The one may think that it is effected through the action of some supernatural power. The other may know that the help comes through suggestion and through the building-up of a better balanced self. It is more than likely, however, that the large majority of those presumably enlightened people who have their attention turned to Christ and are encouraged to "believe" that he will heal as in days gone by, or who seek healing through prayer, it is more than likely, I say, that they also expect the desired results to be accomplished through the exercise of some supernatural power which becomes available through the fervency of their prayer or the quantity of their faith. It is evident that they do not stand on a different ground from that occupied by those primitive minds who are healed by some relic, by holy water, or by an incantation. Even though the belief in magic powers should continue, though in modified form, to be efficacious with modern peoples, it is a serious question whether the church can afford to build up its healing functions on the basis of any such idea. It seems to me, if it came to a choice between the two, that the fantastic metaphysics of Christian Science along with its thoroughly practical healthymindedness would be far more desirable and certainly safer. Moreover, even though many people may be able to be helped through a belief in miraculous powers, it is a belief which will fail to appeal to an increasingly large number in this age of enlightenment. What, then, is the way out of these various difficulties? If the minister attempts, on the one hand, to use suggestive therapeutics in any thorough way he encroaches upon the sphere of the physician and if, on the other hand, he confines himself strictly to the religious sphere he almost inevitably overworks the religious motives and in the minds of many of his patients becomes a purveyor of supernatural powers. As far as I can see he must first of all recognize more clearly his real function as a religious leader, and secondly he must see, without intellectual wavering, the real nature of the relation of religion to health. This function and this relation have already been clearly stated in the earlier portions of this paper in terms of religion as a developer or integrater of character. There is a real need, on the other hand, that the medical psychotherapist should appreciate more keenly the fact that it is not mere suggestion, in the long run, but rather actual reconstruction of character (a process often slow as well as difficult), that is most needed in combating disease and that religion can, as we have seen, exercise an inportant influence in such a reconstruction. I am willing to go so far as to say that the efforts of the average physician might well be supplemented in many cases by the intelligent minister. Possibly some basis of co-operation might be worked out not open to the objections brought against the Emmanuel Movement. The busy physician is apt to treat disease as if it were an isolated process and he is apt to overlook the thousandfold connections in which the nervous system stands with the patient's whole life experience in past and future. The physician is thus too easily inclined to underestimate the good which may come in the fight against disease, from the ideas and emotions which form the background of the mind of the patient. Even if the disease cannot be vanquished, the mental disturbances which result from it, the pains and discomforts, may be inhibited, as soon as hopes and joyful purposes gain a dominating control of the mind. The nervous patient often needs a larger hold upon life, while routine prescriptions may too easily reduce that hold by fixing attention on the symptoms. Here then is the right place for the moral appeal and the religious stimulation. . . . . We should not underestimate the manifold good which can come from the causal effect of religious and ethical ideas. Those faith curists who bring mutual help by impressing each other with the beauty and goodness of the world really bring new strength to the wavering mind [as the personal self is submerged into a larger, all-embracing existence, and] thus inhibits the small cares and troubles of merely personal origin. The consciousness sinks into God. . . . . The haphazard pains of the personality disappear [or] are suppressed by the joy and glory of the whole. . . . . Neglected functions of the brain are released and give to the mind an energy and discipline and selfcontrol and mastery of difficulties which restitutes the whole equilibrium and with the equilibrium a new calmness and serenity which may react almost miraculously on the entire nervous system and through it on the whole organism and its metabolism.23 It seems to me, in conclusion, that great good for the minister and his people might come from the current psychotherapeutic movement, even though the minister should not enter the field as a mental therapist. As he goes about his ordinary duties as a reli23 Psychotherapy, 206-8. gious ministrant and counselor he may exercise important and safer therapeutic influences. He is pre-eminently a character-builder, and he may now appreciate as never before the subtle difficulties which attend the process through the possibility of emphasizing aspects of religion which, if taken by themselves, disintegrate rather than build up the self. Religious leaders, in view of the facts which this movement has brought to light, may well consider whether the content of their religious messages might not be reconstructed to some extent, reconstructed so as to place more emphasis upon hopefulness, cheerfulness, and the joy of being of service to others rather than upon intellectual problems of doctrine, or upon the distressing aspects of the problem of evil, or even insisting too much upon an uncompromising ideal of duty. I have no thought or desire to soften religion or to render it any less worthy of the respect of the strongest minds. The things which have just been mentioned must often enter into the message of the minister to his people. But we have learned enough about the working of the human psychophysical machine to know today that these are edged tools, not to be used indiscriminately nor to be hurled at all times upon the receptive minds of a congregation. By cultivating a different type of general religious appeal, the clergyman of today will actually minister more effectively to the needs of his people. The content of religion is vast, and a selection from its great storehouse must be made from generation to generation to meet the varying human needs. I believe this age has a peculiar need and that it will in no wise compromise religion if the ministers of the people try to offer them that for which they are hungering. I shall not try here to formulate that need more definitely. It is easier felt than stated, and, moreover, each one will have to state it for himself. It seems to me, however, that it lies along the lines suggested in this paper. WAS NEWMAN A MODERNIST? PROFESSOR WILLIAM HENRY ALLISON The attempt to assign a man of a past age, even of the previous generation, to one of the groups into which men are now classified in regard to their opinions-political, philosophical, theological, ecclesiastical-may be nothing more than an idle act of the imagination, guided perchance more or less by the reason, but after all of little scientific value. Such an attempt at classification as is suggested by the question before us may do violence to distinctions which existed in the past but which now have practically or completely disappeared; or, on the other hand, it may imply the existence in the past of conditions in the realm of thought or in social groupings before they have come into actual being. Moreover, to catalogue a man of the past according to the system of classification now in vogue may imply that his thinking would have continued in its habitual trend, that nothing could have arisen to deflect it into a new channel; yet history is full of instances of men who have been working as colleagues, in fullest and deepest sympathy one with another, with common purpose and complete accord as to methods, until the rise of some new issue has given to some of them a new point of view, after which time radical differences have separated them. No one, however, looking at only such evidence as was available before the new and disruptive issue had arisen, could have foretold with certainty how individual members of the group would be affected by the entrance of a completely new factor, be it political, economic, social, philosophical, or perhaps personal. If Hurrell Froude had lived ten years longer, would he have remained Anglican or would he have gone over to Rome? Probably both sides of this question could be argued with about equal weight of evidence; but we realize how impossible it is to reach an incontestable conclusion as we recall that if we were to limit ourselves to evidence previous to the death of Froude, we could use much the same arguments and with equal force for Pusey or for Newman, for Faber or for Keble. It is with caution, then, that we must raise the question concerning John Henry Newman which forms the subject of the present paper. There is the more need of this because of certain difficulties which inhere in Newman's mental attitude toward fundamental religious questions. The question before us has been raised because the defenders of Modernism have claimed Newman as belonging to them in spirit, while certain of the opponents of the Modernists have resented this as an assault upon the genuineness of the late English cardinal's Catholicism and the aspersion of heresy within the unsullied precincts of the Sacred College itself. Although Newman was called by Whately "the clearest headed man he knew," and is considered a master of the most lucid English style, in regard to some matters he never succeeded in making himself understood. The historic pamphlet of Charles Kingsley, What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? was doubtless for many reasons an unfortunate episode in its author's career, and yet there are several reasons why it is well that it appeared. Of these the most obvious one is that it resulted in the production of that almost matchless spiritual autobiography, the Apologia pro vita sua, but to mention this only is to imply that the pamphlet was merely an evil out of which, forsooth, good came. The brochure was not, however, as the Roman Catholic clergy of the diocese of Hobart Town asserted in the heat of polemic passion, "the production of a bold, unscrupulous man, with a coarse mind, and regardless of inflicting pain on the feelings of another," for no characterization of Charles Kingsley could be farther from the truth. Kingsley but voiced suspicions that were rife throughout Protestant England. partly springing from the inherited prejudices and animosities toward Roman Catholics, but directed toward Newman, because his own words, interpreted in the light of his religious career as that was popularly understood, opened the way to those suspicions. Newman accused his assailant of "poisoning the wells," but the question may be raised whether the wells were not poisoned before Kingsley wrote. The curse of Chocorua was supposed to account |