ts with the modern religious quest for
health and healing. But even here we shall find it worth while to trace
broadly the history of faith and mental healing.

III

FAITH HEALING IN GENERAL

Those cults which are either founded upon faith healing or involve it
have a long ancestry. George Barton Cutten's very suggestive book[8]
makes that clear enough and supplies an informing mass of detail.
Medical Science and Psychology have been slow to take into account the
facts thus submitted, but they have of late made amends for their
somewhat unaccountable delay, and we have now reached certain
conclusions about which there is little controversy except, indeed, as
to the range of their application. Beneath all faith healing and kindred
phenomena there are three pretty clearly defined bases. First, the
action or reaction of mind upon body; second, the control of mental
attitudes by the complex of faith; and, as an interrelated third, the
control of the lower nerve centers by suggestion.

[Footnote 8: "Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing."]

_The Bases of Faith and Mental Healing_

There is an almost baffling interplay of what one may call these three
controlling principles, and the exhaustive discussion of the whole
subject demands the knowledge of the specialist. But we do know, to
begin with, that just as there are demonstrated bodily approaches to
both the mental and spiritual aspects of life, so there are equally
undeniable mental and even spiritual approaches to physical conditions.
We have here to fall back upon facts rather than upon a definite
knowledge of what happens in the shadowy border-land across which the
mind takes over and organizes and acts upon what is presented to it by
the afferent nervous system. Nothing, for example, could be really more
profound than the difference between waves of compression and
rarefaction transmitted through the luminiferous ether and the
translation of their impact into light. Somewhere between the retina of
the eye, with its magic web of sensitive nerve ends, and the proper
registering and transforming regions of the brain something happens
about which Science can say no final word.

What happens in the case of light is equally true of sound and tactual
sensation. That vivid and happy consciousness of well-being which we
call health is just the translation of normal balances, pressures and
functionings in the mechanism of the body into an entirely different
o