se he knows too well that such
unregulated powers may just as well destroy the good as in another case
the bad; in short, that ruin may result just as well as health. But that
does not exclude the fact that indeed almost mysterious cures can be
made without really contradicting the scientific theories. Such are the
means by which the mystical cults earn their laurels. A chance letter of
the type which often swells the mail of the psychologist may illustrate
this effect. I choose it because it is evidently written by a skeptic. A
short quotation from the lengthy epistle is sufficient.

"My condition was horrible in the extreme. I had consumption of the
lungs and other supposedly fatal troubles, complicated by wrecked
nerves. At the present writing, I am robust and splendidly healthy,
looking twenty years younger than I did at the period previously
described. The Christian Scientist saw my condition but appeared
unconcerned and unafraid, I being absolutely hopeless, skeptical, and
deeply contemptuous meanwhile. On the third day of her treatment I was
desperate for sleep, she having forbidden drugs, and I deliberately took
an overdose of chloral, thinking to die at once and end it. My
condition justified the act. She brought me out of the coma of the
chloral after three hours of mental work, and the next day I felt
decidedly calmer and less afraid of the coming of night, should I live
to meet it, which seemed doubtful. At noon she left me to go to her home
to lunch. I was pondering seriously on her reiterated 'God is love and
fills the universe and there is nothing beside Him,' when I suddenly had
a sensation of being lifted up or rising slowly and becoming lighter in
body. A rush of power that I have no way of describing to you filled me.
I seemed to be a tremendous dynamo in the air several inches above the
ground and still ascending. When I noticed everything around me becoming
prismatic and more or less translucent, I could have walked on water
without sinking, and I had distinct understanding that matters seemed to
be disintegrating and dissolving around me. I was frightened but
self-conscious and quiet. I remained in this state for about three
hours, my consciousness seeming to have reached almost cosmic greatness.
I could have cured, I felt, any human ill, was filled with an absorbing
altruistic desire to help suffering. It was tremendous and totally
foreign to my everyday attitude. At the end of the day, towards
tw