onging for pleasure and a well feeling and the abhorrence of pain and
illness pervades our practical life and keeps in motion all our
utilitarian efforts. But if there is one power in our life which ought
to develop in us a conviction that pleasure is not the highest goal and
that pain is not the worst evil, then it ought to be philosophy and
religion. It is only the surface appearance if it seems as if the
religious therapeutics minimizes the importance of pain; in truth it
does the opposite. It tries to abolish pain, but not because it thinks
little of pain; on the contrary, because it thinks so much of pain that
it is willing even to put the whole of religion into the service of
this strife for bodily comfort. The longing for freedom from pain
becomes the one aim for which we are to be religious. In a time which
denies all absolute ideals, which seeks the meaning of truth only in a
pragmatic usefulness, it may be quite consistent to seek the meaning of
religion in its service for removal of pain, and personal enjoyment. But
in that case the ideal of both religion and truth is lost. It is finally
not less undignified for religion to seek support for the religious
belief in effects which it shares and knows that it shares with any
superstitious belief on earth. Granted that the church can cure: the
shaman of Siberia can cure too, and the amulets of Thibet not less. The
psychologizing church knows, therefore, that it is not the value of the
religion which restores the unbalanced nervous system; and yet it wants
to provide for the spreading of true belief by the miraculous cures
which it exhibits.

This situation naturally produces the desire of the church to substitute
a religious explanation for a psychological one. It is claimed that
after all it is not the mental effect of the prayer, but the prayer
itself, not the psychophysical emotion of religion, but the value of
religion which determines the cure. Yet in that moment the whole
movement in its modern shape comes into a still more precarious
position. If the cure results from the inner value of the religion how
can we confine it to the so-called functional diseases and abstain from
any hope in organic diseases? Luther, from his religious point of view,
still had the right to separate the two groups because only those
functional diseases were effects of the devil, obsessions which could be
banished by the minister and by prayer, while the other diseases did not
resu