hrough the healer rather
than the saint or the king or shrine or relic that we approach the
renaissance of mental and faith healing in our own time.

IV

THE APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MARY BAKER EDDY

There is, however, another stage in this long line of development which
needs to be considered since it supplies a double point of departure;
once for the most outstanding healing cult in our time--Christian
Science--and once for the greatly enlarged use of suggestion in modern
medical practice, and that is mesmerism and "animal magnetism."

_Mesmerism a Point of Departure for Modern Healing Cults_

Paracelsus[17] may be taken as a starting point just here. He is known
in the history of medicine "for the impetus he gave to the development
of pharmaceutical chemistry, but he was also the author of a visionary
and theosophic system of philosophy." He believed in the influence of
the stars upon men, but he enlarged upon the old astrologic faiths. "He
believed the human body was endowed with a double magnetism, one portion
attracted to itself the planets and was nourished by them, the result of
which was the mental powers, the other portion attracted and
disintegrated the elements, from which process resulted the body." His
world, therefore, was a world of competitive attractions. He believed
the well had an influence over the sick through magnetism and used the
magnet in his practice.

[Footnote 17: A German-Swiss physician and alchemist, b. 1493, d. 1541.
These quotations, partly from authorities on faith healing and partly
from the history of Spiritualism, illustrate the underground connection
in this whole region.]

"This dual theory of magnetic cures, that of the magnetic influence of
men on men and of the magnet on man, was prevalent for over a century."
"It is, then, upon these ideas--the radiation from all things, but
especially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which would
act in all things else, and which was in each case directed by the
indwelling spirit, together with the conception of a perpetual contact
between reciprocal and opposing forces--that the mysticism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly depends."[18]

[Footnote 18: Podmore, "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. I, p. 45. I am in
debt also to Cutten for general information and some quoted paragraphs.]

These ideas were adopted by a group of men who are now only names for
us. The phenomena of magnetism fascin