stances even be blasphemous to wish it away.

Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special
miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale,
almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was
one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be
possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and
conversion on the patient's part, and prayer on the priest's, was quite
spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt,
in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years.
Blumhardt's Life by Zundel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in
chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing
activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition.
Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical character,
and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago
to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist
preacher, whose weekly "Leaves of Healing" were in the year of grace
1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denounces the cures
wrought in other sects as "diabolical counterfeits" of his own
exclusively "Divine Healing," must on the whole be counted into the
mind-cure movement. In mind-cure circles the fundamental article of
faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the
pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate
ourselves on any lower terms.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force
of a revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthy-mindedness
has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity
had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In
what can the originality of any religious movement consist, save in
finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs
may be set free in some group of human beings?

The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the
force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind
of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectable, and
intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its
acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert.
The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle
of the acute religion of the few against the chronic re