telepathy to the mind of the patient. ‘Why herein,’ surely, is a marvellous thing for those who cannot accept our Lord’s claim to be the Son of Man in a unique sense--that He should thus have possessed, 2000 years ago, a knowledge of the mysterious processes of human nature which modern science is only now beginning to divine. It is in that fact that the ‘glory’ (Luke xiii. 17; John xi. 40), the ‘wonder’ (Matt. xxi. 15), the ‘strangeness’ (Luke v. 26) of the miracles of Christ consist. They are ‘works of power,’[68] ‘outcomings of that mighty power of God which was inherent in Christ,’[69] and which He exerted within a region of human nature then unexplored. We cannot ponder too deeply on that great saying of St. Augustine, ‘Portentum fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.’[70] Who shall attempt to lay down the laws which govern the operation of the spiritual upon the material? and still more to delimit the powers of the Personality and Will of Him, in whose name Apostles, Saints of the Church, and humble Christians unrecorded in history have wrought cures, which only a purblind scepticism can gainsay?

[68] Matt. xi. 20; Luke xxiv. 19; Acts ii. 22, &c.

[69] Abp. Trench, _Synonyms of New Testament_ (Art. xci.).

[70] _De Civitate Dei_, xxi. 8; quoted by Dr. Sanday, _Life of
Christ, &c._, viii., adding, ‘miracle is not really a breach of the
order of nature; it is only an apparent breach of laws that we know,
in obedience to other and higher laws that we do not know.’

THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING

BY

W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.

VICAR OF CHEDDAR AND PREBENDARY OF WELLS

THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING

BY W. YORKE FAUSSET, M.A.

The psychologists teach us that a man’s ‘self’ is a larger thing than the ‘me’ which, we might say, a child has in view when it puts out a hand to get a sweetmeat for itself. As Professor W. James says, ‘The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts--soul, body, and clothes--is more than a joke’; and he goes on to include in that self the man’s immediate family, his home, the property he has collected.[71] And then we think of Aristotle’s definition of man as a ‘political’ or social animal--the social self with its wider or narrower reach--for ‘properly speaking a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.’

[71] _Text Book of Psychology_, pp. 177, 178.

(i) All this has an important bearing on the subject of health and disease. We are all influenced by our environment for better or worse. The material and visible conditions of life, our home, our friends and associates, our country, our daily occupations, contribute to make us what we are. Life is defined by Herbert Spencer as ‘the continuous adjustment of internal relations.’ It may be difficult or even impossible to attain to the stable equilibrium of perfect goodness, perfect health, perfect happiness; and, in fact, neither science nor religion encourage us to expect such a consummation within the limits of this earthly existence.

But there may be a ‘continuous adjustment’; and it must be the practical aim alike of religion and of science to mould the individual by the environment which will best harmonise his personal good with the good of the whole. We have to elevate the conditions of human existence. The individual has not only to adapt himself to his environment, in the temper of _laisser faire_, but to adapt it to the satisfaction of his highest good. ‘Great religious consciences have taken their post, confronting society, as representing in themselves truth and right, because behind them was God, while behind existing societies there is only man, nature, and circumstances. Far from consenting to identify himself with the social conscience, the religious conscience disposes man to oppose the rights of God to those of Cæsar, the dignity of the human person to public constraint.’[72] In the language of religion, ‘No man hath seen God at any time: if we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.’ That is the ideal of the Christian Society, the Body of Christ, actuated by the great principles of faith, hope, and love. And much might have been said of the duty of a Christian State to secure to all its members the elementary conditions of a healthy, useful citizenship. Most of our disease is a disgrace to our Christian civilisation, because it is preventable. The ancient poet rightly associates the spectres of Care, Hunger, and Fear with the grim forms of Disease at the portals of his Inferno:

[72] Emile Boutroux, _Science et Religion_, p. 206.

Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae:
Pallentis qua habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas.[73]

[73] Virg. _Æneid_, vi. 273 sq. ‘Right in front of the doorway and
in the entry of the jaws of hell Grief and avenging Cares have made
their bed; there dwell wan Sickness and gloomy Eld, and Fear, and
ill-counselling Hunger, and loathly Want.’--J. W. Mackail.

(ii) But the problem of the prevention of sickness scarcely concerns us here, though it requires a passing reference. It has been sufficiently shown that you cannot isolate the individual from the society in which he moves; that were to make him an unreal abstraction. The Church has never committed that mistake in her dealing with the sick. When we pray, in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, that God would ‘preserve and continue this sick member in the unity of the Church,’ the prayer breathes the very spirit of ancient piety. It is an unspeakable help, in dealing with a sick man, to be able to appeal to his own conscious and sincere membership in the Body of Christ. The Visitation Office is ‘peculiarly a ministration for those who have been trained beforehand in the fulness of Church life and privileges.’[74] Herein, as often, the Prayer-book sets up an ideal standard. But, however far our actual practice falls short of it, we must work towards it. It is said of St. Francis of Assisi that, ‘in each one, with whom he had to deal, he saw a possible Christ.’ A bold saying, had it not been that the Master Himself had anticipated it.[75] In the Christian view of things, the sick and suffering, whatever their religious attainments and professions may have been, have a clear claim upon the other members of the One Body. Christian faith can only heighten human sympathy.

[74] Dean Savage, _Pastoral Visitation_, p. 76.

[75] Matt. xxv. 35, 36.

And in the New Testament there are not wanting indications that the faith of friends has a vicarious efficacy. In such faith the force of suggestion is at work, but it is a collective suggestion. There is the typical case of the four friends, who were not to be put off by the crush at the doors, but resolutely stripped the roofing in order to lower the paralytic, as he lay on his pallet, into the Saviour’s immediate presence. Such unconventional faith was irresistible. ‘When Jesus saw their faith, He said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.’[76] The bodily cure soon followed. The fact is, that such faith diffuses a spiritual atmosphere; it is contagious and works from mind to mind. ‘Our bodies isolate us, our spirits unite us.’[77]

[76] Mark ii. 5. Cp. T. T. Carter, _Holy Eucharist_, pp. 150, 151,
especially the words, ‘To lean one’s own failing faith on the more
trustful, assured faith and convictions of others. So that the same
spirit may communicate itself to the sad and darkened soul by a
mutually organic sympathy.’

[77] Sir Oliver Lodge, _Man and the Universe_, p. 47.

Similarly, in the raising of Jairus’s daughter an emphasis is laid on the necessity of a sympathetic atmosphere: first, by the fact that only three, the elect among the chosen Twelve, SS. Peter, James and John, were allowed to attend their Lord; secondly, by the exclusion of all others in the house, except the father and mother of the child. The professional mourners and musicians were turned out--not merely because they ‘insulted the dumbness of sincere sorrow and the patient majesty of death’ (Farrar), but because they diffused, as their behaviour soon showed (κατεγέλων αὐτου̑), an atmosphere of unbelief. The Lord wishes to remove all antagonistic and disturbing human presences and to speak Himself in power to the innermost soul of the departed maiden. On the other hand, if the air was charged with unbelief, if those He wished to help were without faith, as was the case in His own village of Nazareth, ‘He could there do no mighty work.’[78]

[78] Mark vi. 5.

We trace the same principle in His dealing with those whom He had healed. Sometimes He bids them ‘go and tell their friends how great things God has done for them,’ as when he refused to keep the Gadarene demoniac by His side. At another time he bids them tell no man of the cure which had been wrought. This difference of treatment can be explained most simply, if we suppose that in the one case Christ knew that the patient’s ordinary _milieu_ was favourable to his progress in bodily and spiritual health, in another case He knew that this was not so. So it was in the case of the leper of St. Mark i. 44. And, again, this difference of treatment may have been ‘grounded,’ as Archbishop Trench says, ‘on the different moral conditions of the persons healed.’ It is so still, for human nature remains constant to certain broad types. Some overwrought people require the absolute isolation of a ‘rest cure’; others, who are moody and self-centred, can only rally their disused powers in contact with invigorating companionship. They are the unhappy victims of that numbness of spirit of which R. L. Stevenson writes so pathetically in his essay entitled ‘Ordered South.’[79]

[79] Cp. the medieval complaint of ‘accidie.’

(iii) This brings us naturally to consider the special value which Christ attaches in His teaching to a corporate act of prayer. For this is the meaning of the words ‘If any two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in Heaven; for where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.’ And this it is which has moulded the form of the Lord’s Prayer, and that of the great Sacrament of Unity, our highest act of intercession. Thus our Lord enjoined upon His disciples the duty and the efficacy of combined spiritual effort.[80] There is a power intensive, as well as extensive, in collective prayer. In this, as well as in other activities of the spirit, the total effect gained is larger than the sum total of units of effort. There is a sort of analogy here with the force of collective suggestion, which we have been considering above: but we must not expect to find a complete philosophical explanation of any great spiritual principle. Our personal experience verifies the value of corporate prayer. If it were not so, religion would be an individual matter alone; it would lack its most universal expression, that of common worship. It is because the Church in our country lost for a long period her corporate consciousness, at least in a large degree, that she lost sight of the power of corporate intercession for the sick members of the Body of Christ. (Of the faithful departed we may not here speak.) But her formulas and liturgy have been a standing witness against such obliviousness, with which the Church of to-day can hardly be taxed, and those who profess their belief in the Communion of Saints find in such intercession its most practical expression.

[80] Bertroux, _op. cit._ p. 189: ‘une volonté collective est sans
rapport avec la somme algébrique des volontés individuelles.’