Following on the Pan-Anglican Congress meeting came the Pronouncement of the Bishops assembled in Conference at Lambeth, in July 1908. The report of this Conference is published by the S.P.C.K. as a pamphlet. On November 16, 1908, an important conference on Spiritual Healing was held at Sion College, which was presided over by Prebendary Pennefather, who said that the Church had too long neglected that part of her teaching and ministry. Mr. Hickson gave an account of the Society of Emmanuel, and stated that they desired to revive in the Church the use of the gift of healing committed to her by our Lord.
The Rev. Francis Boyd explained the objects and work of the Guild of Health. They held that bodily healing was not of primary importance, that sanctification might indeed be gained through sickness, but that a fuller sanctification might be gained by those who sought to be made whole by a more real and vital union with our Lord. The Guild of Health, Mr. Boyd proceeded to say, recognised three systems of healing—physical, mental, and spiritual—though there was not necessarily any opposition between them. They felt, however, that Spiritual Healing was the only system which concerned the Church. They were quite alive to the dangers of over-estimating the value of bodily health, and only desired to further it so far as it ministered to the perfection of the whole nature of man. After some further discussion, a resolution was passed that, ‘In the opinion of this Conference, the time has come to form a Central Church Council in the diocese of London, for the consideration of questions connected with Healing by Spiritual means.’
At the outset, we must take exception to Mr. Boyd’s three systems. I very much question whether there is more than one system, and I am convinced that physical and mental are one and the same. And I would go so far as to say, that the disastrous mistakes that have been made in the past, and which are still in operation to-day in the treatment of one large section of sick people, viz. the insane, largely owe their origin to this arbitrary division. And, by a curious irony, the branch of medical science where there is the most marked predominance of materialism is this very department of mental diseases. This is all the more curious when we reflect, what occult influences have been, in all ages, supposed to work upon the insane. The obnoxious word ‘lunatic’ is a proof of this. The moon was by some supposed to have a deleterious effect on the intellect; insane persons were spoken of as ‘moonstruck’; the periodicity of the mental attacks was also supposed to have some relation to the lunar interval. Indeed, the whole subject of insanity bristles with occult and mysterious theories. The really hopeful treatment of insanity began when it—a mental disease—was treated, not by mental, but by physical methods, and the more mental and physical are taken together as one and the same, the more rational and productive of good, in the best sense, is our treatment likely to be. Indeed, the whole indivisibility of the three systems is nowhere so well shown as in the arbitrary division of Religious Insanity. Surely if we try to turn the minds of the sufferers from any considerations of religion, by removing their Bibles, by preventing them from any religious discussion, or from taking part in any religious ceremonies, we are helping to keep up the evil. People, as we put it, become insane on religious matters, not only because they have been dwelling on the subject unduly, but because it is naturally of the greatest importance, and absorbs more attention than probably anything else in the world. Now, as the more purely physical, as distinguished from the more or less occult methods of regarding the insane, has become the more enlightened and modern view of the subject, so has the spiritual method of dealing with it come into prominence. Spiritual ministrations to the insane may be thought to be useless, or, at any rate, to be fraught with little practical utility. Comparatively recently a man who had charge of a country parish was appointed chaplain to Broadmoor, which is the asylum for insane criminals. A friend, on being told of the appointment, said to him, ‘Why, whatever will you say to them? You can only talk to them of their sins.’ ‘Talk to them of their sins!’ he said; ‘I shall never mention them.[10] I shall talk to them of Hope.’
I have thought it advisable to dwell rather at length on the question of the insane, because it really rather fairly represents my point of view on this subject. Whether you agree with me or not, it is better that I should state quite fairly and straightly my position, which has only been reached by honestly striving after truth, and by looking fully into the subject for the purposes of this paper. In talking about Spiritual Healing, we are hampered at the start, because we have only actual knowledge of physical things, i.e. of things as they appear to us here. We have to define spiritual things in physical terms, because they are the only things we know and understand. Time and space do not exist in the spiritual domain. Take just one word in illustration of my meaning, the word Rest. Our present state of being here has certain peculiarities. Labour involves rest from labour, and if the limits of rest and labour are exceeded, the result is ruin to man’s moral and physical being. Disease is sure to follow the inactive mind or body, and then comes a time when ‘we cannot do the things we would.’ But these things do not exist in spiritual language. ‘They rest not day and night, but cry “Holy, Holy, Holy.” ’ When we pray ‘Eternal rest grant them, O Lord,’ we have no thought of a period of rest as we understand it, but rest in and with God.
We are far too apt to think that suffering is an evil—it is not necessarily so; on the contrary it may be a blessing, because it is often a direct means of advance towards perfection. Far too much attention is paid at the present day to temporal benefits. ‘Get rid of poverty, of suffering, and the world will be virtuous and happy,’ but this is not so. The people who starve and brutally ill-use their children are not the very poorest; they are usually well-to-do in the world. There is a great deal too much of considering poverty as a real cause of suffering. Christ’s mission of redemption was not primarily a mission for the relief of suffering. If He bids us to take up our cross, He also bids us, as a quite essential corollary, to follow Him. Indeed, taking up our cross is useless, if we do not follow Him. Pain, far from being shunned, should be welcomed and embraced, because it brings us nearer to the sufferings of our Blessed Lord. It is not, of course, mere pain in itself that lifts and cleanses: it is pain rightly and courageously borne, from whatever motive. If this be true, the modern revolt against all suffering—and here I quote from the late Miss Caroline Stephens’s article on ‘Pain,’ published in the Hibbert Journal for October 1908—‘is obviously suicidal. To extinguish all suffering, were that possible, would be to deprive the world of a leverage as all-pervading and effectual towards spiritual elevation and purification, as is gravitation towards stability.’
Pain and evil are not interchangeable terms, but are quite different. Evil cannot be innocent, though pain can be, and often is. When the disciples said, ‘What hath this man or his parents done that he should be born blind?’ they formulated the usually accepted idea at that time, and an idea, moreover, that dies very hard. The whole treatment of disease in the Middle Ages was based on it.
If we quite briefly consider our Lord’s miracles, they were signs of His Divine mission, not proofs, and in performing them, He felt limitations; for we are definitely told that in Capernaum ‘He did no more mighty works, because of their unbelief.’ These signs were sudden manifestations of His power, and as such they are preferably called Divine Healing. They showed the very highest degree of spiritual power, but there was nothing really new. Christ was the perfect manifestation of eternal things, and eternal things are obviously never new. Perhaps the fact that our Lord thought it worth while to show his power in bodily healing was intended to teach us that to keep our bodies in health is an important religious duty, and more than that, that all hygienic social work undertaken is an important part of the duties of religion. Both nursing and doctoring bring us very near to part of the work of Christ, for He went about doing good to the sick, and He symbolised this, not only by His healing words, but by the simple medicines and nursing of the Good Samaritan. But just as illness is by no means caused by evil or ill-doing, so it is equally clear that goodness does not of necessity bring health. The question of bodily health has no connexion with spiritual conceptions at all. If it were so, the persons who are the strongest physically would be the most spiritual; but we know, of course, that this is not so. Take St. Catherine of Siena, one of the greatest of saints, statesmen, and scholars that the world has ever known. She healed others, but she died herself of a lingering, painful disease, at the early age of thirty-three. Also St. Paul, who prayed the Lord thrice that the thorn in the flesh which tormented him might be removed. And the Lord’s reply has been a help and comfort, and a lesson to countless thousands ever since. ‘My grace is sufficient for thee, for My power is made perfect through weakness.’ And what we so very often see now, persons bereft of all that makes life dear, in suffering of mind or body maybe, yet rise above their weakness, and carry through such reforms and such noble acts as they never could have done had they been allowed to remain in bodily health and comfortable and happy surroundings. Indeed, St. Paul’s affliction was the means of his converting the Galatians, for his illness compelled him to stop with them for a time, and in writing to the Corinthians from them, he could truly say, ‘Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my weaknesses that the strength of Christ may cover me.’ To repeat, it is our duty, as far as can be, to keep our bodies in health, though we can most of us conceive of circumstances when to lose our life may be indeed to save it.
In a sermon preached for the ‘Guild of Poor Brave Things,’ the present Bishop of London, who is the president of the Guild, said: ‘What made more impression on me as an undergraduate at Oxford than all the sermons I ever heard in chapel was a young don, insisting, at the risk of his life, on ministering to an undergraduate dying of a most infectious disease.’
After all, St. Paul’s life, as narrated by himself, can hardly have been considered as hygienic. ‘Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils amongst false brethren; in labour and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Besides those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches.’ In comparison with this, the ‘Don’t-worry Gospel’ of the Christian Scientists seems utterly beside the mark. Health is undoubtedly good, but it must sometimes be cast away in the service of others.
Of course there is a philosophical difficulty in the whole position of the relation of religion to medicine. In a manner they are, as it were, at loggerheads from the outset. The Church is bound to teach that it matters not how long or how short a man’s life is, if it is rightly spent, whereas the doctor’s point of view must be to keep the man alive at any price. And although we may feel that, under certain circumstances, the medical attitude might be modified, it is the only safe one in the present state of our knowledge. Euthanasia seems, on the surface, a most humane and comforting suggestion, but it is allowing us finite beings to take into our own hands things which are beyond our comprehension. We all know of instances where it must have been thought that death would be preferable to life; but apart from the presumptuous thought of mere human beings, look how often the maimed bodily frame ‘rises on stepping stones of its dead self to higher things.’ A man struck with blindness, for example, may be living a full and perfect and whole life, in spite of his maimed condition, because he puts out all his powers and lives at the top of his bent. Such a man is in the highest state a healthy being. The unwhole man is one who is always in terror of his life, and who does not accept with faith and cheerfulness, and in a life of prayer, the ills that are laid upon him by a wise and Divine Providence. It is true that there are more things wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Yes, but even our prayers have necessary limitations arising from our imperfect knowledge, and when St. James declared that the prayer of faith shall save the sick, he spoke at a time when scientific investigation was non-existent, and when people must have been sorely distressed by their total inability to overcome the diseases from which those around them were suffering. But for us, whose physical knowledge is so much more exact, to refuse to accept the remedies which hard and patient toil has discovered, under God’s help and guidance (there whether we recognise it or not), is both presumptuous and foolish. Spiritual Healing—i.e. a quasi-miraculous process—must die a natural death, even if the agony is prolonged. It is simply pandering to charlatanism, and by its exaltation of the Health of the Body, is almost pagan in its effects. It is, moreover, an emphatic expression of individualism at a time when co-operation in every direction is the natural and right trend of affairs; for truly never did we feel so strongly as now, that no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself—as true of nations as of individuals. It is, therefore, in the highest sense, reactionary, and a sentimental attempt to put the clock back, which is doomed to failure. Take one item, which is wrapped up in this idea of Spiritual Healing, and that is Demoniac Possession. This was an ancient belief, as is shown by some of the miracles narrated in the Gospels, and there is an attempt to revive it in the present day, and with that, a practice of Exorcism as a cure for it. ‘But,’ and here I quote from ‘Religion and Medicine,’ ‘it is a significant fact that as education spreads, belief in demoniac possession dies out, and the greatest strongholds of the belief to-day are in non-Christian countries.’ A possible explanation of this is, that in Christian countries, spiritual forces have been actively at work for many generations, and that this spiritual activity has weakened the power of the forces of evil. There is, too, no blinking the question that the behaviour of insane people, or even of people supposed to be insane, might be explained on the theory of demoniac possession. For example, how often one sees people generally good and kind, and even truly religious, go suddenly into a fury of temper or violence of some kind; or in delirium we know that quite sweet, innocent people say dreadful things which one would think they could not even know. No doubt to some people the temporary possession by some evil spirit is a more comfortable theory than that it is a revelation of the natural man in us, when discipline and training are in some way relaxed, and that such is our real nature let loose.