proves only
that those helped have believed it.

The matter of organic healing is more difficult. Medical Science does
not generally admit the possibility of organic change through
suggestion. There may be, however, a real difference of opinion as to
whether a particular trouble is functional or organic. Here is a
border-land not so much of fact as of diagnosis. A cure may be reported
as of an organic trouble when the basal diagnosis was wrong and it was
only functional, but the body possesses undoubtedly the power of
correcting or at least of limiting organic disease. Tuberculosis is an
organic disease but it is again and again limited and finally overcome
without the knowledge of the subject. Post-mortem examinations may
reveal scars in the lungs and so reflect processes only thus brought to
light.

Whatever serves general physical well-being may greatly help the body in
eliminating disease and securing a going measure of physical health. In
such indirect ways as these suggestion may, therefore, while not acting
directly upon diseased organism, contribute most distinctly to arrest
organic disease. Thoughtful physicians are ready to concede this and
thus open a door for a measure of organic healing which technically
their science denies. A very revealing light has been let in upon this
whole region by hypnotism. Some of the students of hypnotism are
inclined to go as far as to admit organic change under hypnotic
suggestion. "Strong, persistent impressions or suggestions made on the
reflex organic consciousness of the inferior centers may modify their
functional disposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organic
structures."[59]

[Footnote 59: Sidis, "The Psychology of Suggestion," p. 70.]

Christian Science, then, as a healing agency has a great field for there
are always folk enough to heal. It has a method, a discipline highly
effective in producing changed mental and spiritual states and,
strangely enough, it is all the more effective because it is so narrowly
true. Those to whom it makes its appeal are, for the most part, not
capable of analyzing through to their sources its fundamental
inveracities, nor would they be inclined to do that if they were able.
Its vagueness and its spacious rhetoric really give it power. It does
produce results and probably one case of physical betterment has a
prevailing power which a chapter of criticisms cannot overcome and, more
than that, one case of physical better