that the want of critical
faculty which has made some of these cults possible will not in the end
yield to experience and a really sounder education. Since, moreover,
some of them--and Christian Science, preeminently--depend upon faith and
mental healing, whatever helps us to a clearer understanding of the
nature and limits of psycho-therapy will greatly affect their future.
All faith healing cults have heretofore depended very greatly upon the
atmosphere of mystery with which they have been able to surround
themselves. The fact that they have been able to secure results with no
very clear understanding of the way in which the results have been
secured has invested them with awe and wonder, so essential to every
religion.

But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws,
develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all this
is extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. For
this reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faith
and mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just now
strongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all.

The intimate association of religion and healing has, on the whole, been
good neither for religion nor health. Of course, this statement will
probably be sharply challenged but it is maintained in the face of
possible challenge. As far as religion goes it has withdrawn the
interest of the religious, thus influenced, from the normal expressions
of the religious life to border-land regions; it has stressed the
exceptional rather than the sweep of law, and the occult rather than the
luminously reasonable. Where it has failed in individual cases, as it
is bound to fail, it has left those thus disillusioned without any sound
basis for their faith and generally has driven them away from religion
altogether. It has tempted religious teachers to win a hearing by signs
and wonders. Even the Founder of the Christian religion grew weary of
this, as the records show plainly enough, in that He saw His true work
to be thereby not helped but hindered, and if this be true of the
Founder it is by so much the more true of His followers.

On the scientific side this temper has hindered honest thinking,
laborious investigation and that specialization which is absolutely
necessary to the furtherance of any great division of human effort.
Medicine made little progress until it got itself free of the Church.
Sp