RELIGION AND MEDICINE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 283, 26 November 1908, Page 6

RELIGION AND MEDICINE.

THE NEW EMMANUEL EFFORT AND ns work.

BY REV. SAMUEL McCOMB, D.D.

Emmanuel Church, Boston, hae been the scene for the pact two years of an effort to save the moral -wrecks of humanity which is, perhaps, as remarkable as any in the history of medicine or religion. This effort is a combination of scientific theology as distinguished from mere traditionalism, scientific medicine, and a philanthropic motive in the alleviation and cure of various maladies which appear to be primarily mental, moral, and spiritual, and only secondarily physical, but wliich nevertheless defy the skill of the average practitioner. The causes for the pitiable frequency of these troubles are manifold and complicated, and form an interrelated network which it is impossible to disentangle. The breakdown of religious faith, the growing artificiality of our social system, the mad rush fur wealth, mental idleness and frivolity, the use of stimulants and narcotics, the lack of selfcontrol, arising, it may be, from overwork, or ill-regulated work, or from culpable self-indulgence—all these and other factors are producing a neurotic and disordered temperament. Hence the formidable list of psychic ailments. I can name here only a few. Hysteria, which manifests itself in exaggerated emotional displays, or in the unconscious simulation of various diseases, the fruit of an ill-balanced but by no means organically diseased brain; hypnochondria, or the fixed but groundless belief that the subject is suffering from some particular disease; neurasthenia, which covers a vast variety of nerve weaknesses, from mild depression to extreme prostration; psychaethenia, in which the patient has a sense of incompleteness, or of the unreality of time, or ol the strangeness of tilings in general, and ie the eubject of abnormal feaTs; alcoholism, cocainism, morphinism, and in general drug habits which end in intellectual and moral degeneration. A LONG LIST. Further, there are insomnia, one of the terrible curses of modern life, and the frequent cause of mental exhaustion, psychic pain, and despair, ending in suicide; tits of hate, anger, and groundless suspicion, which the sufferer well recogn-ises, but which he is powerless to conquer; and religious melancholy. It will be noted that the various disorders, of wliich the above are typical, differ from organic physical disease iv one important particular. They are, at bottom, disturbances or perversions of personality. You may be attacked by dipththeria or typhoid, and come out of the disease morally the same man as you entered it, but you cannot fall a victim to any of the disorders described without a change for the worst —a chajig-e which in some instances amounts to a deep-rooted perversion not unlike the "demoniacal possession" of ancient times.

Here is the secret of the startling fact that, while other religious bodies are stagnant, Christian Science is advancing by leaps and bounds. Too Jong has the soul been handed over to the clergy and the body to the physicians, with the disastrous result that in many circles there is a growing distrust of academic medicine.

Now the Emmanuel clinic concerns itself only -with functional disorders, though it a,lso recognises the truth that in all diseased states mental and spiritual factors enter into the problem. It accepts all the couclusions of modern medical science, is under medical control, and yet at the same time brings to bear on the sufferer all the therapeutic and reconciling forces of the Christian religion. In a word, it is the union of these forces, often supposed to be hostile to each other.

CONSCIOUS AND SUB-CONSCIOUS. The majority of psychologists have come to believe that in creative energy of thought, in religion, in education, in the formation of habits, in the causation and cure of many disorders, in memory, in sleep, in certain hallucinatory states, and in the functional activities of the body, the "sub-conscious" or the "unconscious" plays a dominating role.

The "sub-conscious" is simply that portion of our mental life which lies outside consciousness—the realm of the ex-tra-conscious. In the light of this doctrine, we can see why so much evangelistic and temperance work fails of its purpose; it is spent for the most part outside the region where habit has the seat of its strength. Only when we pierce beneath the conscious and enter the subconscious region can we grapple with the demons that possess the soul and cast them out. The method by which this is done is technically called "suggestion," which may be described as a hint given to the sub-conscious mind in the interests of mental and physical health.

The sufferer is induced to relax all nervous tension, to be calm, quiet, and passive. Ideas of peace, of hope, of faith, assurance that he can control his nervous states if he trill, and energetic appeals and commands that the will should be so exercised, are taken up by the brain mechanism in some inscrutable way and are translated into healthful mental and bodily effects.

ENCOURAGEMENT AND EXPLANATION.

The next great weapon in our armoury is the psycho-therapeutic conversation. What the nervous sufferer needs very often is to unburden himself, to make a frank avowal of past blunders or follies that may bear upon the genesis of his present misery. The minister who would help these sick souls must have infinite patience, and be never weary listening to the burden of their woe. It will frequently be his duty to extricate out of the sub-conscious region long hidden experiences to which strong emotions are tied, to hold these experiences up in the clear light of consciousness, analyse them, and in analysing them deprive them of their mischievous power.

Other burdened souls there are whose inner lives are set to a low key. They are depressed, inert, without hope or faith, and too often without sleep. In these cases the prime necessity is faith. At Lourdes, in Christian Science gatherings, at St. Anne de Beaupre, in Canada, in faith-healing meetings, under every variety of metaphysic, faith has wrought astonishing and unquestioned cures.

Faith without a healthy respect for science becomes mere credulity and superstition. Therefore, while we believe in the power of mind over body, we also preach the therapeutic value of medicine, of good h-abits, of rest, of work —in a' word, of a life regulated by moral and physiological law.