stice of man makes them doubt
whether there be a God, or if there be, whether he is good and has
power, and stands as the help of man. Recourse to their certified
spiritual guides, knowing that full and sympathetic justice will be done
to all their difficulties, ought to be as natural to them as their
recourse to the physical laboratory or the workshop of the mechanician
when an engine breaks down."[83]

[Footnote 83: "A Faith that Enquires," p. 82.]

_Medical Science Should Take a More Serious Account of the Healing
Cults_

Not only the churches but the schools and particularly Medical Science
need to take account of the cults. They constitute perhaps one of the
sharpest indictments of present-day education. Many of their adherents
are nominally educated above the average. They have secured for what
they follow the authority which always attaches, in the American mind,
to the fact that those who champion any movement are college bred, and
yet the want of clear vision, the power to distinguish and analyze,
along with the unexpected credulities which are thus made manifest,
seem to indicate arresting deficiencies in popular education. It has
left us unduly suggestible, much open to mass movement, at the mercy of
the lesser prophets and wanting in those stabilities and understandings
upon which a sound culture is to be built. When we consider what they
are capable of believing who have had college or university training, we
must conclude either that contemporaneous education is wanting in the
creation of sound mental discipline, or else that we have a strange
power of living in water-tight compartments and separating our faith
wholly from our reason.

The cults which are organized around faith and mental healing at once
challenge and in a measure indict modern medical science. In many
directions all these movements are reactions against an excessive
materialism; they affirm the power of personality as against its
environment, testify that the central problems of life may be approached
from the spiritual as well as from the physical and material side. It
would not for a moment be fair to say that modern Medicine is ignoring
this. There has probably always been a considerable element of mental
healing in any wise medical practice. But on the whole, the marvellous
successes and advances in Medical Science within the last thirty years
and the very great success which has attended the definition of all
diseases in terms