It is possible, no doubt, to account for such cures on a purely naturalistic hypothesis, such as that which Keim[29] accepts, viz. that they were cases of faith-healing; a phenomenon which recurs in connexion with nearly every form of religious belief, and in every stage of social development. The influence of the spiritual imagination on the bodily state is undeniable. Everyone knows something about the phenomena of Lourdes and Bethshan, healing resorts which, theologically speaking, lie at opposite poles. In a cruder form the same effects are found in connexion with holy wells and relics of the saints.[30] We may go back to the ancients and find wonderful cures reported in the pagan world, from the shrines of Asclepius (the patron deity of physicians). A blind man touches the altar of Aesculapides (as he was called at Rome) on the island of the Tiber and receives his sight.[31] The Emperors Hadrian and Vespasian used to touch for the ‘King’s evil.’[32]
But can anyone study the miracles of our Lord as a whole (for we must not lose sight of those wrought upon inanimate nature) and feel that they are sufficiently explained by a familiar truth in psychology, viz. that the religious imagination is able to stimulate the bodily forces, whatever may be the spiritual soil in which that imagination is bred? Faith, or a conscious receptivity in the mind of the patient, was a frequent factor in the healing process; although there is really nothing in the records to make us predicate it of Jairus’s daughter or the centurion’s slave or the nobleman’s son. It is surely remarkable that our Lord held Himself aloof from all those methods of cure which might have suggested the enchanter and magician, particularly in the case of demoniacs. The Jews, like other ancient nations, resorted to the use of exorcism, incantation, and talismans, which owed their potency to their effect on the imagination. Christ does not hypnotise men or throw them into an ecstasy. Where faith is present, He gladly works through it towards the salvation of the whole man. But often there is a mere flicker of faith, a spark in the flax. In the sick room, when the vital forces are enfeebled, the brain clouded, and the spirits depressed by physical malady, it is a rare thing, surely, for the flame of faith to burn brightly and the imagination to glow with the consciousness of an unseen Presence. And the Church would have but little encouragement to invoke for her own ministries the healing Power of her Master, if it could only be enlisted on behalf of such patients as already possessed ‘comfort and sure confidence in their Lord.’ We believe that the Church has something less elusive to offer her people in their hour of need: and we return to the records of Christ’s miracles in order to discover it.
(iv) The value of what is called ‘mental therapeutics’ is no longer contested; it receives, and has received for some time, the careful attention of the medical profession.[33] We approach the subject from the religious standpoint, we base our study of it upon the teaching and practice of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we must discriminate between psychic treatment and spiritual treatment. The former term, if applicable to religious treatment, can also denote forms of mental cure which are unconnected with religion, e.g. the use of hypnotism. But Christ addresses Himself to the Spirit (πνευμα), that highest element of our nature, through which the mystics hold that we have kinship with God, and in unison with which the Holy Spirit attests our Divine sonship. His miracles are works of spiritual healing, they are wrought for the whole man, not only for soul, and certainly not only for body. Christ’s view of healing is relative to His view of disease, His view of disease to His view of human nature. Had he attached to bodily health the supreme importance which it is the tendency of our day to assign to it, and regarded bodily pain as a thing at all costs to be effaced, we must suppose that His whole Life upon earth would have been devoted to the relief of sickness and pain, and that the ‘Healing Ministry’ of His Church would have been far more clearly defined. But no more does He abolish disease than He abolishes pauperism. The tendency of His teaching is to inculcate self-sufficingness (the αὐταρκεία, of St. Paul[34] and the Greek philosophers) in the face of all temporary evils and ailments, the conquest of things material by the spirit, its supremacy in the hierarchy of human nature; in a word, the principle of inner control or autonomy, as the birthright of the human spirit. In his great picture of the Transfiguration, Raphael has caught this contrast between the calm of the heavenly Mount above and the ineffective, agonised distraction of suffering humanity here below, in the person of the lunatic boy and his father. But that heavenly calm of spirit is not the self-centred aloofness of the Stoic. The doctrine of the Incarnation brings the Divine Saviour down to men, lifts man up to the peace of heaven,[35] and at the same time bids him find that peace in fulfilling the bodily duties of his corporate Church life. It will not admit of a selfish quietism. But before this peace of God which Christ proclaims, the worry and ‘fear-thought’ of our overstrung modern age, its neurotic sensationalism and morbid self-analysis, would retire abashed. Christ would teach us that human nature is itself only when it is itself in its completeness, when the physical is truly the instrument of the spiritual. There is no dualism, no schism in human nature as Divinely planned. The voluptuary and the ascetic are both at fault, the former more so because he sins against the higher self. Christ is the Saviour of the whole man, and to the sick He restores ‘perfect soundness,’[36] nor does He refuse to be called the Saviour of the body.[37]
(v) It is a significant fact that in the Gospels the word for ‘save’ (σῴζειν) is applied to bodily as well as spiritual salvation; it denotes ‘to restore to health or sanity.’[38] A protest may here be entered against the very prevalent opinion that God sent sickness upon man, by an Almighty fiat, in order to discipline him into patience and other Christian virtues. Such a view, crudely stated, has led to much perplexity and distress of faith, and it is not warranted by the teaching of the New Testament. God can bring good out of evil, even in its worst forms. But that is not to say that God by a deliberate act designs and causes evil. More than once in the New Testament sickness is attributed to Satanic agency, in the case of ‘the woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years,’[39] and in that of St. Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh.’[40] Disease is a disturbance of the balance of human powers, mental and bodily, a derangement of faculties and functions. Consider the bearing of this upon life. Modern science teaches us the doctrine of the persistence of matter; in Sir Oliver Lodge’s words, ‘a really existing thing never perishes, but only changes its form’—in the case of our complex human constitution, that change of form is what we call death. It is vital force which maintains that inner harmony which we call health: it is disease, an accident, which impairs it. This derangement and discord is but one instance of that general disturbance of the world’s harmony which sin has introduced. Sometimes, as in the case of the impotent man of St. John v., disease is the direct consequence of sinful conduct. It is the work of the Son of Man to restore harmony and repair the breaches in Nature’s order. And this His healing power on its spiritual, which is its essential, side effects. Incidentally, miracles are ‘signs,’ evidences of the Christian Revelation, but their primary character is that of ‘mighty works’ (δυνάμεις), particular manifestations of that Power (δύναμις) which resides in the Person of the Lord. As such they impressed King Herod, though he attributed their authorship to the Baptist risen from the dead.[41]
(vi) This Healing Power of Christ stands in closest relation to His claim to be ‘the Life of them that believe and the Resurrection from the dead.’ It flows from His Personality. Though that Personality is veiled for us in profound mystery, we know that in It the Human will and the Divine will are in perfect accord; and, therefore, it does not surprise us that, while a place is found in the Saviour’s Life upon earth for weariness and pain, none is found for sickness; for, in all things, He conformed to the Will of God for man, which is health, not sickness. Sickness is a violation of that normal condition which God has appointed for man. When infection and disease entered into the world, we must believe that they were part of that general imperfection which God can only be said to will as a means to an end, or as a passing stage in the evolution of good. God does not send sickness to scourge us, but overrules it to purge us. In saying this, we need not deny the possible place of death in a perfect cosmos; a death which should have been the gradual ebbing of physical vitality, not its sapping and undermining by the malignant forces of disease. We should expect, then, that our Lord’s healing power would be the action of the life-giving Spirit of God upon the spirit of man, from the very fact that in Christ man was brought into living contact with God.
Recent psychology, especially in the investigations of Professor W. James and the late F. W. H. Myers, has thrown a new light upon those recesses of human nature in which our religious experiences take place. We have learned that there is a subconscious self, a submerged portion of our faculties, which responds to spiritual impressions and accepts those suggestions of a Higher Power, to which mind and intellect are sometimes deaf, a ‘subliminal self,’[42] in which religious faith and the inspirations of genius are alike rooted, and which is en rapport with another world than that of the senses. We are reminded of Tennyson’s words:
Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
Of something felt, like something here;