Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/131

 than as a curative agent. It was urged that the mental hygiene of childhood was not to be determined by any special denominational method.

Such limited methods may result in the fixity of an idea or belief quite compatible with usefulness in any sphere of activity, but they do not deal with the broader and deeper question of the preservation of the mental health of the individual. The exaggerated importance of the denominational question, which has engendered passive resistance, ought to give way to the question of mental health and engender a strong and active resistance to all that tends to narrow or circumscribe the mental life of the infant. It ought to be our object as teachers and physicians to fight against all those influences which tend to produce either religious indifference or intemperance, and to subscribe as best we may to that form of religious belief, so far as we can find it practically embodied or effective, which believes in 'the larger hope,' though it condemns unreservedly the demonstrable superstition and sentimentality which impede its progress and power. As an alienist, and as one whose whole life has been concerned with the sufferings of the human mind, the writer believes that of all the hygienic