Others write to the same effect. ‘Progressive criticism,’ says Dr. Ryle, ‘has adopted, with much assurance, the opinion that the diseases which were healed were what doctors commonly speak of as functional diseases of the nervous system, and that the production of a strong mental impression was the means by which the miracles of healing were brought about. Upon this point there seems to be a practical unanimity no less decided than that which has been reached among critics of the liberal school upon the other two points. Thus Dr. Abbott tells us that the mighty works were simply “acts of faith-healing on a mighty scale.” The “Encyclopædia Biblica” lays it down that “it is quite permissible for us to regard as historical only those of the class which, even at the present day, physicians are able to effect by psychical methods.” Principal Estlin Carpenter (in the “First Three Gospels”) says, “The real force which worked the patient’s cure dwelt in his own mind: the power of Jesus lay in the potency of his personality to evoke this force.”
‘The writers have adopted what may be called, for brevity, the Neurotic Theory. It is for them to show by an actual examination of the records that the ministry of healing which is admitted “to stand on as firm historical ground as the best accredited parts of the teaching,” consisted in the curing of neurotic patients by strong mental impressions. Have they done so?’
Dr. Ryle has, of course, no difficulty in showing that they have done nothing of the kind.
‘It is not too much to say that no one of the writers who has pinned his faith to the Neurotic Theory has made any attempt to carry it out in detail. We are offered a number of quite commonplace allusions to the power of mind over body, and we find a complacent conviction expressed in several ways by several writers to the effect that a certain class of disorders, which are vaguely alluded to as “nervous,” are promptly curable by emotional methods. But we do not find any recognition of the fact that only a small portion of the diseases to which human flesh is heir are nervous diseases; and that of nervous diseases, again, only a very small and unimportant group admit of cure in this way.
‘What the critics have to do if they wish to convince their readers of the Neurotic Theory of the miracles of healing is nothing less than this:
‘1. They must show that the diseases which Christ is said to have cured were of the kind which experience proves to admit of psychical treatment.
‘2. They must show some good grounds for the assertion that the way in which the cures of the healing ministry were effected was the way by which at the present day such cures are effected, when what has been called moral therapeutics has been the method employed.’
The difficulty is obvious. If our Lord was merely a faith healer, the results of long and laborious investigations into many faith-healing systems, all presenting very much the same features both in methods of treatment and effects, justify us in assuming that the number of cures would have been strictly limited.
‘But then, quickly enough, would follow the discovery that the powers of healing were available not for all, but only for a small and limited group of disorders; for in any casual collection of sick people, though there might be perhaps here one and here another suitable patient for a faith-healing exhibition, the majority would be unsuitable. What, then, of the failures?
‘The difficulty here referred to has not been wholly overlooked, and it is worth while to notice how the attempt has been made to meet it. “Did a kind of instinct (asks Dr. Abbott) tell Him that the restoration of a lost limb was not like the cure of a paralytic, not one of the works prepared for Him by His Father?” and again, “Experience and some kind of intuition may have enabled Him to distinguish those cases which He could heal from those (a far more numerous class) which He could not.”