m such doubts and problems, but the physician is to be
blamed if he encourages the belief that all this still belongs to the
proper sphere of the ministerial worker in abnormal psychology.

Those engaged in such work were not long in finding out that the mere
emotional inspiration is often no sufficient remedy, and the development
went along the same lines in which it has gone everywhere for some
thousands of years. Not to disappoint the sufferers, the religion had to
become in very many cases simply an inactive side issue and the real
cure was performed by the same methods with which any worldly
neuropathologist would go to work. If the woman who cannot sleep is
cured from her insomnia by being made to listen to the beats of a
metronome, it may sometimes be effective, however crude, but it is
certainly no longer religion, even though the metronome stands in a
minister's room. The more the movement spreads to those who have no
psychological training and knowledge, the more it must be necessary for
them to import the whole claptrap of the quack hypnotist and soon the
minister may discover that in certain cases physical means and drugs
help still better. Thus he simply enters into competition with the
regular physician, only with the difference that he has never studied
medicine. The chances are great that in his hands even such remedies and
drugs may do harm and finally, even if they were effective, is not the
question justified: will not religion suffer?

Indeed we have so far considered the question from one side only. We
have confined ourselves to the question of how far such a movement is
sound for the interests of the patient; but can we be blind to the other
side and overlook the not less important problem of whether it lies in
the interests of religion and of the church to amalgamate its spiritual
work with a medical one? We are not thinking of those widespread, unfair
arguments to the effect that this whole movement is undignified because
it is instituted by the desire to fill the empty pews or to make
competition with the success of Christian Science. That is utterly
unjust. But there are intrinsic factors in the movement which interfere
with the true aims of religion. First of all it cheapens religion by
putting the accent in the meaning of life on personal comfort and
absence of pain. The originators of the Emmanuel Movement stand well
above such error, but their national congregations do not. Certainly the
l