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/225

 THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN CHRISTIAN HEALING

, M.A.

The psychologists teach us that a man's 'self' is a larger thing than the 'me' which, we might say, a child has in view when it puts out a hand to get a sweetmeat for itself. As Professor W. James says, 'The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts—soul, body, and clothes—is more than a joke'; and he goes on to include in that self the man's immediate family, his home, the property he has collected. And then we think of Aristotle's definition of man as a 'political' or social animal—the social self with its wider or narrower reach—for 'properly speaking a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.'

(i) All this has an important bearing on the subject of health and disease. We are all influenced by our environment for better or