action. He felt himself to be the bearer of a divine
mission and healed the sick, appealing to their belief by laying on of
hands and by movements which we nowadays call passes. Much more
influential in the eighteenth century was Pastor Gassner in Germany.
Gassner succeeded in producing with his religious psychotherapy such a
tremendous stir that many thousands who needed cure from functional
diseases, and thousands of curious people, too, streamed to his church
in Ellwangen, and his methods of cure spread almost contagiously among
the ministers of the country: an Emmanuel Church Movement of the
eighteenth century. Gassner, too, discriminated between the diseases
which have natural causes, that is the organic diseases, which he did
not treat, and the functional ones, which were obsessions of the devil.
To determine to which group the disease belonged, he ordered the devil
to produce the symptoms of the sickness. When in this way the
obsessional character of the disease was recognized, the minister began
with his suggestive influences to banish the devil. He demanded firm
confidence in the name of Christ, reenforced his effectiveness by
narration of the cures he had perfected, used further certain
manipulations such as the rubbing of the skin and passes on the head,
and finally gave his suggestions with authoritative firmness. Many
ministers who became his pupils treated like him with skillful
combination of religion and hypnoid influences the spasms, catalepsies,
neurasthenias, paralysis, and deafness, of neurotic patients.

There is no need to follow in detail the frequent similar occurrences
between Gassner's time and our own. We all know where we are to-day.
The medical profession and the medical science with its bacteriology
and serum therapy, its Roentgen rays and its organic chemistry is far
away from the church and without concession to religious aspects. On the
other hand there are the yearly processions of thousands and thousands
who make their pilgrimage to the sacred waters of Lourdes, guided by the
Catholic priests, half-hypnotized by the hope that the Virgin will cure
them. In every niche of the Catholic churches in all Europe, there are
kneeling before the burning candles those who pray for nothing but their
health; and their belief will sometimes yield almost miraculous cures.
In England the Society of Emmanuel was founded by men and women to whom
it seemed necessary to bring back to the minds of Christian