THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING

By W. Yorke Fausset, M.A.

The psychologists teach us that a man’s ‘self’ is a larger thing than the ‘me’ which, we might say, a child has in view when it puts out a hand to get a sweetmeat for itself. As Professor W. James says, ‘The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts—soul, body, and clothes—is more than a joke’; and he goes on to include in that self the man’s immediate family, his home, the property he has collected.71And then we think of Aristotle’s definition of man as a ‘political’ or social animal—the social self with its wider or narrower reach—for ‘properly speaking a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.’

(i) All this has an important bearing on the subject of health and disease. We are all influenced by our environment for better orworse. The material and visible conditions of life, our home, our friends and associates, our country, our daily occupations, contribute to make us what we are. Life is defined by Herbert Spencer as ‘the continuous adjustment of internal relations.’ It may be difficult or even impossible to attain to the stable equilibrium of perfect goodness, perfect health, perfect happiness; and, in fact, neither science nor religion encourage us to expect such a consummation within the limits of this earthly existence.

But there may be a ‘continuous adjustment’; and it must be the practical aim alike of religion and of science to mould the individual by the environment which will best harmonise his personal good with the good of the whole. We have to elevate the conditions of human existence. The individual has not only to adapt himself to his environment, in the temper oflaisser faire, but to adapt it to the satisfaction of his highest good. ‘Great religious consciences have taken their post, confronting society, as representing in themselves truth and right, because behind them was God, while behind existing societies there is only man, nature, and circumstances. Far from consenting to identify himself with the social conscience, the religious consciencedisposes man to oppose the rights of God to those of Cæsar, the dignity of the human person to public constraint.’72In the language of religion, ‘No man hath seen God at any time: if we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.’ That is the ideal of the Christian Society, the Body of Christ, actuated by the great principles of faith, hope, and love. And much might have been said of the duty of a Christian State to secure to all its members the elementary conditions of a healthy, useful citizenship. Most of our disease is a disgrace to our Christian civilisation, because it is preventable. The ancient poet rightly associates the spectres of Care, Hunger, and Fear with the grim forms of Disease at the portals of his Inferno:

Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus OrciLuctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae:Pallentis qua habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,Et Metus et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas.73

Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci

Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae:

Pallentis qua habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,

Et Metus et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas.73

(ii) But the problem of the prevention of sickness scarcely concerns us here, though it requires a passing reference. It has beensufficiently shown that you cannot isolate the individual from the society in which he moves; that were to make him an unreal abstraction. The Church has never committed that mistake in her dealing with the sick. When we pray, in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, that God would ‘preserve and continue this sick member in the unity of the Church,’ the prayer breathes the very spirit of ancient piety. It is an unspeakable help, in dealing with a sick man, to be able to appeal to his own conscious and sincere membership in the Body of Christ. The Visitation Office is ‘peculiarly a ministration for those who have been trained beforehand in the fulness of Church life and privileges.’74Herein, as often, the Prayer-book sets up an ideal standard. But, however far our actual practice falls short of it, we must work towards it. It is said of St. Francis of Assisi that, ‘in each one, with whom he had to deal, he saw a possible Christ.’ A bold saying, had it not been that the Master Himself had anticipated it.75In the Christian view of things, the sick and suffering, whatever their religious attainments and professions may have been, have a clear claim upon the other members of the OneBody. Christian faith can only heighten human sympathy.

And in the New Testament there are not wanting indications that the faith of friends has a vicarious efficacy. In such faith the force of suggestion is at work, but it is a collective suggestion. There is the typical case of the four friends, who were not to be put off by the crush at the doors, but resolutely stripped the roofing in order to lower the paralytic, as he lay on his pallet, into the Saviour’s immediate presence. Such unconventional faith was irresistible. ‘When Jesus saw their faith, He said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.’76The bodily cure soon followed. The fact is, that such faith diffuses a spiritual atmosphere; it is contagious and works from mind to mind. ‘Our bodies isolate us, our spirits unite us.’77

Similarly, in the raising of Jairus’s daughter an emphasis is laid on the necessity of a sympathetic atmosphere: first, by the fact that only three, the elect among the chosen Twelve, SS. Peter, James and John, were allowed toattend their Lord; secondly, by the exclusion of all others in the house, except the father and mother of the child. The professional mourners and musicians were turned out—not merely because they ‘insulted the dumbness of sincere sorrow and the patient majesty of death’ (Farrar), but because they diffused, as their behaviour soon showed (κατεγέλων αὐτου̑), an atmosphere of unbelief. The Lord wishes to remove all antagonistic and disturbing human presences and to speak Himself in power to the innermost soul of the departed maiden. On the other hand, if the air was charged with unbelief, if those He wished to help were without faith, as was the case in His own village of Nazareth, ‘He could there do no mighty work.’78

We trace the same principle in His dealing with those whom He had healed. Sometimes He bids them ‘go and tell their friends how great things God has done for them,’ as when he refused to keep the Gadarene demoniac by His side. At another time he bids them tell no man of the cure which had been wrought. This difference of treatment can be explained most simply, if we suppose that in the one case Christ knew that the patient’s ordinarymilieuwas favourable tohis progress in bodily and spiritual health, in another case He knew that this was not so. So it was in the case of the leper of St. Mark i. 44. And, again, this difference of treatment may have been ‘grounded,’ as Archbishop Trench says, ‘on the different moral conditions of the persons healed.’ It is so still, for human nature remains constant to certain broad types. Some overwrought people require the absolute isolation of a ‘rest cure’; others, who are moody and self-centred, can only rally their disused powers in contact with invigorating companionship. They are the unhappy victims of that numbness of spirit of which R. L. Stevenson writes so pathetically in his essay entitled ‘Ordered South.’79

(iii) This brings us naturally to consider the special value which Christ attaches in His teaching to a corporate act of prayer. For this is the meaning of the words ‘If any two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in Heaven; for where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.’ And this it is which has moulded the form of the Lord’s Prayer, and that of the greatSacrament of Unity, our highest act of intercession. Thus our Lord enjoined upon His disciples the duty and the efficacy of combined spiritual effort.80There is a power intensive, as well as extensive, in collective prayer. In this, as well as in other activities of the spirit, the total effect gained is larger than the sum total of units of effort. There is a sort of analogy here with the force of collective suggestion, which we have been considering above: but we must not expect to find a complete philosophical explanation of any great spiritual principle. Our personal experience verifies the value of corporate prayer. If it were not so, religion would be an individual matter alone; it would lack its most universal expression, that of common worship. It is because the Church in our country lost for a long period her corporate consciousness, at least in a large degree, that she lost sight of the power of corporate intercession for the sick members of the Body of Christ. (Of the faithful departed we may not here speak.) But her formulas and liturgy have been a standing witness against such obliviousness, with which the Church of to-day can hardly be taxed, and those who profess their belief in the Communionof Saints find in such intercession its most practical expression.

Consider the bearing of all this on our highest act of worship, the Holy Communion. There are few parish priests who cannot testify from their own experience to the wonderful—if not miraculous—effects of the reception of the Sacrament upon apparently dying persons, who had been given up by medical science. There is nothing in this that need surprise the Christian believer, nothing that is really repugnant to the findings of modern science. The Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the profanation of the Lord’s Supper, attributes to this cause certain physical consequences incurred by the offenders. ‘For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep.’81There is a natural and proper antipathy in many minds to the idea that the Sacramental Elements operate as a charm. Such an idea would be irrational and superstitious, and we are not intended to conceive of a vindication of the sanctity of the Lord’s Supper by material and simply magical penalties. The offence of the Corinthians was the irreverence of ‘not discerning (or discriminating) the Body,’ and Apostolic teaching plainly implies thata spiritual offence of itself acts upon the bodily organism, by a mysterious law of the Divine government.82(Here again we must not say that God sent the disease.) Surely, then, it may be argued, per contra, that a reverent reception of the Eucharist makes for health and life, for it brings the failing bodily and spiritual powers of the sick into contact with the Divine and immortal life which animates the mystical Body of Christ. This line of argument may be illustrated by the words of the late F. W. H. Myers: ‘To keep our chemical energy at work, we live in a warm environment and from time to time take food. By analogy, in order to keep the spiritual energy at work, we should live in a spiritual environment, and possibly from time to time absorb some special influx of spiritual life.’83It remains only to add that the words of administration in our Communion Office embody the truth for which we are pleading. ‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’

(iv) The charisma, or gift, of healing, is named by St. Paul among the spiritual gifts of the Apostolic Church,84and is associated in one place with the working of miracles (‘powers’).85We have endeavoured to show that it was not intended as a transient but a permanent endowment of the Church. But, in the degree in which the Church corporate falls short in spirituality, her spiritual powers wane. The Encyclical Letter and Report of the recent Lambeth Conference mark a step in advance, though it may not be a long step, towards the revival of this healing agency of the Church. The Committee appointed to report on this particular subject was of opinion ‘that the prayers for the restoration of health, which it recommends, may be fitly accompanied by the apostolic act of the Laying-on-of-Hands.’86We may be disposed to regret that this primitive rite is not mentioned in Resolution 35, which recommends ‘the provision for use in Pastoral Visitation of some additional prayers for the restoration of health more hopeful and direct than those contained in the present Office for the Visitation of the Sick.’ Desiring, as we do, to follow ‘the example’ of our Lord Himself and not merely of ‘HisHoly Apostles,’87we may most reasonably ask for authority to administer the blessing through one of the outward signs which He employed. A ceremony, duly authorised by the Church, would have much value, as regulating and controlling the impulse to invoke the healing ‘charisma,’ which at present is often bestowed and received through ‘spiritual healers’ who lack the full official sanction of the Church.

(v) There is another Ministry of Healing, which the Divine Love has provided for the weary body and the careworn mind, which contributes its own part to the restoration of the sick. It is the silent ministry of Nature. Within the ailing body she exerts her healing power; the doctor’s best ally, on the physical side, is thevis medicatrix naturae, that strange recuperative power which resides in organisms, and offers a standing resistance to the inroads of disease and age.88And then outside there are the soothing influences of the world of Nature, which steals into the troubled spirit to bring the calm which Wordsworth, inhis poem on ‘An Evening by the Sea,’ likened to the hush of worship:

The holy time is quiet as a nunBreathless with adoration.

The holy time is quiet as a nun

Breathless with adoration.

Hebrew literature shows little trace, even indirectly, of that sympathy with Nature, which is the best contribution of what is called ‘natural religion’ to the inheritance of the human spirit, except when Nature is regarded in her grander and more awe-inspiring aspects, those of the thunder-cloud, the whirlwind, the raging fire, the roaring sea. Yet it is not altogether fanciful to find, in our Lord’s habit of retirement to the mountain’s side for prayer, His invitation to the disciples to come apart by themselves to rest awhile in a ‘desert place,’89His choice of the evening hour, at the setting of the sun, for performing His works of mercy, some sanction for that modern sense of the Divine beauty and mystery of Nature in her quiet aspects.90

We must believe that Christ Himself was susceptible in a singular degree to those natural influences. After the intense spiritual strain of the Temptation, ‘angels came and ministered to Him.’ A great modern artist, M. Tissot, pictures the scene as only theimaginative symbolism of genius would have done. The Saviour lies at full length, utterly exhausted, with every muscle, as it were, relaxed, and through the twilight appear myriads of outstretched angel-hands, reviving the Sacred Body with the touch of spirit-life. Here we have, as in a figure, the expression of the unseen forces of Nature, ministering to the Will of the God of Nature, on behalf of the heirs of salvation and of Him who is the author of our salvation and the Prince of Life.

There is no rule absolute about the influence of familiar scenes and old associations upon the weary or ailing spirit. For some people the cure lies in surroundings as novel and unfamiliar as possible. This is where tact and sympathy on the part of the doctor and nurse and friends come in—questions which must not be confused with natural affection, for in that case they would vary directly, whereas they have been known to vary inversely, with nearness of blood relationship. The quick intuition of sympathy can judge of the environment best adapted to the patient’s individual need. The rigid order and routine of the hospital ward may be torture to the sick person who comes from one sort of home and paradise to one who comes from another. The more we can bring of the‘mind of Christ’ into the tender care of the sick, the more right we shall have to expect that the power of His name will bless our efforts.

(vi) Again, our Lord’s attention to details, i.e. the material conditions of health, calls for notice. We have referred to His provision of rest for His tired followers. We find Him giving directions, after the recall of Jairus’s daughter to life, that food should be given to her. ‘Life restored by miracle must be supported by ordinary means.’91The familiar routine of healthy life is to be resumed as soon as possible. Lazarus is to be loosed from his cerements, when the awe of the bystanders blind them to the practical and obvious. And quite in line with this is Christ’s readiness to conform, in His dealings with men, to the existing social and religious system. It was so notably in the case of the leper, who was bidden, after his cure, to go and show himself to the priest and to make the customary offerings.92At the pool of Bethesda Christ helps the impotent man, who has no friend to help him. He leaves the rest of the multitude to the natural operation of the waters.93It was a different matter when, asin the case of the Rabbinical rule of Sabbath observance, the conventional practice was inimical to the freedom of the spirit. Our Lord will never allow the spiritual and essential in things to be overlaid by the material and accidental. Traditionalism was then broken through. The principle, that we must render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s and to God the things that are God’s, manifests itself in various ways, and this is one of them. But, on the whole, Christianity knows no revolutionary breaches in the established social order, as the history of its attitude towards the institution of slavery shows. Men were encouraged to work out their own salvation under existing political and social conditions.

This spirit of conformity to the existing order in all lawful things, and especially our Lord’s attitude towards priestly ceremonial, in the case of the leper, throws a good deal of light upon the relation which should subsist between the clergyman and the doctor in the treatment of sickness. The Christian doctor will gladly subscribe to the words of the favourite physician of Louis XIV, Ambroise Paré, ‘I treated the wound, God healed it.’ Reverently and thoughtfully he will acknowledge the power of prayer and the tranquillising influences of the spirit, and will yield to theChurch, acting by her representative duly accredited and trained, her proper part in the work of restoration. The parish priest will freely allow that the doctor and the nurse, with all the appliances of modern medical science, provide the largest part of the environment and conditions indispensable to recovery; and that it is an act of presumption to reject all these scientific aids in favour of some process of healing by faith alone without expert medical aid.94

Finally, it must be remembered that we cannot expect to find many favourable notices of medical practice in an age and country in which medical skill was at a very low ebb. ‘Medicorum optimus dignus est Gehenna,’ said the Rabbis of the later Judaism.95In nothing has human knowledge made more astonishing strides than in medical and in surgical discovery; and, though we have been too prone in the past to credit the medical profession with the whole of the healing work done in Christ’s Church, the opposite extreme is to be avoided, and it is well to acknowledge thankfully that ‘discoveries in the region ofmedicine and surgery come to man through Him who is the Light and the Life, the Divine Word.’96

(vii) In a previous chapter we dwelt at some length on the Gospel conception of salvation (as illustrated by the words σῴζειν ὁλοκληρία), as a just equipoise of spiritual, mental, and physical faculties and functions. Two remarks may find a place here. The first is, that too much stress may be laid upon the distinction between functional and organic complaints. There are modern critics who wish to eliminate the miraculous from the Gospel narrative, and deal with the sacred text accordingly. For example, Professor Bousset says, in his vivid way, ‘The community of the faithful drew the simple human picture of Jesus on the golden background of the marvellous. But the picture can be detached from that background with comparative ease.’ In cases which are not to be explained simply by psychology, ‘the historically intelligible is still close below the surface, and appears as soon as we remove a few additions which are due to modern tradition.’ We have to regard certain narratives as ‘legendary accretions (Wucherungen).’

If we cannot accept that position, it is notopen to us to explain all the miraculous agency of our Lord and His Apostles and the later Church as consisting in the power to deal with functional ailments by mental or psychic treatment. Nor is it open to us to limit the efficacy of prayer to the stimulation of function and the treatment of nervous disorders. And as, with the progress of medical science, the sphere of the organic is continually growing at the expense of the functional, the ultimate effect of such a concession on the side of religion would be to limit her action to a negligible minority of cases. How would a place be found for the healing of Malchus’s ear, if the organic be excluded? But the Church believes that Christ is the Saviour of the body and that the Holy Spirit is, as an early Father says, ‘given that He may dwell in our bodies and sanctify them, that in so doing He may bring them to eternity and to the resurrection of immortality, while He accustoms them in Himself to be conjoined with heavenly powers and to be associated with the Divine eternity of the Spirit.’97

A second remark is this. Whatever is allowed for the moulding force of environment, Christ plainly teaches that man is never the mere creature of circumstances. Christ is nofatalist philosopher. It is only the evil that man deliberately assimilates which defiles him. ‘There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him’—a parabolic saying which has a deep meaning. As it is with sin, so it is with disease. Wilful sin is lawlessness in the spiritual being; disease is disorder in the material being. Much remains yet to be done, which lies well within the range of the free human will, to combat this lawless disorder in the life of body and soul. We believe that the spirit can impose its own order and law and harmony upon the material elements of our bodily frame. This creed may be an ideal, but it is the only really inspiring ideal; for beyond it lies the hope of final perfection. Therefore, with faith and courage, let us press forward.

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire!Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.98

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire!

Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.98

THE CHURCH AND MENTAL HEALINGBYELLIS ROBERTS

THE CHURCH AND MENTAL HEALING

BYELLIS ROBERTS

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