it on the
whole organism and its metabolism.

Seen from a causal point of view, however, there is no miracle in it at
all. On the contrary, it is a natural psychophysical process which
demands careful supervision not to become dangerous. It is not the value
of the religion which determines the improvement, and it is not God who
makes the cure; or to speak less irreligiously, the physician ought to
say that if it is God who cures through the prayer, it is not less God
who cures in other cases through bromide and morphine, and on the other
side just as God often refuses to cure through the prescribed drugs of
the drug store, God not less often refuses to cure through prayer and
church influence. But the real standpoint of the physician will be to
consider both the drugs and the religious ideas merely as causal
agencies and to try to understand the conditions of their efficiency
and the limits which are set for them. From such a point of view, he
will certainly acknowledge that submission to a greater power is a
splendid effect of inhibition and at the same time a powerful effect for
the stimulation of unused energies; but he will recognize also that the
use of those silent energies is not without dangers.

Certainly nature has supplied us with a reservoir of normally unused
psychophysical strength, to which we may resort just as the tissues of
our body may nourish us for a few days when we are deprived of food, but
such supply, which in exceptional cases may become the last refuge,
cannot be used without a serious intrusion and interference with the
normal household of mind and body. To extract these lowest layers of
energies may mean for the psychophysical system a most exhausting effort
which may soon bring a reaction of physical and nervous weakness. The
chances are great that such a religious excitement, if it is really to
have a deep effect, may go over into a mystic fascination which leads to
hysteria or into an exhausting eruption of energies which ends in
neurasthenic after-effects. The immediate successes of the strong
religious influence on the weakened nervous system, especially on the
nervous system of a weak inherited constitution, are too often stage
effects which do not last. From a mere purposive point of view, they may
be complete successes. They may have turned the immoral man into a moral
man, the skeptic into a believer, but the physician cannot overlook
that the result may be a moral man with a crip