The Emmanuel The latest claimant among these aspirants for peculiar honors is the so-called Emmanuel Movement. In this we have an embryo system, acknowledging its own limitations. While relying on mind, it does not repudiate matter, nor does it scorn the patient physician and his science, but voluntarily and cheerfully co-operates with them. It has much in common with the great brood of Mind-Cure propositions that have appealed for popular recognition, but its work is within the Church and not out of it. It avows humble dependence upon God and the heritage of human experience. If it is to prove of any more lasting value to the world than the multitude of its predecessors, time will tell. It is not the object of this work either to discuss or to favorably or adversely criticise the Emmanuel Movement, but to refer to it as one of the many types of Mind Healing, in order to emphasize the fact that Metaphysical Healing does not need to deny the personal God, repudiate the existence of matter, or found a sect of its own to find scope and plan wherein to spread its wings and exercise its gifts. Stated in brief, the Emmanuel Movement seeks to demonstrate the peculiar power of mind over matter; the control of physical ailments where such are caused by the mind or may be influenced by it; and the relief and return to equipoise of the mind itself when troubled. Over all is stretched the canopy of abounding faith. From three separate agencies flow the springs of the mind's effective power: Moral Regeneration, Arousing Suggestion, and Spiritual Hyp nosis. The last method is employed gingerly, and only in cases of certain forms of mania, alcoholism and such like, with the co-operation of an expert neurologist. Jastrow's "Sub-Consciousness" has been. in its analysis taken as the scientific and philosophic basis of this new religious school of healing. It is generally acknowledged, by those competent to judge, that the powers of the sub-conscious mind are manifold. They flower into genius or pale into fragile visions whose fruitage is disease. Suggestion is made much of in Emmanuelism. To be successful, suggestion must become part of the life. Reason stands guard, a God-given sentinel, to protect the citadel of man from all outside interference. It calls a halt to all overflowing emotions and defends from all assaults and inducements. Reason is the censor that passes on all strange ideas and suggestions. It must either be respected or ignored, and somehow, in certain crises, its hold on the inner life be weakened. So, in order to give the right of way to the needed suggestion, reason and consciousness must be held in abeyance. This may be done when the person needing the help has full confidence in the one offering the suggestion. Here is where what is called hypnosis comes in. It does not effect a cure. Simply the way is prepared by it and hindrances removed. The thing to be done is to defeat the antagonisms of reason, put to sleep self-consciousness, and prepare the way for the suggestion to enter the depths of our sub-conscious being. Now these may all be strange terms, and have a weird and even uncanny sound to some, but the thing they represent is not new. This is the way the mysterious fascinates and captivates the mind. Superstition exercises through these avenues a stupendous force in human existence. What a power it is! We need not turn to Africa or India for illustrations. The writer, traveling in the hills of New Hampshire one summer, sat on the box with the stage-driver as the team wended in and out and up and down amid prospects of enchanting loveliness. The mountain peaks seemed to summon to lofty thoughts. Aspiration pulsed in the very air. But a toothache troubled the passenger. The obliging whip had a remedy close at hand. "Look here," said this Yankee of the granite hills, reaching down and drawing out from the depths of a capacious pocket a peculiar bone. "Look here. Fifteen year ago I had a blazing toothache, but I got this yere toothacher bone, and I hain't had a toothache since. Use ter have 'em lots." What cured his toothache? Christian Science as a Mind-Cure has mingled with it much of error and superstition with a modicum of truth. Its philosophy, we have seen, has within it the seeds of disaster. We conceive only faintly the power of mind over matter. God, the Creator, has set the soul, the mind, in a house of dust and bidden it be master there and exercise universal dominion. Now we see the immortal mind not yet master, but limited, baffled, perplexed. No wonder Professor James feels it is time for psychology to do something! What its last word will be who may say? CHAPTER VI. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHISTIAN SCIENCE. Some of the apparently scientific statements of Forerunners Christian Science seem to have had their origin in Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, which played an important part in the early centuries of Christianity. "In every age, as in every man," writes Philip Schaff, "light and shade in fact are mingled, that no flesh should exalt itself above measure. Even the most important periods have heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, and reflect the spotless glory of the Redeemer in broken colors." Between miracle and fraud lie many intermediate steps of self-deception, clairvoyancy, magnetic phenomena, hypnotic signs, and other unusual states of the human mind, which is full of deep mysteries and stands nearer the invisible spirit world than we may often suspect. These strange and mysterious states appeared in the first and second centuries of Christianity in many effervescings of heathenism attempting to wrap itself in the warp and woof of the Gospel, and gave rise to strange minglings of pagan philosophy with the aspirations and reasonings of Christianity. It may be stated without controversy that Christianity has in all ages been hospitable to truth wherever found, and Gnosticism many Christians in the first and second centuries felt that the splendid manifestations of mind in philosophy, art and literature had not bloomed and matured without a divinely ordered end, and that they were predestined to become important agencies in the higher spiritual development of the race. Here in such a situation do we find the origin of Gnosticism. The world of that time, as the world of our day, in its restless intellectual activity had been seeking for an explanation of the antithesis between matter and spirit, of the ceaseless conflict between good and evil. It was in the second century that the search reached the fever of its intensity. Reason and faith appear in an eternal conflict. Christianity offers a solution of the problem of life through faith, with its practical results of pure and happy lives; but the world wants a philosophy born of reason and knowledge. Over against practice the world wants reason and theory. Now Christianity is not averse to reason so far as the intellect has power to reach. One of these efforts at mingling philosophy and Christian faith and practice resulted in the tangle of Gnosticism, which began in New Testament times. It was at its height in the second century; it declined in the third, and in the sixth it had run its course. What was it? Gnosticism took many forms, but there were some common characteristics in most of them. It believed in one supreme God, dwelling in eternity; that all matter is essentially evil; that God is opposed to matter, hence a dualism in the universe; that Christ emanated |