ons are favorable for a rapid spread and that the church clinics
will become the American fashion of the near future.

It cannot be denied that the Christian church takes in hand there once
more a work which belonged to it through centuries. But they were
centuries in which the priest was in a certain degree the physician,
just as he was the educator and teacher, simply because in the church
there was centered all cultural influences which the community knew. The
complexity of modern times has for centuries demanded the opposite
system. Centralization is allowed only to the purely administrative
influence of the state, while all the active functions are divided among
specialists. We rely on the expert in education, we demand the expert in
medicine: is more gained or lost if the religious leader now again
suddenly undertakes a part of the functions which belong to the
physician? It is true that the ministers of this school do not propose
to undertake the physician's work to its full extent. They leave to him
the first and in some respects most important step, the diagnosis, and
abstain from the treatment of such cases as the physician declares
inaccessible to psychical influences. They do not heal cancer and
phthisis like the Emmanuel Movement in England or like the mental
healers in America.

But is not perhaps just this compromise dangerous in another direction,
inasmuch as it awakens a feeling of safety in those who feel in sympathy
with scientific medicine? They have passed the hand of the physician and
believe accordingly that because their illness is recognized as
functional, the minister can really perform all that ought to be done.
Is this belief justified? At the threshold, it occurs to every one that
such a diagnosis by physicians may be erroneous and that the chances for
such error are under the conditions of the church clinic much greater
than under the conditions of a regular medical treatment. The
diagnostician who treats the patient himself has ever new chances to
remodel his diagnosis and to correct it under the influence of
therapeutic effects. The danger is great that under the proposed
conditions, the activity of the physician will be superficial, because
he is deprived of his chief means, the constant observation. But we may
abstract from this possibility of error. Does the fact that the disease
is one the symptoms of which may yield to psychical treatment really
make it advisable that the further tr