"It is an unexpected pleasure as well as privilege to thus meet face to face so large a body of people who are working or desire to work for the uplifting and healing of humanity by this new yet old Christ-method.
"While there are so many thousands of the world's best workers engaged in lifting the burdens of sickness, sorrow and sin, there are none who accomplish more marvelous or speedy results than Christian healers. Indeed they have already demonstrated this philosophy to be a most powerful means of reclaiming the sinful and adjusting social relations as well as healing the sick.
"It already promises a better method of dealing with intemperance than that of any other class of reformers. Why? Not because earnest, devoted women do not give time, labor and hearts' blood to the temperance cause; not because wise, honest men are not doing their best with tongue and pen, in legislative halls and political conventions, but because neither women nor men have learned the true principle of moral reform.
"The wise mother knows that the best way to keep her child from mischief is not to talk about his temptation but cause him to forget it by thinking of other and better things. She encourages him to do better by recognizing his higher nature and showing him a better way. She 'overcomes the evil with the good.' Thus his moral nature gradually gains ascendency over the lower. This, and this only is the true reform; but the same mother fails to carry out the same principle with larger children. She must learn that the same management which corrects and improves the child will correct and improve the sinner, for a sinner is only a child of larger growth.
"Thus far, the world has been most attracted to the healing of bodily ills, and all discomforts of the flesh, but the material demand is only a forerunner or symbol of the spiritual, and the signs of the times are even now ready for the keenest readers. People are beginning to enquire if this wonderful power for healing the body can not be used for the healing of vicious minds, the curing of depraved appetites.
"Since religious teachings and ethical lectures seem to be so inadequate to meet the crying need, why not try this new method which claims to be a panacea for all ills, ask the moral philosophers.
"'The world moves slowly,' it is said, but the world awakes slowly, it should be. We are ministering angels to one another, in our process of awakening. If we have not enough realization of truth to keep ourselves awake, some one comes along and wakes us up, by telling us more and we, in turn, wake some slumbering neighbor.
"Invisible and silent are the workings of Truth, and none may judge what best teaches the law. None may know what has given this or that insight into a broader truth, but all at once some one has the new light, and hastens to impart the knowledge.
"All effort for truth points to one end—Truth. All reforms, all religions point to a higher standard of living, a clearer realization of the highest and best, a broader vision of truth, a breaking away from the false and a bringing about of the true.
"Mankind is conservative and must needs consider many things in many ways. Old opinions are not easily relinquished because they are 'bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh' and not till we awake to spiritual as well as intellectual knowledge, shall we realize that we are free—free to listen, learn and live.