ilight, I became wearied of the tremendous throbbing and exalted state
in which I still remained and gave utterance to the thought aloud.
Almost before I had formulated it the condition left me, and like the
sudden dropping of a weight, I struck the ground, the same dull,
ordinary person of everyday experience, but with the vast difference of
perfect health, radiant and lasting to the present writing. My father
like myself is baffled and wondering. We are both pretty hard skeptics.
I want the truth, whether it be terrible or otherwise. I am profoundly
grateful to the Christian Scientist, if I regained my health through her
ministrations, but I have not so far been able to label myself and rise
in their church services to tell what has been done on me. The
performance repels me as crude and rather bad taste. I swear to you on
my honor as an American woman and a mother that what I have written you
is true, absolutely. If you can give me any light or if my experience
may perchance give you a helping ray, my renewed lease on life may have
had some purpose after all, which I have often questioned in my cynical
moods."

The unprejudiced psychotherapist will be perfectly able to find room for
such cures and, if it is the duty of the scientific physician to make
use of every natural energy in the interest of the patient's health, he
has no right to neglect the overwhelming powers of the apparently
mysterious states. Some of this power ought to irradiate from his eye
and his voice whenever he crosses the threshold of a sick-room. Some of
that power ought to emanate from him with every pill and drug which he
prescribes. The psychotherapeutic energies which work for real health
outside of the medical profession form a stream of vast power, but
without solid bed and without dam. That stream when it overfloods will
devastate its borders and destroy its bridges. The physicians are the
engineers whose duty it is to direct that stream into safe channels, to
distribute it so that it may work under control wherever it is needed,
and to take care that its powerful energy is not lost for suffering
mankind.

PART III

THE PLACE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

XII

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE CHURCH

The belief in supernatural energies has cured diseases at all times and
among all peoples. Everywhere the patient sought help through the agents
of higher forces and everywhere these agents themselves utilized their
therapeutic success for str