Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 5

And yet all this has been a long, long time coming true and for almost 1,500 years the Church and its authorities were a hindrance rather than a help and that for two or three outstanding reasons. Christianity, to begin with, sadly underestimated physical values in its overinsistence upon spiritual values. The body was at best but the tabernacle of the soul and the soul being the chief concern, whatever happened to the body was of little importance. The body was not only underestimated, it was scorned and abused, starved and scourged; it was the seat of unholy influences and impulses; its natural longings were at the best under suspicion, at the worst under absolute condemnation. Christianity, speaking through the Church, took immense care for its spiritual hygiene, though even here it went wrong because it forgot Plato's n.o.ble word, but it failed utterly in physical hygiene.

Then again sickness and suffering were for the Church but the manifest punishment of some sin known or concealed. To interfere, therefore, was in some way to defeat the justice of G.o.d. Pestilences were inscrutable providences; they were the wrath of G.o.d made manifest. In the face of so stupendous a calamity anything man might do was not only futile but impertinent.

By a strange contradiction early and medieval Christianity, while making little of the body, nevertheless strongly opposed any study of anatomy which depended upon post-mortems or dissection. This probably because of their belief in the resurrection of the body. Any mutilation of the body after death would be a real handicap in the day of resurrection. But behind all this, equally real though intangible, was the desire of the Church to have the whole of life under its own direct control. It instinctively feared methods of thought or processes of investigation not directly a part of its own imperial administration of life. Some subtle distrust of the human reason went along with all this. As a result the Church, in the main, threw herself against the more independent processes of scientific thought, sought to subdue all the facts of life to her creeds and understandings and so became a real hindrance to any pursuit of truth or any investigation of fact which lay outside the region of theological control. How largely all this r.e.t.a.r.ded growth and knowledge and the extension of human well-being it is difficult to say, but the fact itself is well established.

_Saints and Shrines_

For one thing early Christianity continued the belief in demoniac possession. By one of those accidents which greatly influence history the belief in demon possession was strongly held in Palestine in the time of Christ and the Gospel narratives reflect all this in ways upon which it is not necessary to enlarge. The Gospels themselves lent their mighty sanction to this persuasion and there was nothing in the temper of the Church for more than a thousand years afterward to greatly modify it. Indeed the temper of the Church rather strengthened it. Origen believed that demons produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of the air and pestilences. They hover concealed in clouds in the lower atmosphere and are attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen offered them as G.o.ds.

According to St. Augustine all diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to these demons and the church fathers generally agreed with these two, the greatest of them all. It was, therefore, sinful to do anything but trust to the intercession of the saints. The objection of the Church to dissection which is, of course, the indispensable basis for any real knowledge of anatomy was very slowly worn down. The story of Andreas Vesalius whom Andrew White calls the founder of the modern science of anatomy is at once fascinating and illuminating. He pursued his studies under incredible difficulties and perhaps could never have carried them through without the protection of Charles V whose physician he was. He was finally driven out, a wanderer in quest of truth, was s.h.i.+pwrecked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in the prime of his life and strength "he was lost to the world." But he had, none the less, won his fight and the opposition of the Church to the scientific study of anatomy was gradually withdrawn. But every marked advance in medical science had really to fight the battle over again. The Sorbonne condemned inoculation, vaccination had slowly to fight its way and even the discovery of anesthetic, perhaps the greatest single blessing ever given surgery, met with no little theological obstruction. It is only fair to say in this connection that so stupid a conservatism has been by no means the sole possession of the Church and the clergy. Medicine has been upon occasion almost as conservative and the difficulties which Sir Joseph Lister encountered in his endeavour to win the London hospitals for asepsis and anti-sepsis were quite as bitter. The difficulties were of a piece with the opposition of the Church to scientific advancement.

After all a conservatism of this sort is a matter of temperament rather than creed or cla.s.s.

But if the Church was strangely slow to give place to medicine and surgery, the Church sought, through agencies and methods of its own, to cure disease. It is impossible to follow through in detail the long story though it all bears upon the line we are following through its ma.s.sive testimony to the power of mind over body. Since the Church believed in demon possession it sought to cure by exorcism and there are in the ritual of the Church, as the ritual has finally taken form, offices growing out of this long, long battle against evil spirits which have now little suggestion of their original purpose. The sign of the Cross was supposed to have commanding power, the invocation of the triune deity had its own virtue, the very breathing of the priest was supposed to influence the evil spirit and he fled defeated from the touch of holy water.

The Church possessed, as was everywhere then believed, not only a prevailing power over demons, but a supernatural power all her own for the healing of disease. This power was a.s.sociated with saints and relics and shrines. During the lifetime of the saint this power was exercised through direct saintly interposition. After the death of the saint it was continued in some relic which he left behind him, or some shrine with which he had been particularly a.s.sociated. There grew up gradually a kind of "division of labour among the saints in the Middle Ages." Each saint had its own peculiar power over some bodily region or over some particular disease. And so the faithful were guarded by a legion of protecting influences against everything from coughs to sudden death.

There is almost an unimaginable range of relics. Parts of the true Cross possessed supreme value. St. Louis of France was brought back almost from death to life by the touch of the sacred wood. The bones and hairs of saints, rings which they had worn and all such things as these had value and to prove that the value was not resident in the relic but in the faith with which the relic was approached we have reported bones of saints possessing well authenticated healing value, later proved to have been the bones not of men but of animals. There have been sacred springs and consecrated waters almost without number. They will still show you in Canterbury Cathedral stones worn by the feet of countless pilgrims seeking at the shrine of Thomas a Becket a healing to the reality of which those who wore away those stones bore testimony in a variety of gifts which made the shrine of a Becket at one time one of the treasure houses of Christendom.

"The two shrines at present best known are those of Lourdes in France and Ste. Anne de Beaupre in the Province of Quebec. Lourdes owes its reputed healing power to a belief in a vision of the Virgin received there during the last century. Over 300,000 persons visit there each year." Charcot, it is worth noting, had confidence enough not in the shrine but in the healing power of faith to send fifty or sixty patients to Lourdes every year. His patients were, of course, the mentally and nervously unbalanced. The French government supervises the sanitary conditions at Lourdes and a committee of doctors have undertaken some examination of the diseased who visit the shrine for the guidance of their profession. Ste. Anne de Beaupre owes its fame to certain wrist bones of the mother of Christ.

_Magic, Charms, and the King's Touch: The Rise of the Faith Healer_

Religious faith is not always necessary--any faith will do. Charms, amulets, talismans have all played their part in this long compelling story. The various metals, gems, stones and curious and capricious combinations of pretty much every imaginable thing have all been so used. Birth girdles worn by women in childbirth eased their pain. A circular piece of copper guarded against cholera. A coral was a good guard against the evil eye and sail-cloth from a s.h.i.+pwrecked vessel tied to the right arm was a preventive as well as a cure for epilepsy. There is almost no end to such instances. The list of charms and incantations is quite as curious. There are forms of words which will cure insomnia and indeed, if one may trust current observation, forms of words not primarily so intended may still induce sleepfulness.

The history of the king's touch as particularly helpful in epilepsy and scrofula, though useful also for the healing of various diseases, is especially interesting. This practice apparently began with Edward the Confessor in England and St. Louis in France and was due to the faith of those who came to be touched and healed in the divine right and lonely power of the king. It is significant that the practice began with these two for they, more than any kings of their time or most kings since, were really men of rare and saintly character. Curiously but naturally enough the English have denied any real power in this region to French kings and the French have claimed a monopoly for their own sovereigns.

The belief in the king's touch persisted long and seems toward the end to have had no connection with the character of the monarch, for Charles II did more in this line than any one who ever sat on an English throne. During the whole of his reign he touched upward of 100,000 people. Andrew White adds that "it is instructive to note, however, that while in no other reign were so many people touched for scrofula and so many cures vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of the disease."

Along with the king's touch went the king's gift--a piece of gold--and the drain upon the royal treasury was so considerable that after the reign of Elizabeth the size of the coin was reduced. Special coins were minted for the king's use in that office and these touching pieces are still in existence. William III refused to take this particular power seriously. "G.o.d give you better health and more sense," he said as he once touched a patient. In this particular instance the honest skepticism of the king was outweighed by the faith of the suppliant. We are a.s.sured that the person was cured. The royal touch was discontinued after the death of Queen Anne.

The list of healers began early and is by no means ended now. The power of the healer was sometimes a.s.sociated with his official station in the Church, sometimes due to his saintly character and often enough only to a personal influence, the fact of which is well enough established, though there can be in the nature of things no finality in the estimate of his real efficacy. George Fox performed some cures; John Wesley also.

In the seventeenth century one Valentine Greatrakes seems to have been the center of such excitements and reported healings as Alexander Dowie and others in our own time and it is finally through the healer rather than the saint or the king or shrine or relic that we approach the renaissance of mental and faith healing in our own time.

IV

THE APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MARY BAKER EDDY

There is, however, another stage in this long line of development which needs to be considered since it supplies a double point of departure; once for the most outstanding healing cult in our time--Christian Science--and once for the greatly enlarged use of suggestion in modern medical practice, and that is mesmerism and "animal magnetism."

_Mesmerism a Point of Departure for Modern Healing Cults_

Paracelsus[17] may be taken as a starting point just here. He is known in the history of medicine "for the impetus he gave to the development of pharmaceutical chemistry, but he was also the author of a visionary and theosophic system of philosophy." He believed in the influence of the stars upon men, but he enlarged upon the old astrologic faiths. "He believed the human body was endowed with a double magnetism, one portion attracted to itself the planets and was nourished by them, the result of which was the mental powers, the other portion attracted and disintegrated the elements, from which process resulted the body." His world, therefore, was a world of compet.i.tive attractions. He believed the well had an influence over the sick through magnetism and used the magnet in his practice.

[Footnote 17: A German-Swiss physician and alchemist, b. 1493, d. 1541.

These quotations, partly from authorities on faith healing and partly from the history of Spiritualism, ill.u.s.trate the underground connection in this whole region.]

"This dual theory of magnetic cures, that of the magnetic influence of men on men and of the magnet on man, was prevalent for over a century."

"It is, then, upon these ideas--the radiation from all things, but especially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which would act in all things else, and which was in each case directed by the indwelling spirit, together with the conception of a perpetual contact between reciprocal and opposing forces--that the mysticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly depends."[18]

[Footnote 18: Podmore, "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. I, p. 45. I am in debt also to Cutten for general information and some quoted paragraphs.]

These ideas were adopted by a group of men who are now only names for us. The phenomena of magnetism fascinated them and supplied them a.n.a.logies. There is, they thought, an all-prevailing magnetic influence which binds together not only celestial and terrestrial bodies, but all living things. Life and death were for them simply the registry of the ebbing and flowing of these immaterial tides and they ended by conceiving a vital fluid which could be communicated from person to person and in the communication of which the sick could be healed--the driftwood of their lore has come down to us on the tides of time; we still speak of magnetic personalities--and they sought in various ways to control and communicate these mysterious forces.

One of them invented steel plates which he applied to the body as a cure for disease. He taught his system to Mesmer who made, however, one marked advance upon the technique of his predecessors and gave his name to his methods; he produced his results through physical contacts and pa.s.ses. But he shared with his predecessors and stated with that compact clearness of which the French language is so capable even when dealing with obscure matters, that there is a "fluid so universally diffused and connected as to leave nowhere any void, whose subtlety is beyond any comparison and which by its nature is capable of receiving, propagating and communicating all impressions of movement.... This reciprocal action is subject to mechanical laws at present unknown."[19] This fluid in its action governs the earth and stars and human action.

[Footnote 19: Price's "Historique de facts relatifs du Magnetisme Animal," quoted by Podmore.]

He originated the phrase "Animal Magnetism" and was, though he did not know it, the originator of hypnotism; until well within our own time mesmerism was the accepted name for this whole complex group of phenomena. The medical faculties examined his claims but were not willing to approve them, but this made no difference in Mesmer's popularity. He had so great a following as to be unable to deal with them personally. He deputed his powers to a.s.sistants, arranged a most elaborate apparatus and surrounded his whole procedure with a dramatic setting of stained gla.s.s, mirrored and scented rooms and mysterious music. The result of it all naturally, as far as his patients were concerned, was marked excitements and hysterias. They had often to be put into padded rooms. And yet the result of all this murky confusion was said to be numbers of marked cures. He was investigated by the French government and two commissions presented their reports, neither of which was favourable. Imagination, not magnetism, they said, accounted for the results. His popularity wore away markedly when he undertook to explain his method and reveal his secrets. He left Paris in 1815 and lapsed into obscurity.

_The Scientific Investigation of Mesmerism in France_

As has been said, there are two lines of development growing out of Mesmer and his methods. Ten years after Mesmer left Paris Alexandre Bertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraud or mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his a.s.sociates had produced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced by suggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer had contrived for his so-called treatments. The schools of medicine were slow to follow out Bertrand's discovery and it was not until something like twenty years later, through the studies of Braid, that hypnotism began to be taken seriously.

But once the matter was brought broadly before them, the doctors began to follow it through. Charcot, in the Salpetriere, used hypnotic suggestion for the correction of abnormal mental and nervous states. The psychologists took up the matter and hypnotic suggestion has come to be not only a legitimate subject for the investigation of the student and an accepted method in correction of abnormal mental states, but as it were a window through which we are beginning to see deeply into unsuspected depths and intricacies of personality.

Modern faith healing cults, however, have not come to us down this line, though the studies of Bertrand, Braid, Charcot, Du Bois and their a.s.sociates supply the interpretative principles for any real understanding of them. Mesmerism naturally appealed to the type of mind most easily attracted by the bizarre and the mysterious. There are always amongst us the credulous and curious who find little enough either to awe or inspire them in the broad sweep of law, or in such facts as lie open to the light of reason. Such as these are impatient of discipline, eager to free themselves from the sequence of cause and effect; they are impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts to health, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of their own inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with reality and which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of disproof as through their disengagement from normal experience they are capable of verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the "idee fixe." Everything for them centers about one idea; they have one key and one only to the marvellous complexity of life. Such a temper as this naturally disa.s.sociates them from reality and makes them contemptuous of contradictory experiences.

_Mesmerism is Carried to America; Phineas Quimby an Important Link in a Long Chain_

America has been far too rich in such a temper as this and it was never more so than in the forties and the fifties of the last century.

Mesmerism crossed the ocean and while Braid and later Bernheim and Charcot were following it through on sound, psychological lines and bringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific discipline, it fell here into the hands of charlatans and adventurers. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, best known for his connection with Mary Baker Eddy, hardly deserves the name of charlatan, though he was dangerously near being just that. He belonged to the border-land regions in thought and propaganda and he did give to the whole complex movement which we have been considering a direction which has played a relatively great part in its later development. He had a shrewd mind which ranged over wide regions; he is a pretty typical example of the half-disciplined, forceful and original personality which has played so large a part in American life. The New England of his time--Quimby was born in New Hamps.h.i.+re and spent his life in Maine--was giving itself whole-heartedly to a mysticism bounded on the one side (its higher and more representative side) by Emerson and the transcendentalists and on the other by healers, prophets of strange creeds and dreamers of Utopias.

Phrenology, mind reading, animal magnetism, clairvoyance, all had their prophets.

Quimby belongs to this succession. His education was meagre, he did not even know how to spell according to the dictionary or punctuate according to the grammar.[20] He had his own peculiar use of words--a use by which Mary Baker Eddy was doubtless greatly influenced. He had marked mechanical ability and a real pa.s.sion for facts. He was an original thinker, little in debt to books for his ideas though he was undoubtedly influenced by the temper of his environment to which reference has already been made. He had a speculative, but not a trained interest in religion and dealt freely with the orthodoxy of his time constrained by no loyalty to the accepted faith and no critical knowledge of its content. "Truth" and "Science" were characteristic words for him and he shared his speculations and conclusions freely with his disciples.

[Footnote 20: What is here said of Quimby is condensed from Dresser's "The Quimby Ma.n.u.scripts."]

_Quimby is Led to Define Sickness as Wrong Belief_

In his early thirties he was supposed to be dying of consumption and suffered much from excessive medication. He recovered through an emotional crisis but does not seem to have followed out the possible suggestion of his recovery. He turned instead to mesmerism and travelled about with one Lucius Burkmer over whom he had strong hypnotic influence. When hypnotized Burkmer (or Burkman) claimed the power to look as through a window into the bodies of Quimby's patients and discover, often with illuminating detail, their condition; a good many reputed cures followed. The testimonials to these cures and to the strange powers of Burkmer are themselves an arresting testimony to the lengths people go in the face of what they do not understand. "I have good reason to believe that he can discern the internal structure of an animal body and if there be anything morbid or defective therein detect and explain it.... He can go from point to point without pa.s.sing through intermediate s.p.a.ce. He pa.s.ses from Belfast [Maine] to Was.h.i.+ngton or from the earth to the moon ... swifter than light, by a single act of volition."[21]

[Footnote 21: "The Quimby Ma.n.u.scripts," p. 38.]

Quimby had too alert an intelligence to rest content with the merely occult. He came to believe that Burkmer only saw what the patient thought, could do no more than describe the patient's idea of his own state, or else report the "common allopathic belief about the disease in question," and the cure, he was persuaded, was not in the medicine prescribed but in "the confidence of the doctor or medium." (Note that Quimby here a.s.sociates the cures produced by the medical faculty and his own cures in one sweeping generalization.) What he was really dealing with then was "belief." It might be the belief of the doctor or the patient or the belief of his friends--but sickness was only "belief."

This also was a sweeping generalization but it becomes intelligible as we follow the process by which Quimby reached his conclusions and it helps us to understand the significance of Belief as one of the key words of Christian Science. Quimby was led to identify sickness and wrong beliefs through this a.n.a.lysis of mesmeric diagnosis and health and right belief through his own experiences as a healer. He had no training to help him to an understanding of the real facts which lay behind the belief in sickness. He became a skillful diagnostician of states of mind and a healer of such diseases as could be so treated. But he knew, scientifically, no more of what lay behind it all than a ploughman may know of what lies beneath the furrows he turns.

_Quimby Develops His Theories_

Mrs. Eddy took over the catch-words of his system and its loose a.s.sumptions, and a reasonably careful comparison of the Quimby ma.n.u.scripts and "Science and Health" shows not only Mrs. Eddy's fundamental and never honestly acknowledged and finally categorically denied indebtedness to Quimby, but the confusion which Quimby's rather striking and original philosophy suffered at her hands. Beginning with his persuasion that health and sickness are phases of belief Quimby discarded mesmerism altogether and addressed himself to the minds of his patients. He had doubtless a keen intuitive knowledge of human nature and its morbid fancies and he was dealing generally with neurotic temperaments over which he exercised a strong and helpful power of suggestion. His explanation of disease--that it is a wrong belief--becomes grotesque enough when he comes down to detail. This, for example, is his diagnosis of Bronchitis--"You listen or eat this belief or wisdom [evidently that Bronchitis is real] as you would eat your meals. It sets rather hard upon your stomach; this disturbs the error of your body and a cloud appears in the sky.... The elements of the body of your belief are shaken, earth is lit up by the fire of your error, the heat rises, the heaven or mind grows dark ... the lightning of hot flashes shoot to all parts of the solar system of your belief. At last the winds or chills strike the earth or surface of the body, a cold clammy sensation pa.s.ses over you. This changes the heat into a sort of watery substance which works its way into the channels and pores to the head and stomach."[22]