cs must
stand the higher, the more sharply it is separated from special
philosophical or religious doctrines. No theory of the world and of God
ought to gain authority over the mind from such an external motive as a
belief in its curative effects. Freest from such implications is
certainly the hypnotic method of the physician who does not need the
strong religious reenforcement of the suggestion because he reenforces
instead the suggestibility of the patient by slight influences on his
senses.

Even where sound religion without superstition and without
pseudophilosophy stands behind the therapeutic work, the community will
not give up the question whether the church does not necessarily neglect
by it the interests which are superior. The community becomes more and
more strongly aware that too many factors of our modern society urge the
church to undertake non-religious work. Social aid and charity work
ought to be filled with religious spirit, but to perform it is not
itself religion. Still more that is true of the healing of the sick.
Whether or not such expansion of church activity in different directions
saps the vital strength of religion itself is indeed a problem for the
whole community. The fear suggests itself that the spiritual achievement
may become hampered, that in the competition of the church with the
other agencies of social life the particular church task may be pushed
to the background, and that thus the church in imitating that which
others can do just as well or better loses the power to do that which
the church alone can do. The final outcome is therefore practically in
every way the same. From whatever starting point we may come, we are led
to the conviction that the physician alone is called to administer
psychotherapeutic work, but that he needs a thorough psychological
training besides his medical one.

But the interest of the community is not only a negative one. Society
does not only ask where psychical treatment can be dangerous, but asks
with not less right whether the scheme and the method might not be
fructified for other social ends besides the mere healing of the sick.
If psychotherapy demonstrates that for instance hypnotism makes possible
the reshaping of a pathological mind, it is a natural thought to use the
same power for remodeling perhaps the lazy or the intemperate, the
careless or the inattentive, the dishonest or the criminal mind. Both
educators and criminologists have indeed