Health in itself is an ideal, the perfect harmony of all the elements, the spiritual and the material, which constitutes a man. One of the greatest living authorities writes: ‘Health, like every other such name, is to be used in a relative sense; absolute health is an ideal conception.’[52] This being so, it is apparent to any religious mind that the true concept of the well-being, physical and even mental, of any person is only to be found in the Mind of God. And that is only an abstract way of saying that, if we follow Christ’s example, we shall seek to enter into His fellowship with the Father. In that Divine fellowship we shall be able to pray for the true health and recovery of our sick people. ‘The prayer of faith shall save the sick,’ for faith implies a whole-hearted acceptance of the Will of God for the uncertain future. This gives a man the tranquillity of soul which is no less needed for prayer than for action. Such an one possesses his own soul. Our Lord promises to those, who ‘have faith and doubt not,’[53] that they shall ‘remove mountains,’ a hyperbolic expression, but yet one which seems to claim a certain power of acting upon inanimate nature.[54] Such a power need not carry with it a positive breach of cosmic law. It is impossible for any really reverent mind to wish, even in the supposed interest of his dearest friend, to bend the Will of God to his own desire. Such a rash prayer involves the fatal flaw of that ‘doubting mind’ which is forbidden us, the mind ‘divided’ between God and self. The spirit which unites us to God, that unfathomed inner self, desires the universal good.
Our wills are ours, we know not how:
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
God wills the true health and salvation of each human soul, as He alone can view it, in its relation both to the vast whole of immaterial being and to the order of the material universe. ‘His will He knoweth which way to accomplish.’ Prayer is the act of resignation of our individual desires and thoughts into His all-wise hands. Prayer universalises a personal longing; and so wonderful is the magic of true prayer, fetching up from the deep of our being suggestions, inspirations, forces unperceived by man, that it can never fail to induce a sense of calm, the most favourable for a physical recovery; and many a time it has effectuated that recovery itself. Science may teach the ‘reflex action of prayer’; religion will always find authentic answers to prayer.
Prayer is the spiritual instrument on which our Lord in His Human Nature relies, and on which He encourages His Church to rely—‘a mighty engine of achievement.’[55] His method was grounded in prayer, the prayer of that Divine fellowship, which is His, as it cannot belong to any of the sons of men, and yet in Him, ‘in the Name of Christ,’ the Church must still expect to accomplish the miracles of faith, in proportion to the degree of her own spirituality. Who, indeed, would have looked for miracles of healing in the English Church of the eighteenth century, unless it were among the non-jurors, who actually revived the apostolic rite of unction,[56] and the pious followers of John Wesley?[57]
(ii) But that spiritual power, thus resident in the Healer, has to communicate itself to the subjects of His grace; subjects they must be rather than objects. And His first purpose is to excite the dormant energies of life and action. He does it as a wise physician will do it, by concentrating the patient’s mind upon Himself.[58] This is done by a question, or other means, adapted, with His profound insight into character, to the individual case. In the case of the deaf man who had an impediment, He effected this by isolating him,[59] and then using physical means (with finger and saliva). Exactly parallel is the case of the blind man, which, like the former, is recorded by St. Mark alone.[60] He asks blind Bartimæus, ‘What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’[61] And this is one of several cases in which the sovereign faculty of will leaps forth, and the confession of faith attends it.[62] In the cure of the lame man by St. Peter (in Acts iii. 4, 5) this concentration of the thought of the patient upon the healer is reciprocal (ἀτενίσας . . . ἐπει̑χεν).
The tonic influence of a healthy personality upon the hysterical, neurotic, and mentally diseased, not to speak of minds depressed in a normal way, is familiar to everyone. In Dinah Morris’s visit of comfort to the widowed Lisbeth, we have a sample of that subtlest perception and ‘subduing influence of the spirit’ which we may call inspiration.[63] In the New Testament it appears at its highest in treatment of those strong cases of dual personality, mental disorder, or hysteria, which we know as demoniacal possession. We cannot here discuss the question, whether the sufferer was the victim of the lower elements in his own nature or of a malignant outside influence (known in the language of the day as a ‘demon’). On the other hand, it has to be remembered that the Jews personified ordinary diseases; and our Lord conformed to popular ideas when ‘He rebuked the fever’ of Simon’s wife’s mother, unless we hold that the evangelist has coloured the record of His action by his own mentality.[64] On the other hand, we know little as yet of the psychological problems of civilised humanity and less of those of half-civilised or uncivilised peoples, such as the Galileans of our Lord’s day. But if we should allow that the demon was merely the sufferer’s lower ego, the marvel of the cure is not lessened. There is a great power of evil in the world; and the lower self was entirely dominated by it until Christ emancipated the man by His sovereign demand upon his spirit. Inner harmony was restored. They find the man ‘sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.’ The bodily and the mental well-being are combined in the cure. The sufferer’s enfeebled will is braced up to respond to the Will of the Healer, that ease shall expel disease. Within the man’s being, as truly as without it, ‘imperavit ventis, et facta est tranquillitas magna.’[65]
(iii) An analysis of the miracles of Christ indicates His attitude towards the material and outward means, on which the physician still so largely relies. The letter of King Abgarus to our Lord (preserved by Eusebius), genuine or not, indicates, we may believe, the feature in His treatment which most impressed the men of His day. ‘The story hath reached my ears of Thee and Thy healings as wrought by Thee without drugs and simples.’ Though this was so, He did not eschew the use of material and visible signs, such as clay and saliva, which were adapted to convey to sick folk that ‘mental suggestion’ of returning health, which was His constant method of healing. In the following miracles the use of such material means is recorded: the case of the deaf man with an impediment (Mark vii. 33), of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark viii. 24), of the man blind from his birth (John ix. 6), who also was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam. Of the Apostles, on their first mission, it is said that they anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them (Mark vi. 13). Probably this element, which was in frequent medicinal use, was in their hands ceremonial, a symbol of that healing power of their Master which they were allowed in His name to exercise. He Himself is found, in the great majority of instances, to rely on the touch of the hand alone.[66] He knew that it spoke to the heart of a Divine effluence of power as well as a human sympathy. In one of the frescoes of the Creation, on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo has pictured the form of the first man, perfect as a statue, but lifeless until the Finger of God quickens it with a touch. And, after all, a universal instinct associates ideas of sympathy and positive relief with the movement of the hand. Thus in the Greek myth, the distracted Io is comforted by the prophecy of Prometheus that the God would restore her by his touch.[67]
(iv) The healing of the nobleman’s son, of the centurion’s slave, and that of the Syrophœnician woman’s daughter stand by themselves as instances of ‘absent treatment.’ The strong impression wrought in the mind of the father, the master, the mother, respectively, is conveyed by a sort of telepathy to the mind of the patient. ‘Why herein,’ surely, is a marvellous thing for those who cannot accept our Lord’s claim to be the Son of Man in a unique sense—that He should thus have possessed, 2000 years ago, a knowledge of the mysterious processes of human nature which modern science is only now beginning to divine. It is in that fact that the ‘glory’ (Luke xiii. 17; John xi. 40), the ‘wonder’ (Matt. xxi. 15), the ‘strangeness’ (Luke v. 26) of the miracles of Christ consist. They are ‘works of power,’[68] ‘outcomings of that mighty power of God which was inherent in Christ,’[69] and which He exerted within a region of human nature then unexplored. We cannot ponder too deeply on that great saying of St. Augustine, ‘Portentum fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.’[70] Who shall attempt to lay down the laws which govern the operation of the spiritual upon the material? and still more to delimit the powers of the Personality and Will of Him, in whose name Apostles, Saints of the Church, and humble Christians unrecorded in history have wrought cures, which only a purblind scepticism can gainsay?
THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING