ecifically the average minister is neither by training nor temperament
fitted for healing work and those laymen who have assumed that office
have generally been wanting in balance and self-restraint. This is not
to deny the reality of a power not ourselves making for health and
well-being generally, or the power of faith, or the efficacy of prayer.
Least of all is God, upon this understanding, to be shut out of life.
But the power not ourselves which makes for faith and healing is best
known through laborious investigation, the discovery of methods and
obediences to ascertained law. When we have clearly come to see the
nature of psycho-therapy, the occult authority of healing cults will in
the end yield to this understanding and the cults themselves be greatly
weakened or displaced.

One must recognize, on the other hand, the staying power of any
well-established religious system. Through nurture and those profound
conservatisms which hold more tenaciously in the region of religion than
anywhere else, it is possible to continue from generation to generation
the unreasonable or the positively untrue, and this holds in the Church
as well as outside it. None the less, the most coherent systems must
reckon with their own weaknesses. Christian Science may have before it a
long period of solid going or even marked growth, but its philosophy
will at last yield to the vaster sweep of a truer philosophic thought.
Its interpretations of historic Christianity will come up again and
again for examination until their fallacies become apparent and its
force as a system of psycho-therapy will be modified by simpler and more
reasonable applications of the same power.

_New Thought Will Become Old Thought_

New Thought is likely to take a different course but it also will have
to reckon with changing sciences and philosophies. What is New Thought
to-day will be old thought to-morrow; it will be challenged by new
expressions of the spirit which begot it. It will endure, therefore,
only as it is open, flexible and possesses a great power of
accommodation. But as long as understandings and ideals are fluid, as
long as religion is under bonds to take account of all the elements
which must be incorporated in it in order to enlarge and continue it, as
long, in short, as the human spirit outgrows fixed forms in any region
there is likely to be in religion itself something corresponding to the
New Thought of to-day, but this will be true on