Varieties of Religious Experience — Lecture 5 - The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts of experience with the mind‐cure religion.

I have many answers from correspondents—the only difficulty is to choose.

The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends.

One of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind‐cure disciples are inspired.

“The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the _human sense of separateness_ from that Divine Energy which we call God.

The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene: ‘I and my Father are one,’ has no further need of healer, or of healing.

This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine union.

Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath.

If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?

“This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs paralyzed.

My thoughts were no more impure than they are to‐day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds.

For how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?

—since ‘Greater is he that is _with_ us than all that can strive against us.

’ ” My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:— “Life seemed difficult to me at one time.

I was always breaking down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs.

I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach.

But I never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.

“I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of life which permeates all and which we call God.

This is almost unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves _actually_, that is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and invigoration without.

When you do this consciously, realizing that to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have engrossed you without.

“I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily health _as such_, because that comes of itself, as an incidental result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to above.

That which we usually make the object of life, those outer things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the bosom of the spirit.

This life is the real seeking of the kingdom of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all else comes as that which shall be ‘added unto you’—as quite incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of our being.

“When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown in philanthropic undertakings.

Such things should be results, not objects.

I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities.

” Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman.

I read you these cases without comment,—they express so many varieties of the state of mind we are studying.

“I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.

[Details of ill‐health are given which I omit.

] I had been in Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were these words: ‘You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.

’ These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I said at once that only God could have put them there.

I

believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston.

Within two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer (this was January 7, 1881).

The healer said: ‘There is nothing but Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a man thinketh so is he.

’ I could not accept all she said, but I translated all that was there for _me_ in this way: ‘There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past experience.

’ That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself: ‘The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have eaten.

’ By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with God’s Thought of me,’ and slept all night without waking, for the first time in several years [the distress‐turns had usually recurred about two o’clock in the night].

I felt the next day like an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that would in time give me perfect health.

Within ten days I was able to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to me like stepping‐stones.

I will note a few of them; they came about two weeks apart.

“1st.

I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.

“2d.

I am Soul, therefore I _am_ well.

“3d.

A sort of inner vision of myself as a four‐footed beast with a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering, with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself.

I

resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even look at my old self in this form.

“4th.

Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with faint voice.

Again refusal to acknowledge.

“5th.

Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing look; and again the refusal.

Then came the conviction, the inner consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for I was Soul, an expression of God’s Perfect Thought.

That was to me the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I appeared to be.

I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees (though it took me two years of hard work to get there) _I expressed health continuously throughout my whole body_.

“In my subsequent nineteen years’ experience I have never known this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child.

” But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you back to philosophic generalities again.

You see already by such records of experience how impossible it is not to class mind‐cure as primarily a religious movement.

Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God’s life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ’s message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.

(52) But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi‐logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, the mind‐curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation.

Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as a “mystery” or “problem,” or in “laying to heart” the lesson of its experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals.

Don’t reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond!

It is Avidhya, ignorance!

something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten.

Christian Science so‐called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind‐cure in its dealings with evil.

For it evil is simply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar.

The optimistic ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention.

Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system we are examining.

Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind‐curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?

After all, it is the life that tells; and mind‐cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the _Diätetik der Seele_ into the shade.

This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: “Pessimism leads to weakness.

Optimism leads to power.

” “Thoughts are things,” as one of the most vigorous mind‐cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion.

No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued.

Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet to the divine.

Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction.

Most mind‐curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are “forces,” and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over.

Thus one gets, by one’s thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one’s side by opening one’s own mind to their influx.

On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind‐cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements.

To the believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, “What shall I do to be saved?

” Luther and Wesley replied: “You are saved now, if you would but believe it.

” And the mind‐curers come with precisely similar words of emancipation.

They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty.

_Things are wrong with them_; and “What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?

” is the form of their question.

And the answer is: “You _are_ well, sound, and clear already, if you did but know it.

” “The whole matter may be summed up in one sentence,” says one of the authors whom I have already quoted, “_God is well, and so are you_.

You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.

” The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels.

Exactly the same adequacy holds in the case of the mind‐cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its manifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their day.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ But I here fear that I may begin to “jar upon the nerves” of some of the members of this academic audience.

Such contemporary vagaries, you may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures.

I can only beseech you to have patience.

The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit.

Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads.

The result is that we have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy‐minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form.

The psychology of individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet—our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb‐like contribution to the structure.

The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico‐academic‐ scientific type, the officially and conventionally “correct” type, “the deadly respectable” type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.

Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic conversions, and of what I call the mind‐cure movement seems to prove the existence of numerous persons in whom—at any rate at a certain stage in their development—a change of character for the better, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed.

Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness.

“Be vigilant, day and night,” they adjure us; “hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.

” But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two‐fold more the children of hell they were before.

The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment.

Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.

Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti‐moralistic method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture.

Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule.

Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

This is the salvation through self‐ despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes.

To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one.

Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an external power.

Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one fundamental form of human experience.

Some say that the capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character.

With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality.

They _know_; for they have actually _felt_ the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice.

At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours.

But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop.

He fell just six inches.

If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.

As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.

The mind‐curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.

They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology.

It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there.

The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic‐ idealistic, or a medical‐materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.

(54) When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn something more about all this.

Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind‐curer’s _methods_.

They are of course largely suggestive.

The suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education.

But the word “suggestion,” having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases.

“Suggestion” is only another name for the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct_.

Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others.

Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere.

The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to‐day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word “suggestion” as if it were a banner gives no light.

Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that “Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form.

Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.

” And this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely _nothing_, or did nothing until mind‐cure came to the rescue.

(55) An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.

The mind‐cure with its gospel of healthy‐mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened.

It has let loose their springs of higher life.

In what can the originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some group of human beings?

The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of success.

If mind‐cure should ever become official, respectable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost.

In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert.

The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit.

“We may pray,” says Jonathan Edwards, “concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if they were all dead.

”(56) The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers, of minds who unite healthy‐mindedness with readiness for regeneration by letting go.

Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character formed of this peculiar mingling of elements.

However few of us here present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination, well represented in the world.

Finally, mind‐cure has made what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life.

To their reasoned advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even invoked something like hypnotic practice.

I quote some passages at random:— “The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on which the New Thought most strongly insists,—the development namely from within outward, from small to great.

(57) Consequently one’s thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though this trust be literally like a step in the dark.

(58) To attain the ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the attainment of self‐control.

One is to learn to marshal the tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a unit by the chosen ideal.

To this end, one should set apart times for silent meditation, by one’s self, preferably in a room where the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought.

In New Thought terms, this is called ‘entering the silence.

’ ”(59) “The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace, Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.

This is the spirit of continual prayer.

(60) One of the most intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often talking loudly.

Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds about him, this self‐centred faithful man would, in any moment of perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he were alone in some primeval wood.

Taking his difficulty with him into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive until the reply came, and never once through many years’ experience did he find himself disappointed or misled.

”(61) Wherein, I should like to know, does this _intrinsically_ differ from the practice of “recollection” which plays so great a part in Catholic discipline?

Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on Contemplation.

“It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and affection for him....

Would you escape from every ill?

Never lose this recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor in adversity, nor on any occasion whichsoever it be.

Invoke not, to excuse yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you, that you are under his eye.

If a thousand times an hour you forget him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection.

If you cannot practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your soul.

”(62) All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course unlike anything in mind‐cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the exercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their own persons that whereof they tell.

Compare again some mind‐cure utterances:— “High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and strengthened.

Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it forms a habit and wears a channel.

By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony.

To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful.

“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations.

If we _will_, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence.

The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum....

Whenever the thought is not occupied with one’s daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into the spiritual atmosphere.

There are quiet leisure moments by day, and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful exercise may be engaged in to great advantage.

If one who has never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought‐ forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and superficial thinking.

At such favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire.

The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm.

The ego gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.

There is soul‐contact with the Parent‐Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.

”(63) When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed away—doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract talk and rhetoric set down _pour encourager les autres_.

You will then be convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of “union” form a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance.

This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should like to pass from the subject of healthy‐mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too long drawn out.

It concerns the relation of all this systematized healthy‐mindedness and mind‐cure religion to scientific method and the scientific life.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the other.

There are plenty of persons to‐day—“scientists” or “positivists,” they are fond of calling themselves—who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and outgrown.

If you ask them to explain themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality.

The savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends.

For him, even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers.

Now science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho‐physical, which are all impersonal and general in character.

Nothing individual accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law.

Should you then inquire of them by what means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been by the strict use of the method of experimental verification.

Follow out science’s conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated.

The world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you infer them impersonal and universal.

But here we have mind‐cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy, setting up an exactly identical claim.

Live as if I were true, she says, and every day will practically prove you right.

That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and mental experience will verify.

And that experience does largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind‐cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results.

Here, in the very heyday of science’s authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific philosophy, and succeeds by using science’s own peculiar methods and weapons.

Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not impugned, but corroborated by its observation.

How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough from the narratives which I have quoted.

I will quote yet another couple of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn.

Here is one:— “One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two months after I first saw the healer.

I fell, spraining my right ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully guarding it ever since.

As soon as I was on my feet I made the positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): ‘There is nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly.

I cannot be sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.

’ Well, I never had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day.

” The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such account.

“I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not been gone long before I began to feel ill.

The ill feeling increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an attack of influenza.

I thought that I was going to have the grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse.

The mind‐cure teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to test myself.

On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with some effort from telling her how I felt.

That was the first step gained.

I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send for the doctor.

But I told him that I would rather wait until morning and see how I felt.

Then followed one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

“I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did ‘lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.

’ I gave up all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient.

There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.

My dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt,’ and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all _was_ well.

The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding.

There was no place in my mind for a jarring body.

I had no consciousness of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and faith.

“I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep;

but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_.

” These are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification.

For the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not.

That they seemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system.

And although it is evident that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet it would surely be pedantic and over‐scrupulous for those who _can_ get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more scientific therapeutics.

What are we to think of all this?

Has science made too wide a claim?

I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature.

The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many‐sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for.

What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed?

But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?

The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed.

Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease.

Religion in the shape of mind‐cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons.

Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure‐ house to him who can use either of them practically.

Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use.

And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right?

On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co‐eternal.

Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems at any rate as far as ever from being driven by science from the field to‐day.

Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.

(65) The case of mind‐cure lay so ready to my hand that I could not resist the temptation of using it to bring these last truths home to your attention, but I must content myself to‐day with this very brief indication.

In a later lecture the relations of religion both to science and to primitive thought will have to receive much more explicit attention.

Appendix (See note to p. 121. ) CASE I.

“My own experience is this: I had long been ill, and one of the first results of my illness, a dozen years before, had been a diplopia which deprived me of the use of my eyes for reading and writing almost entirely, while a later one had been to shut me out from exercise of any kind under penalty of immediate and great exhaustion.

I had been under the care of doctors of the highest standing both in Europe and America, men in whose power to help me I had had great faith, with no or ill result.

Then, at a time when I seemed to be rather rapidly losing ground, I heard some things that gave me interest enough in mental healing to make me try it;

I had no great hope of getting any good from it—it was a _chance_ I tried, partly because my thought was interested by the new possibility it seemed to open, partly because it was the only chance I then could see.

I went to X. in Boston, from whom some friends of mine had got, or thought that they had got, great help;

the treatment was a silent one; little was said, and that little carried no conviction to my mind; whatever influence was exerted was that of another person’s thought or feeling silently projected on to my unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat still together.

I believed from the start in the _possibility_ of such action, for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering, the body’s nerve‐activities, and I thought telepathy probable, although unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play.

“I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting‐places, of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life, too high to climb.

I

began to read and walk as I had not done for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable.

This tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when, summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few months later.

The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly gaining ground instead of losing it, but with this lift the influence seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience, and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after this got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which came when I made trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful expectation.

It is difficult to put all the evidence in such a matter into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases one’s conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had abundant evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I came to then, and since have held to, that the physical change which came at that time was, first, the result of a change wrought within me by a change of mental state;

and, secondly, that that change of mental state was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the influence of an excited imagination, or a _consciously_ received suggestion of an hypnotic sort.

Lastly, I believe that this change was the result of my receiving telepathically, and upon a mental stratum quite below the level of immediate consciousness, a healthier and more energetic attitude, receiving it from another person whose thought was directed upon me with the intention of impressing the idea of this attitude upon me.

In my case the disease was distinctly what would be classed as nervous, not organic; but from such opportunities as I have had of observing, I have come to the conclusion that the dividing line that has been drawn is an arbitrary one, the nerves controlling the internal activities and the nutrition of the body throughout; and I believe that the central nervous system, by starting and inhibiting local centres, can exercise a vast influence upon disease of any kind, if it can be brought to bear.

In my judgment the question is simply how to bring it to bear, and I think that the uncertainty and remarkable differences in the results obtained through mental healing do but show how ignorant we are as yet of the forces at work and of the means we should take to make them effective.

That these results are not due to chance coincidences my observation of myself and others makes me sure; that the conscious mind, the imagination, enters into them as a factor in many cases is doubtless true, but in many others, and sometimes very extraordinary ones, it hardly seems to enter in at all.

On the whole I am inclined to think that as the healing action, like the morbid one, springs from the plane of the normally _un_conscious mind, so the strongest and most effective impressions are those which _it_ receives, in some as yet unknown, subtle way, _directly_ from a healthier mind whose state, through a hidden law of sympathy, it reproduces.

” CASE II.

“At the urgent request of friends, and with no faith and hardly any hope (possibly owing to a previous unsuccessful experience with a Christian Scientist), our little daughter was placed under the care of a healer, and cured of a trouble about which the physician had been very discouraging in his diagnosis.

This interested me, and I began studying earnestly the method and philosophy of this method of healing.

Gradually an inner peace and tranquillity came to me in so positive a way that my manner changed greatly.

My children and friends noticed the change and commented upon it.

All feelings of irritability disappeared.

Even the expression of my face changed noticeably.

“I had been bigoted, aggressive, and intolerant in discussion, both in public and private.

I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others.

I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh.

I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared.

I had been in the habit of approaching every business interview with an almost morbid dread.

I now meet every one with confidence and inner calm.

“I may say that the growth has all been toward the elimination of selfishness.

I do not mean simply the grosser, more sensual forms, but those subtler and generally unrecognized kinds, such as express themselves in sorrow, grief, regret, envy, etc. It has been in the direction of a practical, working realization of the immanence of God and the Divinity of man’s true, inner self.

”