ced study of the regular physician? Such physical questions
cannot be settled by the preparatory examination of the physician; they
come up every day during the treatment and what the spiritual diet which
the minister offers may help, may at the same time be ruined by the
physical diet about which the minister without chemistry cannot judge.

But let us abstract from the bodily aspect. Is the situation really very
different for the mental one? The appeal to the religious emotion, the
reenforcement of religious faith is from the religious point of view
certainly the one central effort from which everything has to irradiate.
The unity of this controlling thought is the glory of such inspiration.
But as soon as we handle this thought as a psychotherapeutic remedy,
destined to restitute the disturbed psychological equilibrium, it
becomes evident that the very uniformity of it makes it a clumsy,
inadjustable pattern. If there is anything which impresses the careful
student of psychology, it is the over-rich manifoldness, the complexity
of mental life. Even the simplest content of consciousness is a tissue
woven from millions of threads and any stereotyped influence means
crudeness and destruction. The minister's attitude towards inner life is
there directly opposite to that of the psychologist. He cannot enter
into those endless interplays of associations and memories, or
inhibitions and sensations and impulses, he cannot examine from which
remote psychological sources those ideas have arisen, how the feelings
become disturbed and the judgments sidetracked. He should not analyze
even if he could, because his whole aim is to synthesize. He asks for
the meaning and not for the structure, for the aims and not for the
elements. His therapeutic effort is therefore not even directed towards
a careful rebuilding of the injured parts of the mind, but it is nothing
more than a general stimulation to the mind to help itself. By touching
on one of the deepest emotional layers of the mind, the layer of
religious ideas, the minister gives to the soul an intense shock and
expects that in the resulting perturbation, everything will be shaken
and may then settle itself by its own energies in a healthful way. It is
a fact that that can sometimes happen and under certain conditions the
chances for it are even favorable. Under many other conditions the
chances are unfavorable and the result does not happen at all.

But whether or not a cure re