Contents
Preface
Chapter I. An Ideal Occupation
Chapter II. Mental Attitudes
Chapter III. Besetting Self-Consciousness
Chapter IV. Persistent Fear
Chapter V. Spiritual Quickening
Chapter VI. A Letter to a Skeptic
Chapter VII. The Emmanuel Movement
Chapter VIII. The Power of the Spirit
Chapter IX. The True Christian Science
Preface
IN these pages a twofold purpose has been achieved, the restatement of the methods and laws of an ideal occupation in terms of living issues, and the inculcation of principles of self-help closely allied with this ideal. Chapters I, VII, and VIII are especially meant for those who would become physicians to the soul, the others more particularly for those who are seeking light on personal problems. The book was written in response to a number of requests none of which I saw fit to meet precisely as stated. These requests in substance called for critical estimates of various theories of mental healing. Critical estimates are apt to be unpleasantly decisive, and it did not seem worth while to return to a field which I left several years ago. Moreover, the therapeutic movement within the church has suddenly put the situation in a new light. Hence it seemed more profitable to indicate what I believe to be the next advance, a step in accord with recent investigations in new fields. Finally, I have responded to a request for a refutation of “Christian Science” by writing an essay on the science of the Gospels. The book as a whole, then, is constructive, and it points the way to lines of work which may almost wholly supersede methods now in vogue.
Cambridge, Mass.,
July, 1908.
Chapter I. An Ideal Occupation
Some occupations are thrust upon us, others are acquired by dint of hard work; the vocation of physician to the soul is a gift of experience. It may indeed be acquired, but is more likely to be added to a man’s regular work, not because he directly sought it but incidentally. One thinks of every minister or father-confessor as such a friend to the soul, but such friendship is not limited to the ministry, and the priest is sometimes a mere agent of a doctrinal system. Some problems are taken rather to the lawyer, though not always with ideal results. The regular physician may also be a friend indeed, so may the teacher, the employer, or the kinsman. By a subtle intuition people know whom to trust. Hence a man unexpectedly finds himself sought by people of certain types who rear him, as it were, into their special friend. The revelations of which he is the recipient enable him to discern the deeper meanings of life, and to develop new fields of interest. After a time there are results to publish to the world, and one friend to the soul is able to further the work of others. It is with the hope that some of the results thus attained may be of service that in what follows I shall collect certain hints, and undertake to define this ideal occupation with reference to the soul’s needs at the present time.
First a word to indicate how the ideal vocation is added to professional work. As the development of such an office is obvious in the case of clergyman or physician, we may take the work of the teacher of philosophy as typical. Now, philosophy of all subjects is deemed most remote from individual problems, given over to tradition and the dry routine of abstract questions. He whose vocation compels him to draw distinctions until only the technically trained can follow, is supposed to be unable to render a decision in an individual case. Moreover, it is the philosopher’s province to raise objections to the last, and he of all men is able to block conviction and impede conduct. But this depends upon the use to which this hair-splitting occupation is put, for it may well lead to the finest discernment of which the human mind is capable.
The inquirer would indeed be less likely to consult a philosopher if he expected the sort of positive statement which the clergyman ordinarily gives. Yet the minister is oftentimes noncommittal where the philosopher is unsparingly frank. Hence those who are deeply involved in doubt, and those who seek fundamental self-knowledge, are likely to turn to the teacher of philosophy. At any rate, it is the province of philosophy to make explicit the interests of the occupation which ministers and teachers share. The philosopher is in large measure the freest member of the community, since his interest is eternal truth, and is not dependent on particular systems. The work of the soul’s physician explicitly lies in the universal realm which exists above all special doctrines.
The teacher of philosophy discovers a fundamental discontent with existing institutions, and it is partly his work to throw himself into sympathy with this restless striving. Outside of his ordinary work he therefore goes on missions such as those that engaged Socrates of old, when he wandered up and down the streets of Athens pursuing any possible clue to knowledge, calling forth the views of men who were struggling for self-expression. To return to the conversational method, to write to an individual in need, is to establish close connection between philosophy and life. As a teacher one may give forth merely general principles; as a man one must speak to the individual. As a teacher he is under compulsion to accomplish definite ends, but as a man he is free to serve. After all, the true way to teach is to know the individual, and such instruction grows out of sympathetic friendship. The teacher who puts a student off with the remark that it is not the province of philosophy to solve personal problems not only misses a great opportunity but limits his science. To undertake to instruct the individual may be to find him baffling. But the endeavour is worth while, and the art of philosophy begins with knowledge of particular cases. To draw a man out in Socratic fashion may not be to direct, least of all to confute him. But the process makes the man questioned better acquainted with himself.
When two meet, ostensibly to study a subject of mutual interest, such as ethics, they forthwith discover other interests in common. Hence by the doorway of the unexpected they enter a new region. No formal arrangements preside over this added interest. By no consciously wrought device may a man increase the number of these whom he best serves. For in the added region every man counts as one, and one only, in entire equality. To enter there is to find that friendship with a student has gradually changed from mutual interest in science to interest in the finer human world which is shared through affinity of spirit. The best any man may give is his spirit. In so far as he reveals his inmost attitude he speaks from the soul, imparts that subtle quality which arouses love for the true, the beautiful, and the good. Some men never permit their spiritual attitude to become known, to say nothing of their intellectual convictions. There are others who, on occasion, frankly open mind and heart. These are indeed friends to the soul. Whatever the line of approach, the outcome is the same: there is one eternal region whose inhabitants speak a common language—the language of the heart.
Hence the best work of the soul’s physician in any field is wrought in the realm of the heart. No one can tell when the eternal region is to be reached, but insensibly differences in rank are forgotten, and there is unstinted frankness. The relationship thus spontaneously established, its participants may regain it at will. Thus friendship points the way to a new vocation. One dislikes to carry self-conscious analysis into this ideal sphere. But there are souls in need, and one necessarily acquires a method.
The method is essentially Socratic. By persistently questioning, with patient sympathy one must call forth the imprisoned soul, first into confession, if need be, but at any rate into the freedom of self-expression. The burden that has been carried alone must be revealed, misunderstandings cleared away, discouragements brought to light. The usual spirit of hurry, and all mercenary motives, must give place to the most gracious willingness to learn the real state of affairs with this soul in need. Where all known methods fail a new one must be developed. Every soul is in some sense unique, and the soul’s physician has opportunity to discern the heart.
Thus the physician to the soul wins his occupation by that subtle principle of affinity which underlies the noblest relationships in human life. The young woman who opens her heart, the young man who lingers after every one else has gone, the person in middle life who, fearing intrusion, nevertheless seeks an interview, could hardly give sufficient excuse, but no explanation is needed. It is perhaps a personal experience which no one at home knows about, and the heart knows by a way of its own to whom to flee. Or, it is a question of conscience, and it seems wise to consult one who is disinterested. It may be a problem of social adjustment, and the questioner one who is glad to consult a man who is neither merely conventional nor an advocate of a plan for moral regeneration. The one who is thus chosen knows that he has no special wisdom. While the heart’s outpourings are being bestowed upon him, he may be sorely perplexed to give answer. But it is a relief to the troubled heart to communicate its problems and reveal its struggles. As such opportunities increase a man finds that his knowledge of human nature grows more intimate.
Occasionally the difficulties are largely religious, and pertain not merely to sin but to theological matters. The questioner has already consulted her pastor and been turned aside, inasmuch as her beliefs had implications that threatened his theology—and some ministers care more for theology than for souls. Here, once more, the physician to the soul must speak from the universal world straight to the heart. The priest makes as much as possible of sin, for that is his vocation. But the philosopher, being partly a Greek, may draw upon those happy times when men were less troubled about sin, and deeply concerned with the ideals of self-realisation. His province is not to condemn but to be a brother, and to point the way to philosophical selfexpression.
Again, it is a young person who seeks aid on subjects which father or mother could throw light upon if only they were what father and mother should be. It is indeed a sacred task to confer with one who is mystified by the warfare of the passions. Here, too, the end in view is self-realisation, and the means to it transmutation of life from lower to higher levels, without selfdisparagement or morbid introspection.
Or, it may be one who is in quest for that “bread of life” which the schoolteacher cannot give, which is seldom bestowed at home; and which, strange to relate, is not always obtainable at church. There is so much routine in school and college that oftentimes the best that human life affords has no recognition. More may depend upon the prescient word of commendation, spoken without regard to customary standards, than upon all else that a teacher can say. The man who thus gives of himself may be the one who above all others discerns character, and thereby offsets all the routine remarks of the less friendly. The personal touch that reaches the soul may be the one gift needed to quicken the spirit into fulness of life. There is no greater service than to hold up a life-giving ideal before another.
The social settlement worker and the missionary are supposably physicians to the soul. The growing methods of social service have come into vogue because of the conviction that work with individuals is the only sort that avails. Yet there are problems which the social worker cannot solve. Such a worker has her heart-longings, too, and so she turns from her work to admit to the philosopher that she has no underlying faith. Again, the missionary becomes discouraged because evangelical methods prove too general, and people no longer respond to an appeal to be “saved.” Thus, as a student of human life, one welcomes any opportunity to look behind the scenes and discern the real situation. And is this not rightfully a part of the philosopher’s interest? Is any tendency of our times more promising than that which leads men and women to pursue truth to the end, even if the process involve some of the sensational exposures which the past few years have witnessed?
However that may be, the soul’s physician is one who permits nothing to stand between himself and the truth which sets the soul free, or between himself and the man or woman whom he would serve. He seeks the truth even though to obtain it he must learn what no one else knows about his questioner’s life. He tells what he believes to be the truth, howbeit the telling of it may give pain, or cost him the opportunity further to serve. He out-distances the father-confessor inasmuch as he is no hireling. A free lance, he is also an impartial friend of those who would live by the Spirit. If really successful, he is likely to learn more about a person than intimate friends have learned in many a year. It is his right to unmask, if need be, or to be a mediator when the most vital issues are at stake. His clientele increases by its own laws. His service changes with the growth of his own soul.
Sometimes the questioner can best tell the story of inward struggle by letter, and again the friend may write more freely than he could talk. One may even be the soul’s best friend and never meet except by letter. A letter to an imprisoned soul will, when printed, call out unexpected responses from total strangers of various types who insist that the letter was written explicitly for them.
To see a need and to persuade are, however, two different matters. For the soul’s problems are sometimes inextricably linked with a household, and households are not always amenable to suggestion. Here is a young woman, for example, who is sacrificing her life to an invalid mother so selfish or so feeble that she must be spared every pain. The situation is intolerable, yet every door is closed, and the daughter must be a martyr unto the end, concealing her sufferings, externally cheerful. Again, it is a daughter whose mother is out of sympathy with her, whose sisters despise her, while a whimsical father rules over all and defeats every plan for a change in the home life. Or, it is a wife in distress who has grown morbid because she pines for the attention her husband might give her were he not greatly absorbed in his vocation. It is a relief to pour out to the soul’s friend the woes which other ears should have heard, it is momentarily restful to receive sympathy; but the situation remains unchanged. If the whole family could be summoned in these cases, if each would take action, all might be well. But into the domestic tragedy is wrought an entire system of conventionality, with all its masks, its protection of one member at the expense of others, its cruel judgments, and its exacting penalties.
The central difficulty in many cases springs out of a strong sense of duty which knows no exception. On the one hand, are the troubles of the people at home, already so great that the one who comes to make confession believes it her duty to conceal her own ills, to put on a smiling face, utter the cheerful word, and never by any chance reveal her real feelings. But this leads to duality of life, on the other hand, hence to fresh misery. The moral ideal is one of self-sacrifice, yet it is maintained by a kind of self-centredness which inevitably leads to selfishness. To the observer it is plain that the moral ideal is radically wrong, yet he can make almost no headway in combating it, for this strong sense of duty triumphs over all. There is in fact a deadlock between the straggle to be free and the relentless power of duty.
The same moral obstacle is found in the case of the social worker who has spent so many years in devoted labour for others that her health is sadly impaired. She comes, not because of her health, but to be made morally stronger, that she may “die gloriously in the harness” She refuses to give up her work, even to take an extended vacation, for there is no one to take her place. Those who are over her in authority will not lighten her work, for they are victims of the same moral mania. She expects relief for the soul, yet obstinately refuses to lessen her moral zeal. One argues that it is a strange system of “charity” which oppresses its workers till their very lifeblood is spilled, but to no purpose. She is the sacrificial victim of a system as unyielding as that which enslaves mother or daughter in the home.
It is not always the moral doctrine, however, that is at fault. The trouble may date back to childhood. Here is a man, for example, who as a boy was so nervous and delicate that he grew up without the free life of play which is the right of every boy and girl. Shy, sensitive, imprisoned in the inner life, he has never been able to “let go,” hence has not been understood, but has been under constant condemnation. Struggling now in later life to attain self-abandonment, he is everywhere hampered by life-long habits of subjectivity. He is over-serious, not because of too great interest in moral problems, but because he has not played enough. He is trying to be a moral reformer, but reform should begin at home. He has consulted specialists in nervous diseases, but has found no light. What he needs is the most sympathetic advice, both in regard to his deeper selfhood and with respect to his undeveloped objective life. Whatever is done he must accomplish for himself.
Thus it comes about in these times, when many men and women have become hypersensitive and uncommonly subjective, that a more hidden field has opened before the soul’s physician. This field is one that minister, doctor, or teacher, may enter, the qualification being that one shall have the ready sympathy which opens the way beyond the reaches of ordinary professional life. Such work calls for vicarious psychological analysis. Enveloped within the mists of a delicately subjective world, the patient is a victim of incomplete knowledge. Well-intentioned advisers have suggested that the resource is to avoid all introspection, but this is impossible. It rests with the soul’s friend, equipped with scientific psychology and a metaphysical doctrine of the self, to penetrate the mists and point to the clear light of day.
From the religious point of view, it is desirable that one be in imagination as much of a mystic as the most zealous questioner, yet be able to assess mysticism and pass far beyond it. For the practical mystic of the day, regarding himself over-seriously, needs the guidance of one who appreciates without becoming possessed by the present-day “practice of the presence of God” Psychologically, one needs to be well-grounded in physiological doctrines, yet able to take the point of view of those for whom the soul is a “purely spiritual entity,” wholly free from cerebral conditions, and master of the body. As man of science and adviser, one’s judgments may from first to last be founded on physiological diagnosis and psychological analysis; but as friend one must speak in terms of the soul, and propose ideals in mental or religious terms. If many of the so-called psychic phenomena of the day have no existence outside the mental states of those who believe in them, nevertheless these phenomena are no less real to the subject of them, and one must be governed accordingly.
Coupled with knowledge of the psychology of religion, there should be sure possession of a workable moral ideal. It is not sufficient to hold a merely scientific ethical standard. One must be able to establish connection between the given struggles and the way of escape. For the intensely subjective person of the day is apt to be conscientious to the extreme, excessively persistent in the endeavour to discover what is right, inclined to reexamine all moral decisions a dozen times to see if they are really right. Such zeal is not to be lightly turned aside, nor can one dispose of it by analytically showing the folly of the implied moral creed. One’s word of counsel must be empirical, in line with moral struggles which need an appropriate outlet. Hence one must find work for the power locked within the moral intensity and restless pathological fluctuation.
Philosophically speaking, one’s chief work consists in lessening the intellectual zeal which anticipates problems at the end of the book of life when the questioner has not yet learned the beginning. For example, here is a woman who wants to know all about “how the mind works,” how we know things, where the soul comes from, what the soul is; yet she has not even learned logically to put two and two together, and merely “feels” her way along. Here is another who chances upon such a book as Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, and thinks she will begin her studies in philosophy with that. But this same woman, speaking scornfully of “intellectual philosophers” is so ingenuous that she proudly claims to do her own thinking “subconsciously.” Here is a third who undertakes to read a philosophical work as she does a novel by looking at the last chapter to see how the plot is worked out. Such cases are not hopeless; they need patient analysis, together with gentle advice in regard to the point at which serious thinking may begin.
Again, one of the qualifications for present-day service is appreciative knowledge of popular beliefs and supposed sciences, such as palmistry, astrology, graphology, phrenology, the “new thought,” and “Christian Science” Extensive acquaintance with these beliefs is not called for, but rather willingness to regard them with toleration, readiness in momentarily maintaining the point of view of those who hold them. These beliefs cannot be eliminated by merely sweeping them aside. The distinction between “divine” and “Christian” science, for example, means very much to the disciples of these doctrines. So do the distinctions between the various methods of mental therapeutics. The variations are endless, but one soon learns the types.
The special field which just now opens before the soul’s physician is twofold in character. In the first place, there are physiological and psychological states which have baffled the ordinary physician, and perhaps the mental therapeutist of whatever school; in the second place, there is a mass of doctrines, mostly of a therapeutic type, inextricably confused, so far as the believers are concerned, with the psychophysical states. Into this confusion between disease, metaphysics, and religion, the teacher must penetrate. The prospect is not inviting, but there are victims, and some one must go to the rescue. Moreover, the probability is that one’s questioner has passed through the entire round, from spiritualism and theosophy to Christian Science and the new thought, and has already discarded most of these, hence the problem is simpler. It is a question, first, of explanation of the besetting psychophysical states, so that these shall be understood by themselves; and, second, of analysis of the remaining doctrines in the light of their religious and philosophical values. That is, one should know, (1) the actual state of the patient, mentally, physically, socially; (2) the chief causes of the most central of these states, in the light of the inner history; and, (3) the underlying moral or religious attitude. There must be a certain degree of explanation of the obsessing states, the fixed ideas, and haunting mental pictures, that is, sufficient to allay fear and give intellectual satisfaction; advice in the light of the latent ambitions, the above mentioned states and common-sense methods of treatment; and aids, psychological, religious, and philosophical, to constructive reflection.
The attitude with respect to the present struggle is sure to be of crucial importance. If one can, by persistent questioning on various subjects, learn this attitude, then find a way to persuade the patient to alter it, success is assured. For with a change of attitude moral regeneration will begin, there will be an altered mental tone, and accompanying physical responses. It may be necessary to lay down rules, at first, but the end to be kept steadily in view is, command by the individual of his own powers, self-help through more intimate self-knowledge. For, unlike the disciples of the various therapeutic beliefs above mentioned, the aim of the soul’s friend is not to make converts to a particular doctrine, but to aid him to think about his problem, whatever theory he may eventually adopt If one be a friend indeed, there is no reason to undertake to convert. The conversion that is just now worth while is into good sense.
For example, here is a woman of a psychasthenic type who has been a Christian Scientist. She has taken literally the proposition, “All is mind, there is no matter” She has heard so many discourses on the “science” that she now dwells in an artificial world, although she has done her utmost to discard the doctrine. Moreover, she had a “dreadful experience” in breaking free from her “scientist” teacher, who first threatened her, then “with a terrible look” once more subdued her, until a fortunate incident opened the pathway of escape. With utmost sympathy and gentleness, one must gradually lead this prisoner out into the world of natural human society, where the dominating personality shall be forgotten. With yet greater patience one must steadily persuade her to open her eyes upon the glad world of nature, and dismiss for ever the notion that “there is no matter” Judging by experience with a case in point, this is no easy undertaking. In the habit of bowing to authority, this woman would fain transfer her allegiance to another leader, and one cannot readily interest her in the trees and flowers. She will ask, almost incredulously, “Are these things actually real?” with a yearning that is pathetic in the extreme, she will try her utmost to accept nature as really existent, then suddenly relapse into theoretical negations.
As a rule, former disciples of Christian Science react from their fanaticism with moderation and with little bitterness. Hence it is not difficult to temper their spirits. The same is true of followers of the “new thought.” Without as yet seeing precisely why the “thought” has failed, they begin to investigate in other fields, to try osteopathy, different modes of diet, new systems of physical culture or methods of breathing. All this is an aid because it is a movement towards common sense, and the teacher can readily point out the futility of “demonstrating over” natural conditions, or of “holding thoughts” when something practical needs to be done.
However baffling these cases may be, there is but one course for the lover of his kind, namely, to penetrate back of the specific beliefs to the personality, the soul’s attitude, and call forth the self into more ideal expression. One’s province is to aid, not to controvert, to guide in terms of universal reason, not to take advantage of the opportunity to win a disciple. If the person can be persuaded to come forward, to react, express, then indeed one may make constructive comments. But the highest service is to aid each man to achieve his type. There are proselyters enough in the world. The soul’s physician is a lover of truth. He utters what he sincerely believes, then leaves the truth to make men free.
Chapter II. Mental Attitudes
To many people it is still an entirely new idea that mental states bear any relation to bodily health. In the first place, little is known about mental influences in general; and, in the second place, the possible value of collecting the necessary data and drawing inferences is not considered. Instances of alleged accidental influence of one mind upon another are mentioned as remarkable or as “interesting coincidences” It is well known that religious emotions produce powerful effects, and nearly everybody knows something about the power of the imagination; but here acquaintance with the subject usually ceases. Yet there are reasons for believing that the subject is profoundly important, especially since all our social relationships are involved. But more significant still are the mental attitudes from which the influences arise and by which they are in turn affected. The purpose of what follows is to indicate a few directions in which the study of mental influences might profitably be pursued, with special reference to the work of the soul’s physician.
Without undertaking to decide between the various theories of relationship between mind and body, we may begin with such instances as any one may verify. The facts are true, however they may be explained.
To investigate is to discover that each of us is adopting and maintaining attitudes of influential character.
It is well known, for example, that much depends upon the word of cheer uttered by physician, nurse, or friend when entering a sick-room. The tone of confidence which the physician is able to convey may be of great moment in case of illnesses where the situation hangs in the balance. To persuade a patient that he can be cured, hence to inspire him with hope, is oftentimes no small part of the physician’s task. Again, it is the sufferer’s conviction which triumphs over the unfortunate verdict pronounced by those who do not know all the facts. Chronic invalids have for years kept their minds in the most helpful attitude by the power of a hope which no adverse opinion could vanquish. Always “going to be better to-morrow,” was the encouraging word of one of these sufferers who was confined to her bed for six years with an apparently fatal disease, but who regained her health and lived for more than forty years. Another was always “approaching the climax,” undaunted by frequent collapses. The conviction that “suffering means progress” has for many been the central hope.
It is the person of strong character, however, whose conviction is thus triumphant. Ordinarily those who are ill are dependent on the decisive word of another. To be told that one is “looking better to-day” is forthwith to feel better, if perchance the state of mind be hesitant. To be characterised as “pale,” ” thin,” “tired,” is to be the more burdened. Days of anxiety for one’s health may grow out of the chance remark of one who unwisely announces that a certain disease is imminent. An appropriate word of greeting in the morning may give tone to the entire day, while a wrong word may painfully mar a day. Thus responsive are we to the dicta of our friends. To make a point of addressing optimistic remarks to those who need them is to be of great service to our fellows.
Again, the power of a word is seen when symptoms are named, and the one who is ill imagines the successive stages through which the disease may run. Patent medicine advertisements are not the only sources of trouble, for there are medical books at hand with their suggestive descriptions. There are also unenlightened people who are ready with a name for every painful symptom and with graphic portrayals of the sufferings which their friends have endured. To hear another’s illness discussed and classified is, for those who are in an unstable mood, to be supplied with ready material which the mind turns to unfortunate account. On the other hand, names, mental pictures, and fears are alike banished by the authoritative word of one who knows. A dreaded verdict pronounced upon us greatly increases the burden of depression and fear, but a promising statement gives the mind a productive clue. This is not to say that disease is made or unmade by verdicts, names, and suggestions, but that the graphic word is oftentimes a momentous factor. So slight an event as a change of clothing may result in a change of mind, provided the necessary concomitants are present, and some people systematically change their outer garments so as to have the full benefit of refreshed states of mind. Whether or not there be such influences attached to physical things as “mental atmospheres,” at any rate some people are decidedly affected by the suggestions associated with various material things. To exercise the body is to exercise the mind, too, if one drops care and takes the gymnastic activity in earnest. The given exercise, like the word of cheer, is a new object of attention, and a new object of attention means another series of mental influences, probably a changed attitude.
The effects of anger well illustrate the consequences of a new object of attention. The emotional excitement known as anger causes a nervous reaction which expresses itself in disordered circulation, increased heat, muscular strain, and the like. Even if the anger pass off without outward expression in deeds of violence, its ravages within the organism leave effects which are long noticeable. There is perhaps great distress because one was so deficient in self-control, so lacking in patience as to become angry, together with an intense struggle to throw off the passion. If the anger actually finds expression in an unkind act, the effects are even more painfully apparent Moreover, the complications may be very great. The victim may be a zealous Christian, one who eagerly prays to be righteous. Yet there may be uncontrolled forces which rise on occasion and sweep every righteous sentiment out of mind. Hence there is warfare between the gentle and the fierce emotions, and the entire state of bodily health may be involved. The problem may be to understand and to master the tendencies which make for anger so that a Christian spirit shall prevail. Thus one subject leads to another until one finds that the problem of the emotions and their control is the problem of life.
More prolific than anger are the emotions of fear. Many people spend a life of servitude to fear. They are constantly in dread of disease of various sorts, and the slightest pain suggests a fear. They almost create what they dread by habitually dwelling upon it, by exercising their ingenuity to the last degree in anticipation of the ills which may befall them. When they step out into the street, enter an electric car or a railway train, more fears are set free, and the pleasure of the journey is sadly marred by these ravaging emotions. Other fears override these when the destination is reached, and the slightest variation from the expected, whether on land or sea, in the house or out of it, is an invitation to yet other fears to arise. As if the fear of accident and disease were not enough, there is oftentimes added a round of fears in regard to property, investments, jewelry, the silver that has been put away, the money that may not arrive. Added to all these fears is solicitude for our friends and families, supplemented by the ever-present fear of death. Luckily for us nature is able to throw off many of the results of all this folly. But simply to trace the effect of fear in our lives should suffice to show that we are constantly affected by baneful influences.
Many of these mental states pass off or remain merely mental. But in general, any state that affects us emotionally is accompanied by a physical disturbance, and through the nervous reaction the emotion may become a serious cause of trouble. Where fear does not actually create its object it may at least simulate it, as when the dread of having teeth extracted arouses anticipatory pains. A fear is an invitation. If we could observe it as one might an animal we should see it stealing upon its prey. When we fear, we thus far put ourselves at the mercy of that which we fear. The man who is habitually beset by fear is ever in a state of unstable equilibrium.
On the other hand, everybody knows the calming power of a well-poised personality. Free from the eddies and storms which upset the emotionally constituted, these people have the composure which enables them to reflect before they act. A word from such a person is a boon indeed. But a word is not always needed, for their presence is rest-giving and fear-allaying. If we could know their inmost lives we should find a centre of reserve-power, an attitude of habitual peace. These people have their problems and their conflicts, occasionally their illnesses. But their problems are those of a more advanced stage of development, their conflicts are intellectual or spiritual, while their illnesses are seldom of the nervous type. For, accompanying the habitual serenity supporting the inner poise, there is a harmonious bodily condition and a well-managed nervous organism. In such a life good mental influences are constant, while in the life of the emotional person such influences are only occasional. The serene person’s emotions are moderate and do not run into an excess which disturbs the equilibrium of the nervous system. There is noteworthy absence of the insidious worry which plays havoc in many lives. There is no centre of concealed friction, no gratuitous self-consciousness eating away the inner life by its destructive observation. In short, there is rest, and where there is rest there is another world.
One can hardly come to consciousness in regard to mental influences until life is in a measure detached from external activities and put into an attitude of reflective observation. At length one discovers that throughout existence men are influenced and are influencing. One then begins to discriminate between influences that seize us and, like anger, play havoc, and, those, like an attitude of peace, which send their victorious radiations out over the troubled mental sea. Unthinking man is like a bark tossed by the gale, while the man of thought has harnessed the winds. To know how and why mental influences affect the body for good or for ill, one must understand these disturbing influences and learn the ways in which mental life may be shaped anew. A fear, for example, is an incipient influence which, like a seedling, may be rooted out or cultivated. The garden of life is filled with plants not of man’s conscious sowing which he may deal with more or less as he will, and to know what he can do is first to discover what he is already doing. The initial facts are slight enough, like the tender word of cheer which lightens the invalid’s day of suffering. But if we gather these and compare them, in due course we may make important classifications, then draw inferences and arrive at generalisations.
Another line of mental influence comes into view when we begin to consider the basis of activity within the inmost life. Every philosophical and religious devotee knows that it makes a difference whether or not a person has accepted a creed that brings peace. If the inner life be harassed by doubts the entire selfhood is disturbed. Hence to resolve doubts and attain centrality of faith is to lay foundations for tranquillity. It would be a surprising result if the change from conflict to peace had no effect on the life of the individual as a whole. The effects of intellectual changes may be less apparent at first than the results of emotional conversion. But every person’s faith is outwardly expressed. Underlying our conduct is the particular belief that gives character to it. A change at the centre may affect every portion of the circumference. Different beliefs possess different qualities and give special tone to life. Whatever the tone, the general conduct responds to it. The actual coming of illness may not be simultaneous with a change in the mental tone, but the point is that mental states of various sorts furnish the right material to further the growth of mental disease, while other states make for mental health.
There are two kinds of mental states which are accompanied by notable bodily changes. Temporary and sudden states, such as the phenomena of religious conversion with its emotional excitement and general nervous exaltation, or the disturbance produced by anger, may throw the psychophysical organism into great temporary disorder, a condition favourable to the later development of ill-health. Habitual mental states, on the other hand, expressing the usual mental attitude and the general belief with regard to life, give constancy to the entire life of the organism and constitute a condition which is proof against many ephemeral states and influences. The sudden states are most likely to arouse our interest at first and point the way to profitable inquiry, but the most promising investigation is one that shows the power of habitual beliefs and attitudes, for this inquiry points the way to escape from bondage. In general, the sudden mental influences spring from the emotions, while those of a relatively permanent character are grounded in the intellectual life.
It has so long been customary to regard health as chiefly physical, and disease as largely of external origin, that much thought is required before the power of mental influence is seen. It is frequently said that “knowledge is power,” and when the physician arrives with the wise judgment which quiets the mind and allays fear, people realise the value of knowledge. It is long, however, before those who revere the power of knowledge in others begin to emulate them by acquiring self-knowledge and becoming centres of power-giving influences. As long as men regard health as physical, they fail to take precautions to maintain mental equilibrium. Primarily physical it is in a sense, but unless there be wisdom to sustain the bodily equilibrium it may very easily be upset. Health is in the best sense of the word due to cooperation between mind and body. This co-operation means far more than the ordinary prudence in regard to food, clothing, exercise, and the like. For some people it means careful study of the mental states and attitudes which enable the organism successfully to cope with adverse conditions.
It is not strange that people are surprised when informed that health is partly an affair of the mind, for they have little conception of the power of the individual over his inner states. An entire change in point of view is ordinarily required before one is able to dissociate the self from the environing influences. But once given a clue, people are astonished to find the evidence growing on all sides. For example, let them discover the power of fear, sometimes called “the backbone of disease,” and their eyes will be opened to a series of mental influences.
The mental influences that relate to health and disease are, however, merely instances of a general law, and the power of mental attitudes is best seen with reference to life as a whole. We approach every new experience, for example, in a certain attitude of expectancy. We meet strangers, supposed enemies, people of note, inferiors or superiors in an attitude which stands for all our prejudices and hates, all our selfishness, or our best thoughts and tenderest love, as the case may be. Again, we meet people in an attitude of adverse criticism, distrust or disparagement, which quickly communicates itself. On the other hand, we meet people who “rub us the wrong way,” whatever they do. If fastidious, exacting, aristocratic, they contrive to make us uncomfortable by their very presence. The moneyed person who believes he has an entire right to regulate things in his own way, to command servants as if they were automata, is typical of these disagreeable aristocrats.
Again, there are people of a neurotic type who wear upon us, not merely because of their nervous “atmosphere,” but because of the underlying mental attitude, usually one of self-centredness—not to use the stronger word, selfishness. Then there are vampires, neurological parasites, who cling like vines and send out psychophysical tentacles much more tenacious than a vine. There are imperious, dominating personalities of power sufficient to rule an entire household, and whenever they are present they make their self-important attitude aggressively prominent.
A bit more agreeable but no less influential is the attitude of a person who is out of accord with the beliefs and ways of a household, but who, for prudential reasons, maintains silence. If such a person would express his opinions freely, utter his condemnation every few days and not permit it to accumulate more than a week, the situation would be tolerable, and occasional changes in the household would result. But unexpressed condemnation crystallizes into an attitude which everybody feels, although only the most acute may know why the silent critic is extremely disagreeable. The typical fault-finder is a much more acceptable person than one who thus husbands his opinions and has no clearing-house for hatred and condemnation. But, again, a jealous individual who refrains from giving even an inkling of the suppressed jealousy is surely as annoying. A sister who hates, a mother who refuses to forgive, equally well illustrates the principle.
On the other hand, consider the power of an optimistic disposition, even if the person be undemonstrative. One who believes firmly in another, despite all apparent failures and idle gossip, is an enormous power for good. Trust, confidence, although unexpressed, give tone to our attitudes of approach to people, and strengthen those with whom we are habitually related. Idealisation of a person may not be influential, the man of character may refuse to be idolised; but the attitudes of those who idealise are at least influential in their own selfhood. To idolise another may be to begin to rise above self. The constancy of a person of strong character is a tremendous incentive. Those who are morally steadfast are able to offset an entire group of carping critics and do-nothings. Greatest of all is an attitude of love.
Again, an attitude may bespeak the disciplinarian, or the officious person who deems himself his brother’s keeper. Wilfulness expresses itself in an habitual attitude. Doubt may be thus habitual, also self-distrust. Some people meet so few individuals in the world whom they can tolerate that their whole bearing is affected by their negative opinions. Pride is another strong incentive. Some people are never genuine, save to a few carefully chosen friends. Selective in the extreme, they assume an artificial demeanour that is distressing. Others put on a mask for the occasion, or maintain appearances for social reasons. The discerning man judges these people by the real inner attitude, but the majority are perplexed or take it as mere matter of conventionality. Dualities of attitude exist without limit, and many a person spends half a lifetime in conflict between real and assumed attitudes.
Ambition and the nervous tensions that accompany it also illustrate the power of an attitude. From the inner centre of ambition there spring, for example, restless desires to equal others in respects wherein one lacks the training or the capacity; inordinate social desires, passions for things, for position, and a desire to shine intellectually. Sometimes the nervous strain accompanying these desires is so intense that it characterises the habitual facial expression, shows itself in tense lines and rigid features. This strain, due to the desire to emulate others, may even prepare the way for nervous disease.
A part of one’s attitude towards life may express itself through habitual fear concerning the future. Here is a woman, for instance, who is at the head of a flourishing school which might at any time be sold for a sum sufficient to maintain her for the rest of life. But, possessed of inordinate fear lest the future find her penniless, she hires thousands of dollars to invest in an enterprise which she believes will yield a large profit. But the enterprise is controlled by a “trust,” and the methods of the trust would not bear investigation. Thus questions of conscience arise and the mind has no peace. Added to this is the restless anxiety with which the reports of the stock market are consulted from day to day. In conflict with all this is a Christian belief that one ought to trust, never take anxious thought for the morrow. Furthermore there are social attitudes that comport neither with this Christian sentiment nor with the unceasing distrust over financial matters. The situation is in fact complicated almost beyond description.
The condemnatory attitude mentioned above as sufficient to disturb a household is in some cases characteristic of a person’s entire attitude towards life. There is not only fault-finding with people near at hand, but complaint about everything that can be complained of. The complaint begins with the universe. If this person could have been present when the world-plan was chosen a better one could surely have been found. God Himself is not quite what He should be. There is complaint about the weather, about the climate, the seasons. The day is always too hot or too cold, too stormy or too something. When travelling, such a person is annoyed because the vehicle is not quite comfortable. In Europe there is odious comparison of the buildings, the hotels, the railway carriages, and objection to the continental breakfast, without the coveted chops or other delicacies which one has at home. Out of sorts with oneself, one is impatient with everybody else except those who servilely obey. In friction within, one is constantly finding new sources of friction, inasmuch as one always wants something different. It might be an exaggeration to say that all these surly-natured reactions are found in one individual, but everybody knows people who belong to this type.
On the other hand, the traveller who visits Europe and other lands, not expecting to find what is discoverable at home, alert, always interested, with an eye for humorous situations, very well typifies the individual who meets life in an attitude of adjustment rather than of rebellion. The reflective man adapts himself to what reasonably appears to be the law of life, welcoming experience as it comes, ready for opportunities, alive to life’s joys, with discernment of the beautiful, with thought for the meaning of experience. Such a man maintains an attitude that harmonises with the movement of events, natural and social, he is reasonably contented. He moves with the tide, neither drifting nor struggling against what cannot be changed. Such a man can never be wholly disappointed. Knowing that pure pleasure is seldom possible, he does not seek it. Discerning the meaning of pain, he does not rebel against it. His is not blind, but intelligent optimism. He is an idealist, but does not expect to reform the world out of hand.
Now, there are theorists in our day who, reflecting on such facts as we have briefly passed in review, insist that the chief consideration is man’s thought about himself, about life, about disease or health; hence, that to maintain “right thoughts” is to possess a sound world. There are others who, with deeper insight, point out that a man’s habitual attitude is of more consequence than anything he may think; therefore, that human conduct, springing from human attitudes, is fundamental. One is unable wholly to agree with either view. A man’s sustained attitude is surely more consequential than his thoughts, but there is something deeper than an attitude; namely, life, the events with respect to which we maintain an attitude. It is not primarily a question of optimism or pessimism, an attitude of adjustment or one of rebellion, but of the unflinching world-order which neither thought nor conduct can change.
The experience which the natural man meets unreflectively, the pessimist in an attitude of rebellion and the optimist with joyful adaptation, is practically the same for all. It is a fundamental fallacy of certain prevalent doctrines that emphasis is put upon the individual instead of upon the universal. That the individual counts, is not to be denied. That life alters, for us, for the moment, with our thought, is indeed true. That it is coloured, for us, by the spirit with which we habitually approach it is still more true. But the great fact is life.
The inference to be drawn, therefore, from the foregoing facts is not that man has the whole matter in mental control, but that since his attitude is a factor, and since it springs from himself, he is able within limits to modify his world. It is not my purpose, then, to trace the relationship between suggestion and disease, or undertake to explain the influence of mental attitudes upon health, but to pass on to something more important. That is to say, there is what may be called the soul’s attitude toward life, the fundamental response a man customarily makes to experience. This is not the attitude of prejudice, dislike, social masquerade, or adaptation; but the underlying or central attitude which governs his reaction to life, whatever his lips may profess and however insincere or perverse he may be.
It is sometimes said of people, for example, that their attitude “is all wrong”; that is, they have not yet come to consciousness concerning the conditions and laws of life, they are still asserting their own way as opposed to the way of the universe. To the onlooker it is plain that a person’s entire experience, so far as it is voluntary, arises from this attitude of self-assertion or rebellion, and that if the attitude were changed any number of desirable consequences would follow. The typical case mentioned above of a person with inordinate ambition, whose attitude of stress and strain brings trouble without limit, is a case in point. Instead of deriving his ambition from life, such a man is vainly trying to coerce life into wilfully selected channels. The result is endless struggle and suffering. There is no resource in such a case, save to reform the attitude fundamentally.
Here is a young woman, for example, who is bound to a selfish mother, less intelligent than herself, whom she vainly tries to please. The more she does for her mother the more is expected and the less her efforts are appreciated. Opportunities to change her occupation or to travel have come to her which she has been obliged to decline because her mother refused to change her abode. She has repeatedly overworked, become nervously prostrated, and been compelled to go to a sanitarium or hospital. Health partially regained, she has returned to go through the same round again, not a whit wiser, mystified by her repeated illnesses, unable to get light from specialists in nervous diseases. And so the same state of affairs has continued for years, and will continue until this woman looks the situation fairly and squarely in the face, and discovers the part played in it by her own attitude.
This person lives far too much in her emotions, passing from one emotion to another without thought. For one whose life has been uncommonly rich she has learned surprisingly little. This is partly because of her emotions, but largely because she has pushed the truth from her. She believes, for example, that because of this sacrifice for her mother, whom she adores, she is extremely unselfish, hence she seeks the cause of her misery outside of herself. But commingled with her self-denial there is a form of selfishness almost as extreme as her mother’s. She is, in fact, as one has said of her, a spoiled child. Accustomed to being entertained, a flirt, ever ready for a care-free good time, if people do not show her the attention she thinks she deserves, condemnation fills her heart, and she makes herself miserable— thinking of herself. She is constantly exacting from people that which they are too much occupied to give. It never seems to occur to her that her friends are busy, and that the fault may not lie with them, so occupied is she with herself. She forgets that there are people in the world who have something more important on hand than to entertain her.
It is not primarily a question of the mother, as sorely as she, too, needs to come to judgment, but of her own attitude. In her present attitude there is very little that can be done for her by physician, pastor, or friend; that is, not until she frankly meets the situation. When she has suffered enough, spent weeks enough in the hospital, and become profoundly dissatisfied, she will begin to discover that her attitude is fundamentally wrong, then begin radically to change it. She, too, has her ideals, a better side only partly expressed, and she will be a nobler woman some day. But at present she believes that if every one would do precisely as she wished she would be perfectly happy. She will be unable to express her happier, better self, however, until her mind is freed from numerous misconceptions. One craves for her, not what she wants, but what she needs.
Now in such a case it is plain that no palliative will suffice, but plain speaking, the word that strikes straight home, a gentle word but withal pointed. For no one can change another’s attitude. It is a question, first of knowledge, then of will. The person who clearly sees is likely to act. The difficulty is to make a person see. It is the task of the physician to the soul to learn the central situation in such a case, lay bare the attitude unstintedly, then break the news wisely but with great conviction. It is the truth that sets men free from their benumbing and obstructive attitudes, the truth, not a pleasant theory or compromising dogma. No half-way measures will suffice. And every genuinely earnest person is ready for the truth. Moreover, many of us very well know the truth about ourselves, and what we need is some one who will help us to make the first start towards living by it.
A change of attitude is not a mere change of thought, then, not the substitution of another series of moods, but a radical change in conduct. For the deep-seated attitude is primarily a centre of reaction, it shows how a man takes life. To change a central attitude is to turn in another direction, discover a new outlet for one’s forces. Thus the selfish person, for example, begins to be outgoing instead of intaking. To make such a change is to make decided improvement in character. Hence it is plain that the central attitude does not relate to a person’s health alone but to the whole of life.
It is no less clear that to help a person, the physician to the soul must approach in an attitude of tender sympathy, ready appreciation, outgoing friendliness. For attitude responds to attitude. To approach in an attitude of condemnation is to be met coldly. To indulge in merely intellectual analysis in a critical spirit is to call out a corresponding reaction. One must approach as a friend, letting soul speak to soul. When the person in need discovers this ready appreciation there will be a frank response, first in regard to relatively objective states, but eventually with respect to the heart-attitude. Then the recipient of these confidences must point out that there is an important difference between persons, attitudes, and beliefs. One proposes to be as sympathetic as ever, so far as persons are concerned, but unsparing in the analysis of beliefs and the exposure of mental attitudes. Hence there should be no confusion between the fallacies thus relentlessly exposed and the person who for the time believes them.
The friend to the soul who thus begins by adopting the best attitude will set an example which will go far towards accomplishing the desired end. One must see for another even better than he sees for himself in his ideal moments. One should be able not only to call forth the soul, but reveal clues to a constructive philosophic faith which shall take the place, for example, of beliefs in which the emphasis is placed upon self-affirmation. One may thus point the way from doubt to faith. Whatever the besetting irrationality, one can find some truth in it, and on this common ground erect a stable structure. Thus, without being unduly influential, one may lead almost insensibly from the narrowing mental attitude out into the large world of philosophic reason.
Chapter III. Besetting Self-Consciousness
There are various conditions which give rise to imprisoning self-consciousness. Some are purely pathological, some temperamental, while others are intimately connected with moral problems. Generally speaking, the unpleasantly self-conscious person is subjective, or introspective, in type. Hence there is keener awareness of nervous sensations. With this exquisite consciousness of sensation there is coupled a general sensitivity which easily leads to the exaggeration of feelings of pleasure and pain. There is not necessarily a greater capacity for enjoyment, although the sense of pleasure may be more delicate. But in case of pain this extreme sensitivity readily leads to morbid emphasis of sensation or of neurotic conditions, when there is in reality nothing to fear. This sensitivity, in turn, implies a typical mental attitude towards life.
When the cause is pathologic, it is well to learn this fact as soon as possible, and to set out in quest for health; hence to avoid attributing to the character, or to the mind, that which pertains essentially to the body. Morbid self-consciousness is sure to have its physiological accompaniment, if indeed it does not spring primarily from a bodily condition. There may, for example, be exaggerated consciousness of sexual emotion, and numerous concomitant mental states, all of which would disappear if the sexual life were better understood. Many a conscientious individual had indulged in the most emphatic self-condemnation, as if the character were utterly vile, when the entire trouble was of physical origin.
Allowances must, therefore, be made for the fact that in sensitively organised individuals there is painfully intimate awareness of sensation. Hence it may be put down as a rule that such people should not judge by symptoms. In individuals of this type there is need, as it were, of more room. The brain is like an exceedingly narrow prison. As a result there is consciousness of many bodily functions which the normal person should know nothing about. A subjective or introspective person is not, however, necessarily abnormal. Mere objectivity is not the ideal, although selfconscious persons should seek every opportunity to be with objective people, those who scarcely know that they possess nerves. But the subjective person is apt to be a victim of confined power, and the resource is to work with the hands, or to take up some form of work for others which shall bring objective self-expression.
Oftentimes the pains of self-consciousness are birth-pangs. Instead of disparaging the self, such a person should consider what will bring creative freedom. Now, coupled with imprisoning self-consciousness there is usually an uncommon shyness, a strange shrinking from people, a lack of confidence. It would be absurd to say, Let yourself out. The poor, imprisoned souls are eager enough to attain self-abandonment, but do not know how. One difficulty is that they consider every move so carefully that they never enter into any activity with zeal. The resource in such a case is to cultivate the opposite extreme, on occasion. That is, do something foolish, something impulsive, indulge in play, in almost riotous exuberation. Such freedom once attained, it is of course possible to select some of the tendencies which have been brought into exercise and reject others.
It is obvious that a certain form of selfishness accompanies this exaggerated awareness of subjective conditions. It is not well, however, to dwell upon this; for the chances are that the self-conscious person is already too well aware of it. It is of little avail to tell such a person that the self is taken too seriously. On the other hand, it is no less unwise to admonish those who are introspective to inhibit all self-analysis. The resource is not less thought, but more. A man cannot take himself too seriously if, instead of burying his consciousness in his own sentiments, he brings them into the light and relates them with other men’s thoughts. If the victim of such seriousness so far underestimates himself as to be unable to share his views, he should find those who know less than himself and gain confidence by teaching them. Or, he should seek a friend who holds different views and submit his own to controversy.
It is easy, then, to say that the shy individual is thinking too much of himself, instead of his neighbours, his brothers or sisters, with whom he is unsociable. Do not stop with this judgment, but break in on the reserve of that same shy person and meet him three-quarters of the way. Or, if it be oneself, one should arise forthwith and set about doing something for a person in need. If undue self-consciousness implies selfishness, the resource is love. One must love somebody, or at least some animal. There is love confined, and love confined must be expressed in behalf of some adequate object.
The great resource is an absorbing occupation. If it be not yet plain what one should do, if no absorbing enthusiasm has ever been elicited, one may well conclude to fill the mind with some pastime that is worth while, to take up some branch of art or science, preferably one in which creative work soon becomes possible. It is oftentimes better to choose an interest as impersonal as one of the natural sciences, hence one that is remote from the emotional life, in order to avoid being introspective. One may find it impossible to be free while with strangers, or even at home. There may be no opportunity for service which enlists all one’s zeal. But books we always have with us, and a special line of reading in one of the natural sciences, or in philosophy, is an unfailing resource.
Self-consciousness springs in part from the emotions. Any activity, then, which develops the intellect will lead in due course to the repose needed for mastery of the emotions. An emotion is nothing if not central, subjective, tending to undue emphasis of its own importance. The intellectual life, on the other hand, naturally relates itself to a large world. The contemplation of a geologic period, the study of a movement in history, takes the thought out into the great world of large activities. There is no excuse for smallness of thought with all the great scientific interests which our modern world affords.
For those who have the courage to view their mental states at closer range, there is a resource in the fact that the inner life is characterised by two general types of consciousness. Here one is, for example, shut into the narrow world of nervous self-consciousness, anxious lest one make a poor appearance in the forthcoming social event. Such anxiety grows by what it feeds upon, down there on its own level. But there is a higher level of consciousness. Instead of troubling lest I do ill when I appear on the platform, let me think rather of the message of truth which I have to bring to the people in question. By consecrating myself afresh to my work, I forget myself, I actually take hold of my consciousness, as it were, detach it from the lower level and centre it upon the higher level. I take my thought away from self and put it on this little group of people whom it is my privilege to serve. Doubtless my work is inconsequential enough. Were I to drop out, some one else would step in to take my place. But, as poor a piece of humanity as I may be, let me be what I am in full measure. And, lo and behold, by consecrating myself afresh I learn that I am in the best attitude to express whatever may come to me to say or to do, mayhap to speak better than ever before.
The most courageous way, however, is to undertake the most resolute analysis of just these imprisoning states which surround the self in its subjectivity. Such analysis one finds exemplified in Spinoza’s Ethics, in which the emotions and other mental states are subjected to the keenest criticism, studied from the point of view of their causes and treated with the same exactitude which one would apply to a problem in mathematics. Many would shrink from analysis so cold and forbidding, as if they might lose sight of the goal amidst a bewildering succession of moods. But Spinoza has no such shrinking, and he unmistakably finds the peace he sought, namely, in what he denominates “the intellectual love of God.” Such mastery as his analysis leads to is the fruition of downright understanding. From his point of view, “knowledge is power” To see through, to discern to the foundation, is to be free from. The cure for emotionalism is downright intellectuality.
The goal would be different for minds of other types. In general one might say that the philosophical cure for self-consciousness is knowledge of the deeper self. One who is beset by self-consciousness is aware of one’s mere self. There is lack of perspective, of contrast. No one should expect to understand the self alone. But even this mere self in its solitude is a fragment of the real self. The self that is disparaged is condemned precisely because of pent-up ambition, because there is more of a self which one shall presently become. It is people of ability, of power, who disparage themselves. It is because they are haunted by ideals, that they so scorn this disagreeable present self. True self-knowledge is moral, through and through teleological. When I know my deeper self I shall have no time for belittling self-consciousness. For my deeper self is inseparably connected with my fellows.
If I would really be free from myself I must find myself by philosophically relating this my perplexing finitude with the worlds of nature and society, and with whatever my reason discovers as the first principle of things. For Spinoza such self-discovery meant the ultimate identification of one’s own life, viewed as a mode, with the one Substance under whose attributes it belongs. With those who make a study of the self by the aid of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the result is likely to be very different. The problem of post-Kantian idealism is the problem of the self. To enter into the depths of that idealism is to find oneself engaged in a venture so absorbing that there is no moment for the imprisoning consciousness of old.
There is a sense in which the profound disparagement in which some people indulge is the beginning of wisdom. One of the greatest of idealists is reputed to have said that “he that loseth his life shall find it” That great teacher would take no credit to himself. For him there was only One who was good. When a man so well knows himself as to see the nothingness of his own allied goodness, then indeed is he in a position to realise the true self. The discovery of the nothingness of the finite is at the same time the discovery of the greatness of that Being through whom we possess all things. That is, the second discovery may follow upon the first for those who are thorough. Too often people stop with the revelation of their own unworthiness. Hence their self-condemnation, the burdensome consciousness of their own incompetency. But it were a pity to stop there. He who sees the positive side of this great discovery passes forward to realise himself, whatever that self may prove to be. He is willing to make the venture, concerned rather with the venture than with limitations. Every limitation relates to what lies beyond, as well as to that which is excluded. Fortunate are we, therefore, if we look beyond instead of within. Philosophy and the religious teachings of Jesus unite in emphasizing the value of this profoundest of all discoveries concerning the self. To find the self, not to lose it—that is the point. Too long we have dwelt upon the negativity of the finite. To carry the negative onward to complete, to negate the negation—that is the positive clue. If I am nothing without the Absolute, then let me at once proceed to develop a thorough-going conception of the Absolute as the first principle of human thought.
Chapter IV. Persistent Fear
[The following letter to a person beset by fear suggests a method of meeting a particularly obstinate ease of self-consciousness. Experience had already shown that nothing short of exhaustive analysis would ever be satisfactory to this keenly introspective person.]
Your graphic descriptions of the haunting fears which have long troubled you show that your thought dwells in a realm of subjective imagery. You need another set of pictures in place of the grewsome ones, and you should be far more objective. Nevertheless you speak of the most persistent of your fears in such a way as to indicate that it has become a fixed idea. Hence while becoming more objective you need to undertake the sort of interior analysis which leaves not a misconception behind. This you can do by gaining more knowledge of the mind in general. You will be master when you understand. Truth brings freedom.
First, however, a word about the unprincipled palmist whose prediction has become for you a superstition. Even if he were so skilled as to read your future by a study of the lines in your hand, he should have kept his opinions to himself. He lacks knowledge not only of human nature but of what is right. The fact that he laughed when he saw you were taking him seriously shows that he is not to be depended upon. You cannot dismiss the prophecy with too much positiveness. Whether such a prediction could produce an effect would depend upon the person who accepts it. To accept a prediction as possibly true might be unwittingly to prepare, through auto-suggestion, to make it so, as in the case of an astrologist who predicted the day of his death and died on the appointed day. Others who know more about palmistry and astrology insist that to predict the day of a person’s death is beyond possibility. If a suggestion in regard to the day of one’s death can work mischief, it is high time to put suggestion to a better use. It rests with you to substitute a normal suggestion for the morbid one over which you have been brooding. You can accomplish this through persistence and confidence.
As for palmistry, here is a case from a person’s experience in which I can vouch for the facts. It is a case which shows that little dependence can be put upon palmistry. I will state the case as nearly as possible in the words of my informant “A professional palmist once asked leave to read my hand, and being rather sceptical in regard to his science I readily gave permission. He forthwith surprised me by discovering little lines which, he said, were indications of tendencies to disease. He predicted that much trouble lay before me, said that my best life was already spent, although I was a young man, and on the whole pictured a most gloomy outlook. Had I felt any confidence in his powers I should have been greatly depressed. As it happened I did not need to give it a second thought, for that same day another offered to read my hand. This man was not a professional palmist, but had read hands in connection with a careful study of the heads of a thousand people. He noticed these lines in my palm, and casually referred to them as tendencies to ill-health which I had overcome. He said nothing about spent powers but predicted that in two years my health would be better than it had ever been. This man was right, as I knew at the time and as time proved. That was ten years ago. My health has steadily improved and I have done more work than in the preceding ten years.” Here were two readings of precisely the same lines and utterly different. Could one ask for better evidence of the fallibility of palmistry? It is plain that one can have confidence only to the extent that one has superior knowledge, and if one have the knowledge why consult a palmist?
Again, it was a professional astrologer who was at fault. This prophet, learning that a lecturer was about to go on a journey, looked up the horoscope and strongly advised giving up the journey because there was “trouble ahead.” The lecturer departed, however, and had a successful trip from first to last. The head of the house at which he was to be entertained died shortly before his departure and this was probably the “trouble ahead” if indeed there was an iota of truth in the prognostication. One frequently hears instances of this type. One is inclined to believe that if, clothed in one’s right mind, one has decided to depart on a journey it is safe to go, despite what any prophet may say. Rational guidance would appear to pertain to a higher level of reality than the influences taken into account by astrologists. I am told by those who have studied astrology most deeply that one can place no reliance whatever on the average astrological prediction. These students assure me that one should either sound the subject or have nothing to do with it. But, again, if one have time to be thorough why not seek the highest type of knowledge?
As for the effacement of undesirable mental pictures, here is another incident from real life. A young man once related his experiences after the death of his father and told how persistently his mind had been haunted by distressing pictures of the last scenes—the pictures of his father’s face, of the sorrow at parting—and one could see that his grief had been greatly intensified by these images of sorrow and suffering. But one night, he said, there came a beautiful dream. He was apparently in church at vesper-time when his father came with a face radiant with renewed health, in the full vigour of manhood. This inspiring picture made so deep an impression that it completely effaced the scenes of sorrow and suffering from his mind, and the haunting pictures never returned. The transfer of attention which thus took place without effort can be voluntarily accomplished by those who reason away their fears and unpleasant pictures.
Quiet reflection should accomplish much in your case. In addition you ought to create an ideal picture of your future which shall so absorb your attention as to efface the pictures which have collected around your fixed idea. Whenever you picture your life as you would have it in this respect, create the picture with great vividness and accept it with confidence, cling to it, let it fill your mental horizon.
The effective reasoning mentioned above may be further illustrated by consideration of such cases as the foregoing. You would naturally like to know what truth there is in such predictions, but you will hardly find a prophet wise enough to tell you; and mayhap there is no truth at all. It will be safe to disregard them altogether. Many such readings would be required before one would be able to assess them at their real value. You can attain the same result by more direct means if you undertake a genuinely scientific study of life. Most of the alleged prophecies remind one of the attempts of believers in reincarnation who think they have known you in a former existence to recall your former personality—perhaps an Arabian metaphysician, mayhap a Hindoo mystic or a Greek philosopher. The more “friends” of this sort one meets, the greater one’s scepticism. The same is true of the efforts of the spiritistic medium who tries to fit some sort of prospective “journey” to your case or to discover the right name for the spirit-friend who “stands behind” you.
Were all these statements consistent, and if they could be scientifically verified, one might have a basis for suspicion. It might then seem possible that fatalism is true. If any prophet could read the course of fate, we might indeed begin to fear. As matter of fact the utmost one can say of the best reading would be this: here is a possibility that may be realised if no one out of a thousand contingencies arise to prevent. A prediction that ill-fortune will arise might be regarded like a dark cloud in the far distance when there are signs of a thunder-storm. The storm may come one’s way, if no counter wind arise. If it come, one may close the windows and let it pass.
At present your mind is haunted by an idea which has no other foundation than the chance statement of an unprincipled man who merely dabbles in palmistry. You have not accepted the idea, but have permitted the fear to linger. Do you propose to accept the idea as a plan of action, or do you intend to dismiss it as absurd? Here are the alternatives. You should commit your mind absolutely to the latter.
Moreover, there is another line of approach. You are troubled by fear. What if you should begin to trust? Do you really believe in God, in His tender care, as a Christian should? Do you believe that what is best for you will come from Him? If you sincerely believe this, there is absolutely no room for your fear. For, consider how astonishing this fear of yours is, in contrast with what you are supposed to believe. Such reflection should lead you to fall upon your fear with remorseless scrutiny.
It is plain, however, that this one fancy could not have caused all your trouble. You are too sensible for that. There is a morbid tendency within you, and your superstition has brought it to the surface. You should regard this tendency as you would a vein in a ledge that has appeared above ground. The tendency which, in your father perhaps, lay below the surface has come in sight in your life. Welcome this and give the tendency liberty to run itself out. It will not grow without food.
The case reminds me of that of a young man who had inherited, as he believed, a tendency to tuberculosis. His father’s family had succumbed to it. His father nearly conquered it, but it had not reached the surface-stage in the father’s case. The son was so far aware of the fear and its power over him that he could hardly pass the word “consumption” in print, or hear the word spoken, without trembling with fear. But the very absurdity of the situation had its effect in due time, for he had persistently strengthened his health, and there was no reason for fear. Under his keen introspection he actually witnessed the death of his fear, saw its power decrease until he could pronounce himself wholly free. The truth in regard to his real physical condition completely displaced the fear concerning the possible situation. The fear had in fact far outlived the physical tendency, and all that was required was to bring idea and fact into accord.
Now, you can conquer your own situation in the same way, by first discerning the facts, then transferring your belief from the fear to the truth concerning yourself. With slight exception you have excellent mental control, your mind is keen, your self-analysis acute. If you can bring this well-trained acumen into play in the unconquered field you will be able to advance victoriously. You will not commit the deed the palmist seemed to foretell. You will never lose your mental balance. There is every reason to be firm, confident, trustful. But be patient in the analysis of your superstition, give it opportunity to die, and do not rest content until you are wholly free from it. For your mind is such that you will be satisfied with nothing short of complete success. Where others would quickly conquer by an act of will, you must steadily and searchingly reason. But when you see clearly you will not need to affirm your freedom, but will even then be free.
Chapter V. Spiritual Quickening
[The following is from a letter to a person whose problems are particularly typical of the age, one who has broken with the church but has found no alternative faith.]
At first thought, it seems absurd to speak in terms of your request, as if one could quicken another; for is not faith born within us? Nevertheless, one may give hints to another, and it is oftentimes by the accumulation of evidences that faith finds its fruition within us. If the Spirit be present with all men, awaiting recognition, it is chiefly a question of consciousness of that which we already possess. It is seriously to be questioned whether any man lacks the appropriate evidence, if only he could see it in the right light. If we are sceptical, even to the verge of atheism, the probability is that we are distrustful of old conceptions, not of the everlasting realities of religion. A man once said that a certain piece of writing had brought him back to faith in God after twenty years of atheism—the death of his wife had made him an atheist. But the difficulty was that the God whom he ceased to believe in because of his wife’s death had no existence. What he needed was another clue, and he found that in the essay in question.
Now, the fact that you long to be quickened indicates the presence within you of a spiritual element. It is this spiritual need which in all ages has given rise to religion. That need expresses itself in various ways in different ages. But it is a universal element, and when men become sceptical it is because they have outgrown the particular forms in which they have heard the religious life expressed. Men’s doubts are not so profound as they seem. What appears to be practically a hopeless situation becomes instinct with hope, when viewed in another light. It is a question of confidence in one’s own thought, of deeper self-knowledge, enlarged horizon, the right interpretation of experience. No one is wholly sceptical. You, for instance, do not question your own existence, or that of an experience which makes the world known to yoy. You are aware of longings which have never been met. Your life by implication points outward to a larger world. Your experience has been somewhat lonely, and in your pent-up state of mind your best life has failed to find expression. If, now, you can get the right clue and complete your thought, you will discover new wealth in just this erstwhile narrow experience. It is in part the right forms of social life and consciousness which bring us to awareness of that which is spiritual. Our thought is not rounded out until it has related itself to man, to nature, and to God, regarded as the ground of nature and of man. You have all that is required for these larger relationships of thought.
For example, you say that you have “no overwhelming certainty of immortality.” Well, many would be in the same plight were they to seek evidence of immortality directly, if they tried to prove it absolutely. It is rather by reckoning with moral facts that one attains conviction in regard to immortality. If, for instance, one has new insights into the moral law and sees the necessity of a future life for the completion of what is here but ill begun. Or, again, if one has deeper knowledge of the self, and hence of its probable future experience. Again, it may be that new experiences deepen one’s faith and prepare the way for the greater act of faith—the acceptance on trust of immortality. After all it is a question of moral conviction and of faith, not one of proof.
Again, you say, “The church doctrines, based as they are on the high authorities of St. Paul and the early Christian Fathers, always stirred me to revolt so that at the end of a doctrinal sermon I was one long dumb protest. Early I felt the need of getting behind their astounding statements” You have been dissatisfied with theology and hungry for religion. No doubt you have half realized that the doctrines were more or less artificial, despite the “high authority.” You needed to get farther back and regard religion as an experience natural to the soul, primary in authority, and superior in reality to theological doctrines. The doctrines of the church have probably kept you from the real Christianity of Jesus. I question whether in your heart, when you doubted the divinity of Christ, you really doubted the humanity of Jesus.
If, as you suggest, “the world is forcing Christianity upon its last reserves and civilisation demanding another, a bigger, more inclusive ideal to grow by” let us agree that either the real living Christianity of Jesus—as opposed to the formal Christianity of the creeds—must prove itself universal, or we must restate the truths of religion in universal terms. A universal faith need not be forced upon anybody. Its devotees need not insist, from the pulpit, that they alone are able to declare what is right to believe. For it will be generally recognised that direct experience stands first and its formulations afterward. That is, each soul may go to the immediate sources, for each can worship, each can verify that which is universal. The appeal will be to universal reason and experience, not to established authority. If religion cannot thus maintain itself, the sooner it is allowed to die, the better.
Your own statements point to such a view. You say, for example, that you have kindled “to the great world-spirit on a wind-swept mountain, in storms at sea, in summer tempests, in noble music” Now you go on to say “these were transient and emotional glimpses of the great underlying something” which you have called “force,” “law,” but has never seemed a divinity. Yet you speak of it as that which “has held and runs through all time, and on which century after century of successive stages of human progress are threaded, while civilisation has been wrested from brutish chaos, and mankind struggled up to spirituality. I have stumbled along in an untaught and desultory way, considering the spectacle of the racial civilisations, the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Mohammedan, the Egyptian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton, and finally that based on Christianity. In each I seem to see that each has separated out the quintessence of progress, the ‘ideal.'” In other words, you see the rational necessity of an underlying first principle or basis of life in nature and man, throughout this long evolution. Now, is not all this the sort of evidence which men gather when they propound a rational theory of God? What matters it if this “something” be not a “divinity” in the old-time sense?
It seems to me that your distress begins when you find speculation “a barren, blinding waste,” But if this be true of speculation, it is not true of thorough-going philosophy, and the difficulty is that you have not been able to complete your reflection for lack of the proper clue. At the crucial moment you find “nothing to live by when pushed,” and so you declare yourself “pretty much a heathen” You have felt the need of something personal, and “God seems so very impersonal”
Plainly, then, you really do not doubt the existence of God. Your whole statement shows that your nature is not satisfied with merely emotional religion. You already have a firmer hold on the rational approach to religion than you realise. Your very revolt against the theology of the creeds is evidence of the possession of more direct clues to the heart of things. When you were hungry they gave you a stone. Your heart was hungry for the personal touch which transfigures religious thought and makes it concrete, living. You have found God in some measure in nature, in history, but not enough yet in humanity. And, after all, it is persons who make God personal for us. The thought of God as universal love or wisdom is often too remote. When we really find something “to live by” we can complete our philosophic structure.
Is it possible that you have dwelt too much upon the imperfections of those who were near by and, underestimating them, have depreciated yourself, also? But one cannot love, where one does not, you plead. Perhaps not until others have helped us by calling out our love. It may be that you needed to be met more than half-way. What, then, are your heart-longings? For an affinity, a friendly soul? Well, venture to be yourself more valiantly, come forth, be more outgoing, and you will meet your heart’s desire, although not in the way in which you once longed for companionship.
Think not that I speak on merely general grounds. I would utter a special message of peace to you—the erstwhile lonely soul to whose life I have in some measure the key. First I bid you not to call yourself “a heathen” again. To call one’s self heathenish is already to acknowledge a higher moment of consciousness even now seeking fuller recognition. The better self within you that calls the lower self a heathen—this is the one to whom I speak. You are a daughter of the ever-loving Father of all tenderness. The quickening of that heavenly Presence will come through the fuller development of that self which you have hardly dared to be.
Do not look for any sudden or decidedly marked quickening. You have passed the stage where anything like a “conversion” may be looked for. In the life of those who have reached the age of philosophic thought faith grows by gradual cumulation. It means much to be open-minded, on the alert for evidence, sufficiently reflective to see the meaning of evidence. Now, from my point of view, it is significant that you have expressed a desire to be quickened, and that I have been prompted to write these words to you. If I actively sought to quicken you by some self-conscious method, I should indeed fail, for “the Spirit bloweth where it listeth” But if I speak as I am prompted, some statement may strike home, for the Spirit is what some have called “the Over-soul,” the third party or principle of union. I know not when that Spirit may speak, you know not when you may hear. But if we go on doing the best we know, the miracle shall be wrought.
I assure you, there is a compelling Life. Moments of experience stand out above others, the world is transfigured. These moments are not emotional, not less real than other experiences. They are the most real moments. One is constrained to reconstruct all experience in terms of these insights. Convinced that the Spirit is ever with us, guiding and sustaining the soul, one is content to wait to see where the Spirit shall lead. The Spirit shall build my faith for me. It will quicken me so far as I am ready. It will provide for me, if I am unobtrusive. It will build a better life within me than I can devise.
But we do not win the gifts of the Spirit without doing our part. You feel the need of something to live by. Well, try this: instead of feeling responsible for others and for your own selfhood, take life as a gift and see whither it shall lead. You are engaged in a certain form of social work. Look for evidences of a higher selfhood in the people with whom you work. Note the longings expressed in their faces, the evidences of aspiration, the signs of contest in behalf of ideals. Appeal to the highest in them. Approach them in love and tenderness, more interested to call out the soul than to provide for their bodily wants. Gather spiritual evidences and reflect on them. One can hardly take up service in this spirit without being quickened. For, once more, quickening is social.
Begin each new day with eagerness to know what it shall bring as a gift of experience. Approach the needy person who comes to you for aid in a spirit of readiness to be led by the noblest guidance of the moment, not as one more “case” which you propose to deal with according to a set of presuppositions. Let the life of your own higher consciousness grow within you. The spiritual quickening will come while you are moving on from day to day doing the best you know.
Chapter VI. A Letter to a Skeptic
Your letters, with their outpourings from the heart, awaken a responsive sympathy to which I will give expression as friend writes to friend. In your struggles with doubt there seems to be no way to attain the fulness of belief for which you long. You behold the possibility of such conviction fleeing as it were before you. You are most eager to have faith, yet the perversity of your nature apparently makes faith impossible. In the desperation which overtakes you, your very selfhood seems to be at fault, until in your isolation you believe that your life is fundamentally unlike that of your fellows. Still you are unable to restrain the cry, “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief”
Your experience is, however, by no means uncommon. This unbelief springs in part from popular conceptions which you have unwittingly acquired. In your heart of hearts you really possess faith. In your heart of hearts you are really “worthy of the kingdom” You would not so diligently pursue spiritual things were this not so. The element of faith is not only deeper but stronger than the doubt. Faith more truly characterises your attitude than these perplexing doubts, howbeit you are less aware of faith than of perplexity. As matter of fact, the doubts pertain to your external selfhood. You have been surrounded by those who viewed life with materialistic eyes. You have heard many arguments against immortality, against the very existence of the soul. You have sought deeper knowledge of the soul, yet the balance of the argument has always seemed against the soul’s existence. Perplexed to know what consciousness is, you have been assured that it is dissipated with the scattering of the bodily particles at death. So many times you have heard these arguments insisted upon, that you would fain persuade yourself that you believe them. But something within persistently refuses to grant rest. Hence the distress and tribulation of which you write.
Now, you will make headway when you realise that your mind has partly been made up for you. You will gain another point when you discover the persistent integrity of your faith, despite the rude contests to which it is subjected. Theoretically your difficulty arises from the fact that you are trying to understand life from a merely objective point of view. Pursuing physiological clues, you look up, as it were, at the mind from the level of the brain. Thus looking, it seems plain that mental life is a mere product of cerebral processes, hence that there is no self, no spiritual reality. It is not strange that you make no headway while you thus gaze. For why should you expect to perceive from the point of view of space that which is not in space? If you would know what is taking place within, why not look within? If the mind is non-spatial, apprehensible through inner experience, it must be discovered in its own province. To take up the inner point of view may be to discover that in reality mind is fundamental, while what we talk about in an uncritical way as if it were immediately real—that is, the trees, hills, sky, round about—is known only indirectly. Hence the apparently commonsense point of view which seems to you so readily defensible may prove extremely uncritical.
In order to test this matter, try your best to take the point of view of the mind itself. Where shall you go? Nowhere. First discover where you are. This present moment of inquiry is an event within your mind. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not the body which you know directly, but the mind. The very essence of knowing is mental. The sensation which just now attracts your attention is apprehended by you within the mind. The sensation is on the inside and the warmth which you seem to feel in different parts of the body is outside—that is, so far as it is due to physiological processes, to the heat of the room, or of the sun. The sensation of sound, of light, of colour, of touch, is within the mind. Without senses you would not, of course, experience these sensations. The sense organs must first be stimulated before a sensation can arise. But what you directly perceive is the mental event, the sensation within your consciousness which you believe to correspond with the event that lakes place outside of you.
Likewise with pain. You seem to feel it in your finger, “in” the aching tooth. But what you feel is the sense-experience corresponding to the cut in your finger, the disorder in the nerve leading to the tooth. When you experience emotion, tears gather in your eyes, but the emotion is your mental experience at the time. You seem to think in your head. But you cannot tell what is going on within your head by actual experience. At best you are able to picture it in imagination by aid of physiology. When you think, you deal with ideas, not brain-cells. You do not move the nerve-substance about, upset its equilibrium, and cast it into new shapes; you weigh, compare, reflect, and an idea is nothing like a cell or a nerve-tissue. When you will, you apparently take hold of the muscles and make them work. But this is a complete illusion. All that you are able to perceive directly is a volitional event, that is, a mental state; you cannot perceive even the subsequent cerebral process. The whole trouble is that you are fairly beset by misconceptions. You are not at home in your own consciousness. Although dwelling in the mind, you have never learned that whether you take an objective or a subjective point of view you can do it only with the mind, from the mind.
I counsel you, therefore, to take up the point of view of the inner life in actuality of thought, as you really have from first to last unconsciously. I could not hope to persuade you of aught that is not already true. Every item of your present experience is through and through mental; you are each instant using the consciousness you would understand. Hence you have only to learn what you are now doing. Once learn it, once begin to be at home within, and a flood of light will dawn upon you. You will be amazed that you ever could have deemed the brain a direct possession, consciousness an indirect one. You will learn to your surprise that whatever you know about matter you know through consciousness. You will even discover that much that you seemed to perceive directly in matter, in the things about you, you learned only by inference from the data of consciousness. Once at home within, you will be able to solve your other problems.
It might indeed cure you to do as you suggest, namely, pursue your doubts to the end by the study of works on physiological psychology and agnosticism. But why not give philosophical idealism an opportunity? Having become well informed in regard to the higher criticism of the scriptures, why not read the Bible for what it is practically worth, as an expression of positive religious teaching? Can you feed for ever on negations? Surely, you should give experience abundant opportunity to show what it can reveal, by ceasing for a time from this running fire of questions. When you talk less and think more you may find God.
Chapter VII. The Emmanuel Movement
That the ideal occupation of physician to the soul may be added to the regular practice of scientific therapy is admirably shown in the case of Professor Paul Dubois, whose book on nervous diseases is widely heralded as an epoch-making work.[1] Dubois possesses not only the knowledge in several fields requisite for the educational treatment of nervous disorders, but the keenness of insight and the ready sympathy which enable him to discern the heart. The theory, vaguely held in various quarters, that nervous diseases are psychical in origin and nature, and should be psychically treated, is scientifically demonstrated in his book. Pointing out that in all modes of treatment mental influences and the personality of the physician are important factors, Dubois places special stress on suggestibility in all nervous cases. Accordingly, he holds that, when the precise nature of the abnormal mental state is discovered, the chief work is accomplished by progressively persuading the patient to adopt the right attitude in regard to himself and with respect to life as a whole. The cure is fairly assured when the patient is convinced that he will recover, and he is cured on the day he believes himself well. The object of the treatment from first to last is to make the patient master of himself. With this high end in view, Dubois holds that the first step is to discover precisely where the patient stands, mentally and physically. “I know of no idea more fertile in happy suggestion,” he says, “than that which consists in taking people as they are, and admitting at the time when one observes them that they are never otherwise than what they can be….In order to change the state of mind of one who has fallen, it is not sufficient to grant him extenuating circumstances and to show him pity; one must love him as a brother, and stand shoulder to shoulder with him with a profound sense of our common weakness..This is the only secret of a rational psychotherapy—to explain with patience and gentleness, varying the discourses according to the faculties of the questioner; make him understand., .so that he can for himself find the road to truth”[2]
Surely Dubois is right in insisting that knowledge of the inner life is of more consequence than knowledge of pathological physiology, and that the treatment of nervous cases essentially consists in the education of the will and reason of the patient. Wisely optimistic, he places stress on the factors which make for regeneration, and aims above all to arouse in the patient a new sense of power. The greatest of all suffering, he holds, is “moral suffering” He also holds that all suffering is psychical rather than physical. In fact, no one could ask to have more recognition given to mental and moral factors than is exhibited from first to last in his suggestive treatise, that is, so far as psychotherapy is concerned. It is not until Dubois departs from his special field into one not wholly his own that one begins to take exception.
No advice, for example, could be wiser than the following: “Question your patients on their conceptions of life and their philosophy, for everybody has one, however fragmentary it may be. Criticise kindly the false views and approve those which seem to you logical and helpful. Make an effort also to discover in your patient moral qualities and superiorities, and endeavour with all frankness to find some merit in him which will raise him in his own eyes; he has so much need of recovering confidence in himself”[3] But, having thus strongly insisted on the importance of moral re-education, Dubois fails to point the way to a wholly defensible moral doctrine. The difficulty is that he undertakes to settle on merely physiological grounds that which has taxed the utmost wisdom of ethical philosophers, namely, the vexed question of human liberty. Convinced, like most physicians, that what man is and what he believes is determined by cerebral conditions, he is a physiological determinist of the most pronounced type. Hence he does not even consider the alternative ethical positions.
The author’s repeated insistence upon suggestibility by no means implies that man has any power save that which his bodily condition makes possible. To say that all nervousness is psychical, and can best be cured through psychical re-education, is not, then, to say that the mind is supreme over the body. Dubois fails to find the slightest trace of spontaneity in man.[4] By the term “mental constitution,” he means the same as “cerebral structure”[5] Logically speaking, this is materialism once more, and while it is medically sound it is philosophically weak. For, morally, it is never possible to judge a man solely by his actual psychophysical states. The moral man is measurable by what he would or ought to be, not alone by what he is. It is impossible to give a philosophical account of the self in terms of cerebral structure. Philosophically the work of the soul’s physician begins where that of the psychotherapeutist ends. All honour to the man who can psychically reeducate. But another sort of regeneration is accomplished by the clergyman, and yet another by the constructive philosopher.
More promising than the pioneer work of Dubois, out of which it logically grows, is the practice of mental therapeutics which began in Emmanuel Church, Boston, under the leadership of Dr. Ellwood Worcester, and his associate, Dr. Samuel McComb; and thence spread into other churches. Wisely conservative, the founders of this movement first won the co-operation of the medical profession, then limited the practice of psychotherapy to the cases of functional and nervous diseases which were pronounced eligible by competent physicians. The example set by Emmanuel Church has been followed elsewhere, with marked success, and the new movement has within a short time won a place for itself unequalled by the general mind- cure movement in half a century. Its leaders are well trained in physiological psychology, and their work is from first to last carried forward on a scientific basis. The result is not only distinct success within the chosen field, but this field is so plainly staked out that other specialists may the more clearly differentiate their own fields.
Nothing could be more straightforward than the account which the leaders of the Emmanuel movement have given of their work.[6] With few adverse criticisms of other therapeutic doctrines, and admirable leniency with respect to Christian Science, they show what they meant to accomplish and how they tentatively proceeded. It is a satisfaction to find competent men dealing rationally with subjects which the incompetent have so long revelled in. Their book puts out of date nearly every American treatise on mental healing. That is to say, while attributing as much power to suggestion and re-education as the mental healers at large, these writers establish mental therapy on a basis of psychological fact, free from questionable metaphysics, on the one hand, and from confusion with religion, on the other. The result is that mental healing can, for the first time, be estimated in its own right, on a basis of accurate diagnosis, careful records and scientifically describable methods of cure.
While assimilating and building upon psychotherapy, the Emmanuel movement is not limited to the psychological field, but through the agencies of the church may legitimately extend the practice with the sick into religion without confusion of categories. Such a term, for example, as “Christian psychology” would involve an unpardonable confusion of ideas. Yet the same work may be, first psychological, then Christian, and hence pass far beyond the limits assigned by Dubois with his physiological determinism. Suggestion is the prime factor, in the first of these fields, and emphasis is put upon psychophysical states and subconscious activities; while prayer and other religious agencies are supreme in the religious field. The first field is necessarily limited and human, while the other includes powers upon which no bounds can be placed by the hand of man.
So far as it goes, nothing legitimate could be said against the work thus sharply differentiated. In its own field it is easily supreme, and one could wish for it nothing better than such success as to render superfluous the mind-cure movement at large. For the moment, it is the most promising movement within the church. Its promoters hold that the social movement in the church fails because it is “not sufficiently personal, spiritual, ethical,” but must be “supplemented by a psychical movement which speaks in the name of Christ to the soul” The only question is whether a distinctively psychical movement within the church should be more than temporary, that is, until an independent therapeutic movement is established with which the church as a spiritual institution can effectively co-operate. For there are reasons to believe that the present movement is limited, because it is psychological and is regulated in part by medical practice.
Whoever logically defines his field necessarily excludes something, and the new movement is exclusive in a number of directions. The Emmanuel book is essentially for psychologists and therapeutists. It is not a book to put into the hands of people of a neurotic type, for it contains the sort of data upon which undesirable auto-suggestion thrives. It does not trespass upon the field of spiritual self-help, and those who would aid themselves through right mental attitudes will be more benefited by works in which less is said about processes, more about equanimity and poise. Furthermore, there are people who cannot be reached either through hypnotism or by oral suggestion of the psychotherapeutic type. This is to their credit, for advance is possible only through downright thinking and courageous selfdevelopment. For these people other methods and other books already exist.
Nothing could be more prudent than to limit the Emmanuel practice in accordance with scientific diagnosis. From this point of view, it is wholly justifiable to state that its promoters await a single authentic case of psychical cure of organic disease. For in thus putting the burden of proof on mental healers at large they the more sharply mark off the scientific field. Mental healers of the unscientific type have laboured with pathetic earnestness to overcome diseases which were beyond their power. Doubtless what Dr. Coriat, one of the authors of the Emmanuel book, says is true, that “many of the much vaunted and advertised cures of the mental healers, who claim to have successfully treated organic diseases, are merely cases of neurasthenia that have become hypochondriacal, that believed they were ill in body when in reality they were merely sick in mind”[7] Yet it is notable that their most striking cures have been wrought in instances where medical skill had pronounced the case hopeless from any point of view. Doubtless these healers will claim that there is as much reason for their practice as before, inasmuch as medical diagnosis sometimes fails, while some one must experiment with cases rejected as not amenable to psychotherapeutic treatment. Moreover, they are likely to maintain that they regard disease in terms of conditions fundamental to both functional and organic states.
Finally, they will somewhat exultingly exclaim that the Emmanuel practice is on “a materialistic basis,” inasmuch as Dr. Coriat states that “consciousness itself is the result of the energy of the central nervous system”[8] The fundamental difference turns upon the fact that every specialist discovers the sort of data he has been trained to find. The medical specialist, regarding a case from the point of view of physical and other symptoms, in accordance with long experience in reading the typical signs, inevitably judges by the evidences before him. For him the situation is necessarily as limited as for Dubois when he estimates human possibilities in terms of physiological determinism. But the mental healer of the scientifically untrained type discerns other signs, and makes counter-interpretations, precisely because he is psychophysically untrained, but alert in another field. For better or worse, his viewpoint is that of the inner life, the outward look from the centre. Hampered by no theoretical restrictions, he plunges in where the trained mind fears to enter, and is governed by whatever clues he may intuitively discover. Wholly untrained at the outset, he acquires from experience a sort of knowledge which differs fundamentally from that of the medical specialist.
The conditions which are read from without inwards, by the latter, are read from within out by the former. The result is that organic as well as all other diseases are first regarded psychically, before the state of the nervous organism is taken into account. Now, it may well appear that the organic changes are such that the case ought to be referred to a regular physician, or pronounced beyond the reach of any mode of practice. But there is a possibility that the intuitive diagnosis will reveal a direct line of approach. The mental healer is willing to make the venture, the patient to take his last chance. It is possible that there is a value in this method which science has not recognised.
Another point on which the other therapeutists would disagree with the Emmanuel workers is in regard to the method of psychical treatment. Both would agree that the psychological basis is suggestion, and Dr. Worcester’s chapter on the subject splendidly states the common ground. But, instead of depending on hypnosis or oral suggestion, the mental healer of the unlettered type would sit quietly by his patient, render himself receptive, gather his intuitive impressions, and begin a process of silent “spiritual realization” on the assumption that spiritual work would be wrought in the patient. Vague, uncertain, strange, as this sounds, this is the method that has been successfully practiced for half a century. It would be impossible for the scientific therapeutist to revert to this method, for he is too well aware of the facts, the processes, and difficulties, to yield himself to anything so general as a “realization”
The Emmanuel movement in a measure fulfils the expectations of Mr. P. P. Quimby, in whose pioneer work as a therapeutist the American movement began. Quimby’s work and teaching grew out of psychological discoveries, not out of quasi-metaphysical theories. The questionable metaphysical doctrines were added later. Had he possessed the knowledge and the training, his thought would have been expressed in the technical terms of the Emmanuel book. For he found the human mind highly suggestible, he placed much stress on subconscious phenomena, and made great use of suggestion and oral explanation. His practice with the sick also depended upon discovering the facts of each case. His treatment was adapted to individual needs, in contrast with the mechanical methods and flat denials which later therapeutists introduced. Had his example been followed, and had the church been ready, we might have had an Emmanuel movement forty years ago. For, although he began with hypnotic experiments, he made discoveries which led him gradually into religion. The method of silent treatment which took the place of hypnotic suggestion was largely religious in character, and depended upon the belief that the divine wisdom enters into us. Hence the spiritual side of his work might be summarized in Dr. Worcester’s words. “When” the latter says, “our minds are in a state of peace and our hearts open and receptive to all good influence, I believe that the Spirit of God enters into us and a power not our own takes possession of us.[9]
There are respects in which the Emmanuel movement is not up to the spiritual level of some of the earlier healers, but the religious emphasis will doubtless be more pronounced in due time. It is well that the movement should be psychologically grounded, for only so can it undermine the unscientific mental practice. In the long run there is nothing more effective than downright fact, when it is a question of outgrowing doctrines founded upon artificial speculation. If something be lost for a time, the chances are good for its recovery. Hence one welcomes any movement which promises to clear the air.
Chapter VIII. The Power of the Spirit
SOMETIME BEFORE the Emmanuel movement began, a churchman expressed the opinion that our age is witnessing a new revelation of Christianity, that is, with reference to the power of the Spirit. He had in mind the widespread practice of mental healing as it developed out of Quimby’s pioneer work. He by no means endorsed all the therapeutic doctrines, but held that a truth is concealed within them which the church has lost sight of since the early Christian centuries. As a result of this neglect, it remained for outsiders to discover the power of the Spirit anew. The implication was that if the church should be wholly faithful it would win back those who have strayed from the fold.
This view of the matter is particularly interesting at the present time, since it implies belief in the essentially religious character of the movement at its best, and to take it seriously would be to hold to the direct presence of God. It is clear, for one thing, that the movement cannot be accounted for apart from its religious side. It is no less plain that critics of the movement have failed because they condemned it outright, instead of constructively assimilating its spiritual values. Opponents have been compelled to admit that they found a spirit in the therapeutic gatherings which they missed in the churches. They have also been much impressed by the fact that those who were healed under the new practice soon became ardent converts to various doctrines of a religious type, instead of merely going their way rejoicing.
The solution of the problem begins to appear when it is noted that in the therapeutic experience the sufferer is not merely freed from pain but is profoundly impressed by the way the work is done. But to understand this solution one must regard the experience from within, free from prejudices and inhibitory presuppositions. It was unwillingness to learn the facts at first hand which so long kept the critics of the movement at swords’ points with its leaders. The experience must be personally known from within. If the interpretation shall be more rational than that which mental therapeutists put upon it, it must be because of more acute study of this experience, regarded as essentially religious.
But before considering the religious values of the therapeutic experience, it is important to note the remarkable differences of emphasis which characterise recent interpretations of Christianity. Time was when a more general theory of salvation was preached; to-day it is the welfare of the individual soul, and the efficient Christian worker is one who knows how to meet the immediate needs of the people in a specifically practical way, whether in the slums or elsewhere. It was once customary to paint the blackness of sin and describe the horrors of hell, to preach temperance by pointing out the evils of intemperance in the most realistic fashion; nowadays it is more and more a question of regeneration through evolution into a better mode of life, and of the possibilities of heaven on earth.
It was formerly said that man was depraved, hence he must take himself as he stood, unless the divine grace intervene; to-day it is essentially a question of various powers and instincts, partly of evolutionary origin, all of which are good in their place. It was once rumored that man fell, now we hear that he is rising. For the fear of hell with which sinners were once threatened has been substituted the possibility of gradual transmutation from lower to higher levels of conduct. It was once said that Jesus died for us, and to believe in the vicarious sacrifice was to be assured of salvation. The death on the cross is perhaps of no less significance in the thought of present-day believers, but more is said about the life that the Master lived; hence it is becoming clearer that salvation by mere belief is inadequate.
God was once charged with the infliction of suffering upon mankind, but it is now acknowledged that suffering is a result of the way man lives, that God wishes us to be in health. In place of salvation for the elect, we are now more inclined to anticipate salvation for all; and it is seriously to be questioned whether the old-time epithets, such as “heathen,” any longer have proper place in Christian speech. If some Christians still disbelieve in the original or natural goodness of man, at any rate one hears less about “original sin” For the divine sovereign enthroned above the earth the near-by Father has been substituted, and for creation “out of nothing” the philosophy of evolution. The old-time zeal for souls has given place to a desire to help people in the present life. It has become more a question of the continuity of life than of the horrors of death. Man can hardly be said in modern terms to “enter” eternity at death, to “become” a spirit; he dwells in eternity all along, he is a son of Spirit now, howbeit he may not have awakened to knowledge of his birthright. This change of opinion does not necessarily imply any less interest in the welfare of the soul, but it has become a question of bringing men into consciousness of present possibilities. If heaven begins here and now, it surely begins in detail, with the moment’s deed.
It might be difficult to find a Christian sect which stands for precisely the above restatement, but in general such a reconstruction has long been in progress. This social reconstruction is the “new revelation” of Christianity. The therapeutic movement is at best a secondary expression of the changed attitude of our age, and too much should not be claimed for it. Our age is practical, social, humanistic, and the older theology collapsed, as Dr. Gordon has recently pointed out, through a change of view with respect to the dignity and place of man.[10] There was an aristocratic fatalism in the old view, as if but few men were worthy of salvation. The philosophy of evolution has opened a vista of unlimited hope, and inculcated a democratic spirit. If we have all risen through the toils of evolution we are placed in the same way, and it is primarily a question of degrees of enlightenment. In terms of evolutionary idealism man is regarded as more nearly plastic, while evil is not an independent power but is relative to the long progress from lower to higher. It is no longer a question of the mere origin of evil, but of the wisest way to overcome our lower nature, with higher goals in view. Christianity is now offered to men as the culmination of spiritual evolution, not as a deterministic scheme whereby the sheep may be distinguished from the goats.
The new revelation might be briefly characterised as a change from negative to positive considerations. It is not now the fall but the ascent, not the gloomy origin but the bright prospect, not the death but the life, and no longer the divine wrath but the divine love. Merely negative or general goodness no longer suffices. Present-day goodness must prove its character by accomplishing something definite. Here is a young man, for instance, who is surrounded by unfortunate influences and is led into a sinful life. To threaten him with hell by depicting the horrors of sin is to revive an antiquated generality. What he needs is, first, brotherly love, then psychological enlightenment in regard to his own nature and the way to prepare to meet temptation. For him mental evolution out of his present state into a better will be a step towards spiritual salvation. That man will help most who understands the laws of human evolution. That is to say, it is precise knowledge of experience, rather than negative theology, that avails.
It was the theology of an older time that was responsible for the long alienation from the Spirit. For theological purposes it has often seemed necessary to make as much as possible of sin, hell, and the devil, to condemn the heathen and despise their sacred books. But for practical purposes other first principles are called for. The theologian often takes it to be his part to defend the forms of the established faith. Hence the man who insists that he has directly communed with the Spirit is looked upon with suspicion, for such communion implies the elevation of individual experience above books and creeds, and involves the acceptance of what appears to be a rival authority. Accordingly, the rival is condemned and if possible suppressed. This state of affairs continues until a sufficient number outside the church win the right to be heard. Then a reconstruction of belief ensues. History has repeated itself in the case of mystical therapeutics.
In behalf of such therapeutics and those in general who claim to hold direct communion with the Spirit, it might be asked: How should we ever know that, the Spirit really spoke to men in the past unless there were also men to-day who could confirm revelation by the same experience? Why should there be any conflict between belief in immediate religious experience and acceptance of the Spirit’s teachings in the Bible? If the Spirit proved its presence by wondrous works in former times, why should it not give such evidence to-day? I am not affirming that the works of healing prove that there has been a dispensation of the Spirit. I am simply raising the question of the Spirit’s universal presence.
As matter of fact, the great truths of religion have been kept alive through the ages by men who claimed to hold untrammelled communion with the Spirit. The immanent God has always been believed in by those who were acquainted with the primary sources of religion. This conception is by no means new and should not be credited to our age. The absentee God of Christian deism was the invention of an artificial and transient theology. The indwelling Spirit has been repeatedly discovered by those who dwelt outside, as well as by those who belonged within, the pale of authority. Such discoveries speak with an authority of their own. Our age may be said to be witnessing one of these manifestations of the Spirit. It is seen in the rewording of Christianity referred to above. It is seen in the practical tendencies of the time, the emphasis upon character, above all the insistence upon little things in contrast with the mere generalities of a past generation. It is seen in the growing insistence upon the primacy of religious experience as opposed to creeds and dogmas. The desire of the age to know everything at first hand finds its best exemplification in this new emphasis upon experience. The belief in the therapeutic value of religious thought is merely one expression of this widespread interest in direct religious experience.
If the power of the Spirit has again become manifest through works of healing, it is not as a result of conscious theology, but incidentally. That is, people have not set out to rescue belief in the efficacy of the Spirit by performing works of healing, but have sought health and found the Spirit thereby. Their theology had as surely failed as their other convictions, consequently they branched into new pathways. With the separation from traditional ways of thinking, new experiences began, and these experiences led to new modes of thought. Thus, as in many other instances, new experience has come first, then new conviction. The Spirit, ever seeking new instrumentalities, confounds those in authority by appearing amidst humble conditions where least expected, but where obstacles in the shape of adverse beliefs are absent. The Spirit proves itself by its works, then those in authority are compelled to give ear.
Taking our clue from this order of development we may well seek evidences of the power of the Spirit by a fresh return to experience. To begin with an examination of theological doctrines is to become involved in endless controversies. Those in authority are likely to maintain, for example, that the Spirit is only discoverable through recognised channels of the church, hence that no one should look for direct manifestations. Thus theological presupposition closes the door. But to break alike with presupposition and with authority may well be to conclude that the Spirit is closest when presuppositional authority is most absent. To take the clue from experience is to arrive at universal conclusions, provided one possess a rational criterion. For the lessons of history teach that the coming of the
Spirit is not dependent on age, creed or custom. However sharply it may conflict with authoritative belief, one is compelled to accept the premise that all men in all times may dwell near the Spirit, and that the discovery of the Spirit’s presence primarily depends upon empirical conditions. First in experience, the Spirit may at any time become first in man’s thought, if his theory of life be such as to afford no doctrinal inhibition. Squarely in the face of teachings which insist that God can be found only in ways which the church permits, the fact is made apparent that any man may have experience of the divine presence. Apparently our thinking should begin, therefore, with the assumption that every soul is in direct relation with the Spirit, and that it is because of the immediacy of this relationship with the Spirit that religion springs up anew, not primarily on account of books, creeds, and organisations by means of which the traditions are preserved.
To say this, however, is not to endorse the uncritical interpretations of the Spirit’s presence which pass current among devotees of mental therapeutics. We merely chronicle the conclusion that to be in a position rightly to estimate any phenomena alleged to prove the divine presence, we must begin by putting aside tradition sufficiently to give experience opportunity to reveal what it may. It is extremely significant that humble people, like P. P. Quimby, by working in an unostentatious way, and without thinking of religion, have through the therapeutic experience been led to the perennial sources from which all religion has sprung. Merely from the religious point of view such experiences are worthy of investigation. But he who investigates, I insist, needs to give experience free play, so that the religious value may be added to that which were otherwise mere psychological fact. The Spirit, blowing where it listeth, is little likely to reveal itself where sceptical analysis is paramount. Some of the devotees of mental therapeutics have been so little conscious that their work was of a religious nature that they pursued it for years before they awoke to the importance of familiar experience. On the other hand, in mental healing, as sometimes practised by devotees of “mental science,” “practical metaphysics,” and the like, there is a very questionable relation to religion.
For those who would know the therapeutic movement at its best, as represented by a very small number, the clue is found in the larger interest of which the work of healing is one expression, the religious values another. Some who take little interest in the therapeutic work may find in its religious values that which is deeply absorbing. They may be repelled by the language in which these values are expressed, but the first requisite of the sympathetic student of religion is to penetrate beneath all externals to the heart of religious experience. New developments of the Spirit may be expected to assume new forms, hence one cannot judge by externals.
It is plain from the foregoing that one might too quickly reach the conclusion that mental healing exemplifies the power of the Spirit. What we have said thus far has been in behalf of a merely general conception of the Spirit regarded as universally present. Such a conception neither substantiates belief in special dispensations nor proves that a special instance of religious experience unqualifiedly reveals the Spirit. It is plain that in order to be able philosophically to attribute works of healing to the Spirit it is necessary to develop a clear conception of the Spirit and how its power operates, and to make sure that the facts cannot be explained on a purely natural basis. Here devotees of most therapeutic theories and students of science must part company, for the therapeutists insist that no discrimination is possible. To the student of science, however, the way is plain inasmuch as all healing, however furthered, is primarily natural. The second step has already been made plain, namely, that when the co-operative agency is mental it operates on the basis of suggestion—silent, audible, hypnotic, post-hypnotic, selfinduced or in some other form. When every factor has been physiologically explained that can be so accounted for, the way is clear for psychological explanation in terms of suggestion. When the hypothesis of suggestion has been carried as far as possible, the field is free for the introduction of religious values.
Now, it may well be that the power of the Spirit is believed to operate through the natural restorative powers of the body. But if so the animal which, when injured, merely gives up to nature is “spiritually” healed, and spiritual healing has lost its special significance. Again, the Spirit may be said to operate through suggestion. But, once more, spiritual healing would lose its distinctive meaning, since suggestion may include hypnotism and all forms of psychotherapy. It would seem reasonable to restrict the term “spiritual healing” to cases in which religious exercises, such as prayer, are explicitly and primarily used, or those that are followed by confessedly religious consequences. For example, if God’s will be first sought, if there be an experience akin to consecration in which the therapeutist renders himself receptive to what he believes to be the immanent power of God, the therapeutic activity begins with an explicitly religious value. To describe a mental cure is one thing, to explain it psychophysically is another; and to interpret it in terms of religious values is a third. The scientifically described facts should not be confused with the religious values.
There is another reason for discrimination before one concludes that mental healing proves the power of the Spirit. The term “spirit” is frequently employed ambiguously. Spelled with a small letter it is often used as synonymous with “mind” In this usage it represents merely human effort, the power of suggestion. Again, although capitalised, it is employed in a familiar sort of way as if it meant a power which any one might employ, directing it at will. Many mental therapeutists use the term thus, speaking of this power as they might refer to the latent energy of a waterfall. The Spirit seems to be for them a vague, impersonal presence like the sunlight. No distinction is drawn between the psychological and the divine factors, and no attempt is made to relate this practical conception with a philosophical idea of God.
The need of discrimination seems to me so important that I have devoted a large part of a recently published work, The Philosophy of the Spirit1 to a definition of the divine, in contrast with the merely human factors, such as intuition, emotion, feeling, and judgment. My interest in that work is very far from anything of a therapeutic sort, yet inasmuch as the discussion leads to an analysis of mysticism the connection is direct. I have there shown why as a student of mystical experience I should be unable to agree with those who uncritically identify religious emotion with the presence of God. Mystical immediacy must be subjected to thorough criticism before an intelligible idea of God can be evolved out of it. The result is a rationalistic conception in which mediate elements predominate.
The mental therapeutists have placed too much stress on the immediate. This is why they have taken themselves too seriously, and exalted the ego beyond all bounds. This explains why they place so much emphasis on vague silence and receptivity, to the neglect of education. This also explains why they have been unable to organise and to grow. What they need is a sound psychology, that they may be able to discriminate between emotions, and other experiences tinged with personal preconceptions, and principles which might philosophically be attributable to a higher source. If the Spirit be worth anything at all it is worth winning through constructive criticism.
The sincere believer in the Holy Spirit is repelled by the sacrilegious vagueness of the mental healer. To him the Spirit is not a power to be used as one might the physical forces, but is “the giver of every good and perfect gift,” bestowing its gifts according to its own way; it is not an “influence” to be directed so as to control the body, but is of the very life and love of God. Very far indeed, he would say, is the therapeutic movement from the true Spirit. What should be said, if all ambiguity is to be eliminated, is that the therapeutists, working in a human way, make psychological use of their idea of “the Spirit.” That is, it is more efficient to concentrate on the idea, Spirit, than merely to meditate upon the human self as if that were the efficiency. What is called “spiritual” in contrast with mental healing, is explicable by reference to human thought about the Spirit. But the efficiency of the idea by no means proves its metaphysical truth.
To an untold number of devout Christian believers the Spirit is far from being an impersonal power, influence, or emanation, but God Himself in the third Person. Biederwolf’s A Help to the Study of the Holy Spirit,[11] for instance, develops this thesis by examination of every passage in the Bible in which the term “Spirit” occurs. The four essentials of personality are said to be predicated of the Spirit. Functions not ascribable to an influence but only to persons are mentioned with reference to the Spirit. The Spirit is “grieved,” sinned against, invoked as a person would be, lied to, rebelled against, insulted. The very name and the pronouns used show that a Personality is in question. The author develops his thesis by reference in detail to all the meanings of the term in the New Testament—the “sealing of the Spirit,” the anointing, the communion with, the fruits that follow, the baptism into, the filling, the intercession, the various emblems and figures of speech which suggest the presence of the Spirit.
From this point of view the Spirit is known to believers, not by mankind at large. The filling of the Spirit, for instance, is ” God Himself in the Presence and Person of His Holy Spirit entering into the throne-room of a believer’s being, ruling there with power for the perfection of life”[12] The gift of healing is not one of the fruits of the Spirit, according to this writer. There are human conditions that may be observed in order that man may obtain the Spirit for various needs. For example, “intense, unselfish desire to be thus filled,” faith, emptiness, and consecration. But the gift of healing was incidental to the baptism of the Spirit in the apostolic age. Only in one sentence in the book does the writer speak as if the Spirit were fundamental to religious experience in a universal sense: “All spiritual experience finds its source in the indwelling Spirit of God”[13]
In behalf of the mental therapeutists it might be pointed out that to omit the works of healing as fruits of the Spirit would be to neglect a striking feature of the Gospels, and the fact that healing is mentioned by Paul as one of the gifts which come “from the same Spirit” If the Spirit be first a Person, it is followed by an influence or power, mentioned in Acts as falling on all who heard, as a state which one could be filled with as one might by joy, and imbued with as by love. Apparently one’s account should be sufficiently comprehensive to include the mental states and other human activities or works which spring from the Spirit’s presence. “But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth”[14]
The fulfilment of this prophecy begins at once. Those who were “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” and “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit,” showed their spiritual condition by their works, including works of healing. “On the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Spirit”[15] Throughout the epistles of St. Paul and the other apostles there are passages which indicate that the Spirit is to be understood in the light not merely of a Person but of the power, the love, and efficiency which attend those who consciously dwell within God’s presence.
The best that can be said in behalf of the present-day therapeutic approach to the Spirit is that it raises the great issues once more. Nothing is settled by experiences of a single type, least of all those of a mystical character. To insist that the Spirit is present, and to characterize the Spirit, showing what sides of our nature are active in the immediate experience, are two different matters. Practically speaking, the significant fact is that experience stands first. No interpretation will prove satisfactory which fails to do justice to its rich immediacies. If these send us once more to the Gospel, then indeed, in terms of the true Christian Science, the power of the Spirit may come with the force of a new revelation.
Chapter IX. The True Christian Science
Ordinarily ONE would be disinclined to use the term “science” with reference to Christianity. Science is precise knowledge founded on accurate observation and careful induction. It is gained through analysis, comparison, and criticism, the formulation of hypotheses, and the verifications of renewed experiment and study. It is highly selective, and is divided into numerous branches, according to the field in question, the methods pursued. But Jesus did not speak as an investigator. He did not propound hypotheses, or prove his statements by scientifically described facts, established by rationally verifiable induction. The Master spoke as “one having authority,” so that the multitude marvelled. He was essentially a practical teacher. He spoke in terms of life. He inculcated precepts illustrated by incidents taken from the experiences of the common people, those who “heard him gladly.” Jesus proved his statements by the works he wrought, the results that followed from his teaching, most of all by his conduct.
Nevertheless, as the words “Christian” and “science” have been coupled, it is profitable to consider in what sense the teachings of Jesus are scientific, since their implied science is a refutation of the doctrine now known as “Christian Science.” The Master’s teachings are of course scientific in a theological sense, although they are not speculative.Jesus is not theologically perplexed, but moves towards a clearly defined goal. Nowhere does he undertake a systematic statement of his teachings from the point of view of rational construction. It remained for the apostles to begin the development of what later became a theological system. The complexities introduced by Christian fathers who, borrowing Greek terminology, paved the way for doctrinal controversies, nowhere appear in the Gospels. A science in the precise sense of the term is not expounded by Jesus. Yet Jesus speaks with a certainty surpassing that of physical science, and with a comprehensiveness not equalled by the systematic theologian. Without defining his terms, without stating what he intends to prove, or how he proposes to establish his premises, he speaks to the point with unquestioning confidence. There is a sense, then, in which his utterances may be said to exemplify the highest ideal of science.
Now, if the Master be regarded as a unique incarnation of God, the scientific certitude is at once explained. But to accept this explanation at the outset would be to deprive our investigation of its force. Those who hold that Jesus was a son of God, not God Himself, and those who regard him as a man like any other man, must still recognise the authoritative force of the Master’s teaching. It would seem profitable to regard the authoritative utterances by themselves, disregarding for the moment the question of the incarnation. If their authority be thereby accentuated, believers in the deity of Christ will have the more reason for their faith. If those who hold that Jesus was only a son of God find their admiration strengthened, they will perhaps see new meaning in the fidelity of the Master to the Father’s will. Those who deem Jesus a “mere man”—whatever that may mean—will find their task the more difficult, when it is a question of the unprecedented conviction of his utterances.
We may agree, then, to turn to the Gospels as to a book fresh from the press, to be estimated solely by its own statements when viewed in the light of dispassionate reason. Surely a doctrine was never more strictly insisted upon. It has all the force of mathematical statements to which there can be no exception. To obey it a man’s speech must be “yea, yea; nay, nay” There can be no compromise between masters. Every man is either for or against. If against, the last farthing must be paid. If for, absolute fidelity must be shown. To accept the doctrine and to manifest the loyalty for which it calls, is to renounce many things, cleaving absolutely to the principles in question. For a man cannot both love and hate the same thing in the full-hearted way insisted upon by Jesus. To be loyal is to drop numberless interests and turn one’s back on them as if they were nought. Social and other relationships are to be sundered, occupations are to be given up. the dead past is to be left in utter forgetfulness, and the future to be revered in a new light. If a man will do all this he shall be deemed faithful and be given charge over many activities. If he will not, he is not yet worthy and there is no more to be said. Thus inexorable, unflinching, insistent, is the law and the gospel. Yet this same law is that of the tenderest love, and never was man more gentle than the one who enunciated it.
The law of righteousness is indeed expounded with mathematical precision, and insisted upon as a man of science would expound the inflexible laws of nature. Man must not only know the law and adapt his thinking to it with the directness above insisted upon, but obey it, live the life. It is not a mere question of intellectual acceptance, nor one of external observance. Even to lust in thought is to sin. Hence every obstacle must be eliminated, everything in man’s nature must be redeemed, co-ordinated. The standard is absolute perfection, likeness to God. Every man’s righteousness must be comprehensively genuine in order to be acceptable. No one-sidedness or half-heartedness can be tolerated or accepted as real goodness. The Master’s commendations strike to the heart of human fidelity, while his denunciations are utterly unsparing. The same tongue which could say with unexampled charity, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” could brand a man as a liar, hypocrite, or thief, and denunciate whole cities or groups of men in the most telling manner. It was not enough to know the true Lord, one must also know the signs and beware of the false Christs.
Those who are on the highway that leads to the kingdom should indeed be recognised for what they are worth, for he who is not against is somehow in favour, even though the full merit of his service be not plain. Yet there are types and degrees of service. As noble as it may be to go before like John the Baptist, those who have crossed a certain line belong unmistakably in another group. The standard by which men are to be judged is ideal in the highest degree, and involves no slurring of moral distinctions for the sake of making everybody comfortable.
The man who would know the law of righteousness may know it unmistakably, so that not a vestige of scepticism shall remain. He who would obey need have no hesitancy concerning the way and the life. Jesus puts fundamental emphasis upon truth as the power which makes men free, and proclaims a science of heavenly things with utmost precision. Upon the basis of this superior knowledge an equally precise mode of life is founded. That is to say, while his teachings are set forth in the form of precepts, and oftentimes almost incidentally, there is a unified doctrine implied in them which has the force of a closely reasoned science.
The fundamental principles of this heavenly science may be summarised under the following heads: It involves (1) a concrete conception of the heavenly order, proclaimed as the central interest of Jesus’s mission; (2) an equally concrete idea of God as Father; (3) profound knowledge of men and of the limitations of finite personality; (4) precise knowledge of the conditions to be fulfilled by all who would lead the heavenly life; and, (5) illuminating knowledge of the laws, forces, and conditions involved in applying this heavenly science to the needs of suffering and sinful humanity, not only in the Messianic age but in all time.
In the first place, the Master speaks with utmost clearness and confidence in regard to his own mission, as prophesied by those who came before, as fulfilling the law and other teachings of the prophets and completed through acknowledgment that he is the Christ, whose work culminates on the cross, and in the resurrection. Jesus plainly declares that he is “greater than the temple,” and announces the basis of his mission as follows: “All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him”[16] To hear a disciple is to hear the Master, hence the Father; and to reject a disciple is to reject the Master, therefore the Father.[17] “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that doth not take up his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it….He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me….For the son of man is lord of the sabbath.a greater than Jonah is here.a greater than Solomon is here”[18] Jesus’s mission relates to a kingdom that is not divided against itself, hence implies consistency from first to last. He who is not for the kingdom is against it, but if really for it with “single eye,” his whole body shall be full of light. The tree may always be known by its fruits, hence one may identify that which pertains to the kingdom.
From the time of his baptism, when the Spirit of God is represented as saying that Jesus is “the beloved Son,” to the last hour with the disciples, there is an element of purposiveness which is unmistakable. Jesus believes there is a prearranged order of events which should not be broken. In conformity with that order he either goes or does not go into certain places, either reveals or conceals his whereabouts. After Peter salutes him as “the Christ,” Jesus speaks more openly. But when the transfiguration occurs he says, “Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of man be risen from the dead” He foretells his arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection, and the conflicts which shall follow. Confidently he says: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be accomplished. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only”[19] When his hour is come, Jesus announces and accepts it, goes forth to meet betrayal, and to walk in the way that has been prepared, even though to do it means the supremest sacrifice, amidst which he prays to have the cup removed and cries out as if forsaken. He believes that every word he utters is what the Father would have him say, that the Father abiding in him accomplishes the works which fulfil his mission, and that he always does that which is well- pleasing unto the Father. According to the Fourth Gospel he even declares that in all this he and the Father are one, that he who has seen him has beheld the Father. However the statements of his Gospel may be interpreted, it is plain that Jesus sincerely holds that from first to last he is carrying out the will of the Father to the letter, a will which comprehensively includes every deed and event in one purpose.
As thus divinely sent and each moment faithful, Jesus explicitly announces that he came to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance—those who have need of a physician. Sent to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” he keeps company and sits at meat with the condemned, and is especially charitable and compassionate where the world would most quickly turn aside. He knows his own and selects them with the simplest word. He turns aside from those who would tempt, entrap, or outwit him, with a discernment which pierces to the marrow. Although he is represented as fulfilling scripture, he by no means conforms to the external conditions which supposably proclaim the Messiah; but restores a sick man on the sabbath day, and drives the money-changers out of the temple. While some critics maintain that he speaks of himself with unprecedented assurance, it should be remembered that this confidence was coupled with the sweet spirit of peace which could say: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
All this implies a certain clear-cut conception of the kingdom which the Messiah proclaims and reveals, not arbitrarily but on principle. The kingdom thus incisively proclaimed is to be gained through repentance, inspired by the quickening presence of the Messiah, and to be followed by certain unequivocal fruits. Numerous signs are supposed to give sure evidence that Jesus really is the Messiah—the descent of the Holy Spirit, the temptation, and the subsequent events leading to the crucifixion. The watchword, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” everywhere indicates the close proximity of the heavenly order, now referred to as “within,” again as coming “without observation,” and now as a domain to be established upon earth. The kingdom should be sought first, not its rewards. It descends only upon those who become as little children, no longer desiring to be greatest. Numerous conditions are mentioned which prevent its coming, so that those who make excuses, serve two masters, or have many possessions, shall know why they are not yet of the heavenly order. One parable follows another to illustrate symbolically that which can scarcely be depicted with exactness. The works of healing and other signs are plainly meant to lead to knowledge of the kingdom.
The references to the heavenly order are never vague or merely general, but always proceed out of definite expositions of righteousness and the way thereto, such as the sermon on the mount To proclaim this heavenly mission is indeed to bring a sword, yet the Master is unmistakably “the prince of peace.”
The same concrete nearness is expressed in all the references to the heavenly Father, as the giver of conditions which all men may depend upon from the point of view of law. The Father is, for example, the God of justice, “for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” He is the ever-merciful Father, kind towards the unthankful and evil, watching over all, providing for all, anticipating every need, beholding all that we do in secret; and rewarding according to merit, fidelity, conduct, and love. His intimate nearness is suggested by the statement that “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father” With the same incisiveness which pervades the teaching in regard to the kingdom and the details of its righteousness, the Father is said to be the sole God, with whom all things are possible, who alone is good, whose will is the only guide; and in whose hands everything rests, even unto the minutest detail. Although the Father’s love is without bounds, no man shall be dealt with save in entire regard for the faith, the works, and the inmost heart. The Father has determined what shall come to pass in the Messiahship, and every deed is what He wills.
Likewise He speaks in the disciples, particularly when they are in need; and He gives His spirit to guide into all truth, to sustain the soul. Thus through those who are most faithful the Father is most clearly revealed, and through these all men may become partakers of the word of life. The Master makes this conception of the Father clear by various contrasts, in terms of obedience, faith, and love. He brings it out in the many passages in which his human nature is contrasted with the Father’s, culminating in the supreme wish and obedience of the self, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine be done” But above all in those priceless utterances when, in infinite tenderness, he blesses the little children, and bids all who are burdened to come unto him, the Master shows us the Father by his own gentleness and love, by bestowing the sweet peace which the world cannot take away.
Again, the Master reveals profound knowledge of men. Whether in the selection of his disciples, in the beatitudes or the denunciations, this knowledge is always shown with respect to that which most deeply actuates men, their real intentions or passions, their inmost interests and love. Hence the Master’s comments strike at the heart of hypocrisy or faith, as the case may be. Nothing is concealed or softened by qualifications. Men are judged by what comes out from within, whatever the external appearance may be.
The parables exhibit the same insight into that which is central, fundamental. “Knowing their thoughts” Jesus speaks from what he sees. Perceiving the real intent of those who come to test or to tempt him, he adapts his utterances and his conduct to the reality, each time exemplifying a universal law. Sometimes this knowledge is shown in what is said about external observances, again in the references to obsessing ideas, manias, and the like. The Master instructs the disciples from the point of view of this same knowledge, and shows them how, possessing the clue to the semblances of men, they may win those who are worthy. Unsparing in his denunciation of hypocrisy, falsity, sin, he is charitable beyond all precedent in the forgiveness of those who are faithful. All this implies a classification of men into distinct groups in accordance with an equally distinct insight. Other men may doubt, but for Jesus there is a certitude which divides like a knife. “Every plant which my heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up” “And I say unto you that every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” More insistent still is the teaching in regard to the conditions to be observed by all who would lead the heavenly life. In the first place, there is the Master’s own fidelity to the predetermined conditions of his Messiahship.
He says, for example, “I will not eat of it [the passover] until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God….I will not drink from henceforth of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come….For the Son of man indeed goeth, as it hath been determined.”[20] Jesus beseeches his hearers to seek the Father’s kingdom first of all. He speaks of God as the being to be addressed in prayer, howbeit one should ask in the name of Christ. He attributes all gifts to the Father, even the words uttered and the deeds wrought by those who are faithful. He will not permit any one to call him good, but bestows all the glory upon the Father, who alone is good. In many passages he refers to the will of the Father as decisive, but fully believes that he, the Messiah, is ever obedient to that will. It is indeed the Messiah who sows the good seed, who wills to reveal the Father unto men, and who receives from the Father the surpassing wisdom and love by which he is enabled to say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” But from first to last it is the Father who bestows, and the command is to be obedient unto Him, to be perfect even as the Father is perfect.
The conditions obeyed and exemplified by the Master are exacted of all who would take up the cross and follow him. It were futile to call him “Lord, Lord,” and fail to do what the Master says.[21] He who does the will of the Father fulfils the supreme condition, not he who imitates, or tries to follow two masters. It would be equally futile to prophesy in the Master’s name, or by that name undertake to cast out devils. The faithful man is likened unto the one who built his house upon the rock, against which naught could prevail. “If a man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.”[22]
He who is willing to yield up his life in the merely finite, separated sense shall not only find it transfigured in union with God, but shall find himself amidst a heavenly society. “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.”[23] in the heavenly order only one shall be called Father, only one Master. If a man would be greatest, he shall be least and must serve; while the man who humbles himself shall be exalted.[24] One must indeed leave all for the sake of the kingdom; and, having put one’s hand to the plow, never turn back. Thus inexorable from first to last is the law of the strait and narrow way.
That there is a narrow gate and a strait way, a way of the cross through obedience and unstinted devotion—this is the whole point. But it is this same way “that leadeth unto life,” It is the way of love, beside the still waters of peace, where there is nothing to fear. The apparently severe conditions are precisely those through which may be purchased the freedom and joy for which we are most eager. Man must indeed know for a fact that God is the only power. He must not only recognise that every good gift is from God, hence take no credit to himself, but that every possible circumstance has been provided for. But having acknowledged that of himself he is nothing and can do nothing, it is through this same acknowledgment that he becomes a fit instrument for the Master’s service. Blessed is he who knows the law, but thrice blessed if he live by it. For it is one thing to believe that “not a sparrow falleth without the Father,” and another to show by our conduct that we believe the Father has provided for the least as well as the greatest.
Finally, there is the knowledge which pertains to the situation along the way. Jesus affirms the closest correspondence between inner and outer conditions, such that one may tell what is to come objectively by that which is discerned within. Each man shall be rewarded according to his conduct, shall be judged as he judges, receive in proportion as he gives. To be angry is to be in danger of dire consequences. Righteousness everywhere depends upon its inmost character, and faith is everywhere an indispensable condition. Denial brings denial, condemnation its like. The door is closed to those who disbelieve, but to him who is faithful even in little much shall be given. And the conditions of life are everywhere those laid down by the Father. Therefore let no man suppose that by swearing he can make one hair white or black, or by taking thought add a cubit unto his stature. Man neither made the laws nor can he change them. His first duty is acceptance, obedience, together with knowledge of the life that is more than raiment.
It is notable that, as in the case of all genuine science, the emphasis is throughout put upon the universal, not upon the particular occurrence or the individual man. The prime consideration is not what man can do but what God has established. Unless a man first seek and find the kingdom of
God he shall not have the things that are to be added. But man cannot find the kingdom by his own unaided efforts. Man’s part is to close the door to outward things and pray, in the secret place, to the Father who has already established everything as it should be. Hence the first emphasis is upon obedience to the all-comprehending will. The second emphasis, likewise, is upon that which the Father hath prepared, namely, the works which follow upon fidelity to the divine will. The way of the cross is already laid out, the conditions are determined, and no exception to the law is permissible. Unless a man “become as a little child” is the first condition. The finite self is of no account alone. Its efficiency is subsequent to its denial, through the divine goodness. First stands the Father, with the heavenly order which He has established, then the Son who reveals the Father. Unto the Son it is given to make known the way. Unto the disciples and others it is given to follow where the Master leads. Man in himself is unable to make the initiative.
Unlike those whose science is speculative, Jesus does not, then, begin with the facts of our natural existence and reason back to a first cause. He starts with God and ends with God. Not even when Peter declares him to be the Christ does he credit the human self with any knowledge, but insists that this truth was not revealed by flesh and blood but by the heavenly Father. Plainly, we are to understand that the whole trouble with man comes from self-assertion. The first truth, without which no headway can be made in heavenly things, is the fact that man of himself is naught. There is no other way. It is not indiscriminately true that “all roads lead to Rome” The way is hard, inexorable, or abounding in delight, according as it is viewed. The burden seems enormous, when we consider our sins; an incalculable weight is removed from our shoulders when we realise that the Father is within and behind all, that He is responsible. A certain price is indeed called for, we must be willing, must make the act of faith even when we cannot see how provision shall be made. But “he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved,” he who is faithful shall be cared for unto the minutest degree.
Unlike the modern doctrine known as “Christian Science,” the Master’s teaching does not imply a philosophy of denial. There is no evidence that he in any way ignored or slighted the conditions of our natural existence. That would have been to slander the fair name of Him whose footstool is the earth. Nothing serves Jesus better than figures drawn from the simple, homely facts of nature. The waving corn in the fields, the birds of the air, are symbolical to him of the ever-present life of the Father, who watcheth over all, providing for each according to its kind. Just as the vine or the branches symbolise his own Messiahship, so it might be said the whole earth symbolises the wisdom and love of the Father. It is in this poetic spirit of worship and admiration of the providence of God that Jesus accepts nature for what it is—not the highest manifestation of God, but the beginning of the heavenly home which is eternal in the skies.
Jesus says nothing about “demonstrating over” natural conditions, for we “cannot by swearing turn one hair white or black.” What he counsels is adjustment, trust, fidelity to that which the Father has provided. To try to “demonstrate over” would be to deny God and set oneself up over against Him. This is sin.
Nor does the Master anywhere break down the fences between right and wrong by declaring that “All is good; there is no evil.” We have seen that from first to last he calls a spade a spade, condemns hypocrisy for what it is, and indulges in no compromises. He recognises and denounces sin for the contemptible thing it is. Indeed, it was because of man’s sin that the Master came into the world. Nowhere does he make light of darkness. Instead, he calls attention to the darkness and shows how great it is. But the constantly significant feature of his ministry is that despite the darkness there is light for all. He comes with glad tidings. He proclaims the intimate nearness of the kingdom and points the way thereto. Walking where proud man would not go, he loves those whom the world hates, and forgives those whom every one else would scorn. He has boundless compassion for men. Never was heart so stirred as his, never was there a greater sense of the wrongs and miseries of the world. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, his heart was touched by the burdens of men, so that willingly he bore the weight of human suffering. But he comes with the message that the Father has provided for each and all of these things, too, that nothing, no event, no person, is outside of the universe of God.
Jesus has nothing to say about “mortal mind” He nowhere reduces human troubles to “errors” Recognising the reality of the sorrow, the struggle and defeat, he points out the way of escape. The human self is indeed nothing of itself while it is thus assertive, but that same self when turned to the Father is glorified. Hence, in contrast with the levelling proposition, “All is good,” his is essentially an ethical doctrine, one which sets up a standard. His teaching is not pantheistic, as if all things were God. Nor does he juggle with the statement “God is good” by illogically converting it into the proposition, “Good is God” For him God is God, the world is what God made it, and man’s privilege is to be what God would have him become. The emphasis is put upon righteous conduct, not upon “error,” or the affirmations of “thought” To deny the trouble or “affirm thought” would be to bring one’s own selfhood into prominence; whereas the lesson is, receptivity, obedience. This means putting personal thought aside.
To accept this science of heavenly things, to be faithful to God, means, therefore, to follow a definite standard and never to confuse the true Christ with the false. One might say, a man either knows the law or he does not. To know in very truth is to do the Father’s will, hence to take the sermon on the mount in utter seriousness. For the life that shall follow is as incisively marked out as the heavenly science, the precepts spring from the science. To obey means, for example, that we should “resist not him that is evil,” but love our enemies; judge not lest we be judged; pray for those who persecute and despitefully use us; refrain from anxiety, since all that we need has been provided; give to those who ask, even though we cannot see how we are to be recompensed; and do unto others even as we would have them do unto us. By their fruits we may judge the acts of men. Every man who tries to serve both God and mammon will be like a kingdom divided against itself and brought to desolation, hence we may know the signs of righteousness. To love the Lord is to hate all anti-Christs. Strait and narrow is the way. The Master’s doctrine is far from the self-complacent optimism which believes everything will somehow turn out well.
The nearest approach to the modern interpretation of his teaching is found in the emphasis put upon the Spirit. Jesus gives constant evidence of his spiritual supremacy. He turns his tempter aside with the declaration, “Men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” The central fact in all the wonders performed by Jesus might be taken to exemplify the supremacy of the Spirit over the flesh, over the physical forces, over the people who opposed him. The statement that he could at will summon ten legions of angels could be taken as typical of the spiritual reserve power at his command. He assured the disciples that he had meat to eat that they knew not of. Finally came the culminating scenes at the cross and afterwards.
Coupled with this life of triumph was the teaching which emphasised the same spiritual supremacy. For example, Jesus said, “It is the spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life” Going one step further he said: “The words that I speak unto you are not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my words, and believeth on him who sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life”
As in all other oases, however, Jesus shows that this spiritual supremacy is dependent upon the wisdom and will of the Father, not upon the will of man. He declares that “the Son of man can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do” “All things have been delivered unto me of my Father” To Pilate he said, “Thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.” There is, then, but one source of power, and he who obeys the conditions has no adversary. The emphasis is upon this source of power.
On the supposition that Jesus was a man who gained all his power in the usual way, that is, through progressive understanding, self-control, and constant practice, one might say, with the mental healers, that he is “the prophet of the Christ-consciousness.” Having “the Christ within,” we might then conclude that whatever the Master accomplished would be possible to us. From this point of view it would indeed be true, as Emerson assures us, that “Jesus was true to what is in you and me.” But this would be a distortion of the Gospel, inasmuch as its beauty, its strength, is everywhere dependent on one central point, the power of God. As the master physician, Jesus from first to last attributes everything to the Father, and reproves those who would bestow credit upon the human self. In the Fourth Gospel, he is reported as saying that birth from above is a condition of entrance into the kingdom of God. It is not for man to know the “times or seasons which the Father hath set within his own authority.”[25] Man by his unaided will is unable to master the spiritual powers of the world. The greatest truth from the human side is that “the Spirit beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.”[26] No human aspiration or moral triumph shall be despised. The witnessing spirit on our side is evidence that the Holy Spirit exists. But the balance of power is not within our hands.
How happens it, then, that the modern term “Christian Science” has come to stand for a teaching remote in many respects from the heavenly science of the Master? No doubt there is a measure of resemblance on the practical side. There is a Christian art of conduct, involving the precepts above mentioned, and here is where the point of contact is found. Whatever view be held in regard to Christ and his spiritual supremacy, it is plain, for example, that the works of healing fulfilled an important part in the ministry of Jesus. The Master expressly commissions his disciples to go forth and heal, and he gives them authority to cast out diseases and obsessions. Later in his ministry, when speaking of the salvation of the world at large, he mentions the healing of disease as a part of that work. His promises and predictions also include the therapeutic ministry. There is abundant reason for the belief cherished by many, that no one can be a complete Christian unless works of healing spring from his life, although theologians abound who maintain that the therapeutic works were incidental to the Lord’s mission, hence are not essential to the Christian life. But whatever the emphasis put upon the therapeutic ministry, the main point is that in the Master’s case the works of healing sprang from a principle that accords with the heavenly science. To understand that principle is at once to see in what sense the problems of sin and disease are allied, and precisely why the heavenly science is a refutation of the “Christian Science” of to-day.
One does not of course pretend to explain how and why Jesus wrought the works of healing. But certain instructive inferences follow from the brief accounts given in the Gospels. Jesus pronounces a cure, casts out a demon, or commands the sick with the same authority which everywhere characterises his utterances. It might then be said that he heals because he is God, with whom all things are possible. Yet it is noticeable that emphasis is always put on certain human conditions, thereby showing what man may do to become worthy to be healed. For example, Jesus refrains from going into some of the towns round about because of the unbelief there prevalent. Sometimes he heals because of the faith manifested by the multitude, again on account of the great faith shown by the sufferer himself. On occasion he asks, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” Then he utters the decisive sentence, ” According to your faith be it done unto you.” Once convinced that the element of faith is present, he invariably commands the patient to stand forth cured. “Go thy way; as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.” “Daughter, be of good cheer; thy faith hath made thee whole” “O woman, great is thy faith; be it done unto thee even as thou wilt”[27] It would seem reasonable, then, to infer that faith is an essential, and that it is in a measure a social factor. That is, a mother may have faith for a daughter, and the multitude may through faith further the core of one of their number.
Again, there are reasons for holding that restoration to health is part of a general process of salvation, that sickness is allied to sin. Jesus says, for example, to the man sick with the palsy, “Son, thy sins are forgiven”[28] One might interpret this to mean that disease, so far as it is due to our own conduct, not to physical accident, arises from self-assertion, from lack of obedience to the conditions of Christian living. The resource is to become whole, to give the whole mind to Christ, to realise that the body is the temple of the living God. The man who is ill, like the one who is sinful in a moral sense of the word, is living in separated consciousness. To become whole is to cease from the anxieties, doubts, conflicts, which are due to absorption in one’s own feelings; and to return to belief in the fundamental principle that every need has been provided for by the Father. Really to believe this is to be made whole, since no man can at the same time have faith and be consumed by doubt. To be healed, then, is to let one’s eye be single, that the whole body may be full of light.
A clue is also found in the references to the impulses and other activities which, coming out from a man, defile him. Adultery may be inner as well as outer. Condemnation, anger, hatred, and the like spring from within and work mischief because of the external consequences. The law is that with what measure we mete it shall be measured unto us. If we are wrathful, if we judge, we may expect to be paid in kind. To mend our ways we should begin with ourselves, for not until we cast out our own blots can we see clearly how to set our brother free. It is “the pure in heart” who shall see God. Unless a man first find the kingdom “within” he can hardly expect to recognise it without. The inner life, then, is central, decisive. Wholeness begins with a change of mind or attitude, when faith reigns within.
A very suggestive clue is found in the promising declaration that the truth makes men free. The truth is plainly just this gospel of the heavenly science which we have been considering, the truth that the kingdom is at hand, that God really lives and reigns, that this is God’s world, that salvation is for all the faithful, that the Messiah has come. If we have been carried off into jealousy, envy, despair, distrust, it is glad tidings to know that there is restoration for us when we cease to judge by selfish desires, when we no longer covet, put an end to our melancholy, and enter into faith. If we have asserted ourselves and thereby created misery which has increased the more we affirmed our own will, it is a blessed relief to learn the law that never by self-affirmation can help come, that only he who loseth his life shall truly find it. It is also good news that the same salvation that is for the soul is for the whole of life. Furthermore, the truth sets us free because it is plain and unvarnished and reveals whatever has been hidden. For there is no smoothing over in terms of negative optimism. In the same unqualified condemnation by which the Master placed the hypocrite where he belonged, he probably would have shown up jealousy and every other emotion or passion. A Man must be brought to himself to be healed. He must come to judgment. It does not suffice to tell him that he is a victim of “errors of mortal mind.” Something is wrong with his attitude, he must learn what it is and change it, change his conduct. Unpleasant as the truth may be, concerning his wilfulness, he must be told this truth, and learn that there is a change he must make before even God will do aught for him. It would be futile to deny this selfishness. Not by “taking thought” is man able to change a hair. There is only one way and that is the way of the Gospel. Hence to be genuinely healed is to learn “the way, the truth, and the life.”
Deeply significant, also, is the fact that Jesus sometimes restores the sick when “moved with compassion.” This is the same infinitely gentle spirit which bade all men who were weary and heavy-laden to come that they might have rest. That is to say, there are conditions of faith, which man himself can fulfil, changes of heart which are absolutely essential. But higher than all this, and not within human control, are the gifts of the Christ, whose commanding word, “Peace, be still!” is the supreme authority. Moved by a sympathy which knows no bounds, the Master’s heart goes forth in loving tenderness. To come within his presence and touch the hem of his garment is indeed to feel that restoring peace. But the greatest gift is bestowed when the Saviour’s blessing descends by the highest law of all.
“Come unto me” is the great command. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” The Master is a direct giver of life, while the sons of men are merely recipients. Our part is to be ready, to respond or to sow the seed; it is God who giveth the increase. Not “by taking thought” can man do the works that Jesus wrought or perform the greater works that are promised. The healing ministry of the Christ is not a vocation. There is no authoritative secret by which it can be conveyed for a price; but it is the work of the one who, acquainted as no one else is with sorrow and grief, is moved by perfect love and infinite tenderness. This love cometh down from above. It is not of the sort which men attain by progressive acts of selfpurification. It is partly itself. It is beauty, goodness, truth. He who receives is made pure, beautiful, and good, possesses the truth that is freedom indeed.
It would seem right, then, to conclude that only he who has received Christ, and who steadily leads the life, can approach the works promised to the disciples. Others may indeed emulate, may obey the psychological conditions, and prepare for the Lord’s coming. But the coming is the great essential. Salvation is a gift. It is due to the descent of the Holy Spirit. Hence our part is to learn the law of the coming and of the presence of the Comforter. The Master has shown the perfect way. The Holy Spirit is in the world working to bring men into knowledge of that way. There may be other kinds of healing. But Christian healing is above all this.
[1] The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, Eng. trans., New York, 1906.
[2] Op. cit., pp. 56, 69, 317.
[3] Ibid., p. 317.
[4] Op, cit., p. 81
[5] Ibid., p. 161.
[6] Religion and Medicine, New York, 1908.
[7] Religion and Medicine, p. 239.
[8] Op. cit., p. 200.
[9] Op. cit., p. 67.
[10] Harvard Theol. Review, April, 1908.
[11] Chicago, 1894.
[12] P. 99.
[13] P. 140.
[14] Acts, i: 8.
[15] Acts, iv: 45.
[16] Luke, x: 22; Matt., xi: 27.
[17] Luke, x: 16.
[18] Matt., x: 37-40; xii: 8, 41, 42.
[19] Matt., xxiv: 34-36.
[20] Luke, xxii: 16, 18, 22.
[21] Luke, vi: 46.
[22] Luke, ix: 23-25.
[23] Matt., ix: 50.
[24] Matt., xxiii: 9-12.
[25] Acts, i: 17.
[26] Romans, viii: 16.
[27] Matt., viii: 13; ix: 22; xv: 28.
[28] Mark, ii: 5.