Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

and body, so that there shall be no nervous tension or muscular effort. Then standing behind him I gently stroke his forehead and temples, which has a soothing and a distracting effect. Without attempting to induce sleep I inform him that his body is resting and that his mind too will rest . . . . I then tell him that all nervousness is passing from him, that everything is still within him, that his heart is beating quietly and regularly and that he is breathing gently and slowly. I suggest to him that he is entering into peace. . . . I personally attach a religious importance to this state of the mind. When our minds are in a state of peace I believe that the Spirit of God enters into us, and a power not our own takes possession of us." Note how this state of peace is brought about by the limpness of the patient's mind. He is to relax his body. He is not to think his own thoughts, but the thoughts of his psychic guide, even repeating the guide's words as his own. He is to evacuate his reason, and give the helm of his personality into another's hands, and then, when his reason is gone, and his selfhood surrendered, he has entered into the subconscious state which is called "peace," the peace of God, whereby God's power works its cure. The man nears God as he loses his mind; when he has no mind of his own, God takes the place of it, and hence a cure which is entirely beyond his conscious reach. The less mind, the more God. Perhaps this is the reason or unreason why idiots are so healthy. Lean wits make fat bodies. Be a fool and you have already begun immortality.

But what if the imaginary health be the displacement of one disease by another, strengthening the body by weakening the mind, and easing pain of the flesh by a habitual opium-habit of spirit? Pauperism of spirit is meaner than any misery it relieves. The Devil can work by suggestions just as hypnotic on like surrenders of will, to cure just as uncurable ailments. Tuck gives many instances of cures by mean or malign emotions. I cite two: The rubbing of an inveterate wart with a piece of stolen bacon--the bacon must be stolen-causes the warts to disappear as the bacon rots. The pretence of an immediate autopsy scares scirrhosis of the liver out of articulo mortis into runaway life. I myself heard the chief physician of a large city coach a

class of medical students in the magnificent therapy of deceit, and tell them how a patient of his had pined away with the fixed idea that a frog had grown in her stomach from some pollywoggish water she had drunk; and how no poison or persuasion could stop croak and jump until the stomach-pump brought up a green-skinned thing which he had ready for the moment, and set right under her satisfied nose.

Now if the Emmanuel Church cures belong to God because done in the soul's dark, these tricks, as darkly done, together with the myriad hypnotic miracles of fraudulent relics may be imputed to the Devil; and the test question at once arises, Which of the rivals has proved the more darkly efficacious, and whose clinic should be advised with the surer confidence of dark success? Between them, the honors are presumptively in favor of the Devil. For darkness is his favorite realm, not God's. God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. God is intelligence and the way to His power is through heavens of knowledge, not down in the pits of being. The universe is a universe of consciousness, more and more manifestly divine as it rises towards that perfect consciousness of itself which is God. The instinct of the animal is God's felt consciousness; the reason of the man is God's known consciousness; and the difference between the conscious and so-called subconscious mind is precisely the difference between knowledge and vague knowledge, or between reason and implicit reason, or between man and animal. The so-called subconscious mind is simply the animal mind in man, that is, man's lowest, meagerest degree of manhood; and your method of hypnotic or semi-hypnotic cures simply unmans the man to animalize him into health. The health got by it is animal, not human, surely not divine, unless you animalize God too as more God-like with horns and tail than with the brow of reason. The Christian religion, however, worships Him as the God-man, not the God-beast, though the beast were as harmless as a dove with butterflies for angels.

The Emmanuel Church Movement moves the wrong way. William James must have hoo-dooed its authors before they set their faces in the animal direction. He wrote a book to prove religion a cross between the human and animal minds. It was

down there in the hysterical and cataleptic sinks of reason that he saw the sulphur-springs of divine truth bubbling with foul but holy gases. Through swoons and trances the telepathic and clairvoyant instincts of beaver and spider and migrant fish played up into prophetic dreams or mediumistic revelations. The action was morbid, but diseases often intensified powers of health to præternormal exercises, and religion was just such a disease of reason, superrational because subrational. To find its God, therefore, you must not fly direct towards the mind's sky, but wallow in its puddles. The black splashes will be baptismal to your saner fellows, whose sanity makes them skeptical.

To complete such psychological training, it was only necessary for the authors of "Religion and Medicine" to take Von Hartmann for their philosopher and swear by his doctrine of an Unconscious Absolute, or God as the Absolute Fool of the Universe. And this they have subconsciously done, while still calling Him Heavenly Father as if to acknowledge their mental heredity. Better than their psychology, their religion still weaves too much psychological black into the white robe of its ancient creeds, not to look suspiciously gray. You can detect the black threads by a name here and there, and the shibboleth of thoughts that run through entire chapters. Here, for illustration, is its bede-roll: Augustine, Dominic, Francis of Assisi, Wickliffe, Savanarola, Martin Luther, Boehme, Tauler, Fox and his friends, Wesley, Schleiermacher, Newman, Keble, Fechner, Harnack. What bathos, to blow up so big and highsailing a balloon for that last pin-hole collapse! Translated into a roll of musicians, it would read: Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner, "Pat" Gilmore and "Blind Tom." In both rolls it is the blindness that makes the climacteric seer.

And if Harnack's canonization does not convince you of the agnostic streak, you may hear something like a college yell of demonstration in the Harnackian cry "Back to Jesus!" "Back to Jesus" means the same in religion that "Back to Kant" means in philosophy, and "Back to Nature" means in anarchistic individualism.

"Back to Jesus?" Where to? Has Jesus

been away for eighteen centuries that you must go back to their beginning to meet him? Was he not in all those saints from Augustine to Keble, who believed Him a present Christ? And if present to them was it in brief visits between long absences that left dearths of His Spirit in the world? Did His Church, the body of His Spirit, die when He left the earth, that Christendom since then has resembled His bier more than His throne, while holy men bent their heads over it as His mourners rather than His witnesses? And was it reserved for our late day and Harnack to discover Him as He really was during the three years of genuine ministry that inaugurated the eighteen centuries of corruption?

It must be so if Harnack's claim is allowed. For no previous backward hunt ever came upon the exact Jesus that Harnack dug from under the rubbish of the Four Gospels, where lay a fifth, namely, the Gospel according to Harnack. Though, strange to say, the Jesus of that Fifth Gospel acted out Harnack's anti-ecclesiastical role to such perfection that he might have been called Jesus the Harnack instead of Jesus the Christ.

But now that this great historic fact is established there is no need to travel so far back for our Harnack-Jesus. He is not in Jerusalem, but in Berlin, henceforth the Holy City of all crab Christians. Be your cry then "Back to Harnack," that intelligent Churchmen may understand how little of the Church's Christ you want in the dwarf of your backward clamor. The old cry no longer deceives them. When they hear it their answer echoes the refrain of the coon song, "Go way back and sit down." Sit down until you learn how to think upwards. You need philosophy more than psychology in your religion, a reason for your faith, the reason of your faith, the God of Reason for the man of reason, in a rational God-manhood which man's reason can forever adore without agnostic dodges towards the secular idols that take its place in Churches that worship The Real Absence.

The University of the South.

ROBERT A. HOLLAND.

ELLISON CAPERS

From time to time, at long intervals, there have appeared in this REVIEW notices of notable individuals who have passed from the stage of our common life. They have been men characteristic of a section, but not only so,-men too of a larger, national or universal type, whom all sections have been glad to unite with us in honoring. The local coloring, the distinctive trait, never spoils the picture where there is the common atmosphere and the all-embracing sky. So it was with such men as Wade Hampton of South Carolina, and Thomas U. Dudley of Virginia and Kentucky; and so it is with Ellison Capers of South Carolina. We prefix no titles, however honorable, for it is the men, in whatever position, whom we would commemorate, and not offices or honours. Modestly and very distinctively a South Carolinian, Bishop Capers, by virtue of his position in a national Church, was brought into relation with prominent representatives of every portion of our common country, and won the admiration and affection of all. The tributes that have poured in from all directions have been no less warm from North and West than from the universal South where he was naturally best known. The product of the most local conditions and the most concentrative times and circumstances, his heart naturally and easily expanded to the widest sympathies; and sympathy, deep, true, and inexhaustible, became his distinctive and characteristic trait.

What Ellison Capers owed to heredity was, in part at least, patent to the world. He was the son of a Methodist Bishop of whom it was said, that he was one of the noblest and most eloquent representatives of the heroic type of Methodists in the heroic days of Methodism. Himself, in later times and under other conditions, the no less honored Bishop of another Christian communion, he never lost his inherited sympathies or simplicities. If times and conditions had remained identical, he would probably have been even more eloquent and efficient than he was, in his father's style of popular eloquence; for it was

« ForrigeFortsæt »