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/180

 over body, and we find a complacent conviction expressed in several ways by several writers to the effect that a certain class of disorders, which are vaguely alluded to as "nervous," are promptly curable by emotional methods. But we do not find any recognition of the fact that only a small portion of the diseases to which human flesh is heir are nervous diseases; and that of nervous diseases, again, only a very small and unimportant group admit of cure in this way.

'What the critics have to do if they wish to convince their readers of the Neurotic Theory of the miracles of healing is nothing less than this:

'1. They must show that the diseases which Christ is said to have cured were of the kind which experience proves to admit of psychical treatment.

'2. They must show some good grounds for the assertion that the way in which the cures of the healing ministry were effected was the way by which at the present day such cures are effected, when what has been called moral therapeutics has been the method employed.'

The difficulty is obvious. If our Lord was merely a faith healer, the results of long and laborious investigations into many faith-healing systems, all presenting very much the