FAITH HEALING

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 90, 13 October 1923, Page 13

FAITH HEALING

TO TBI BDITOft.

Sir,—"Faith," your correspondent of yesterday, consider* that doctors who criticise tho faith-healer are prejudiced by want of knowledge of his subject. He appears to mo to use the word _ knowledge" somewhat loosely. He implies that the doctor's knowledge of medicine is knowledge in~ tho accepted scientino seme: consisting, that is, of facts recorded by observation and general laws deduced from such facts and reconciling them as closely as possible. But he also implies that the divine healer's knowledge of divine healing is of a character essentially difforent, a knowledge—or, rather, a conviction of powerbased upon religious faith. lam certain there is no medical man on earth who does not know this latter fact, and I beg leave to doubt the existence of any faith-hoaler who knows more. Your correspondent really means to accuse the medical profession not of want of knowledge, but of want of faith. It is meanlngleso to say that a person is ignorant of the unknowable. If_ your correspondent will take his own edvico, and quietly and thoughtfully observe the things he does not know/ 1 think he will find these more numerous than he supposed Let us start from what I conceive to be a fair and reasonable standpoint: that we know nothing: about the actual processes of faithhealing, but that it is reasonable to ascribe to Divine intervention any phenomenon whioh we are convinced is beneJicent. Many phenomena once regarded as beneficent have-been, proved by experience to be harmful. We can convince ourselves that a phenomenon is beneficent only by sufficient and continued experience. We are entitled to look for results, and short-sighted if we do not do so. • • .

On a question of healing- the body, whose experience constitutes the best evidence? Clearly the experience of• a ferson who knows the body's economy, shall be better prepared to believe a doctor who tells me my disease' organs are healthy again, than a faith-healer who does not know where they are, and would be unlikely to recognise them if he saw them.

Although some of its adherents deny the fact to tho verge of. apoplexy, faithhealirig has produced remarkably few authenticated results, recorded by quiet, thoughtful, or even competent. observers. In view of the fact that many 1 so-called faith-healers have been exposed, it seems to me that we are justified, without being in any way adversely sceptical; in reserving judgment on such a". person handing ev-idonoo of permanent cures in such numbers as to rule out the element of chance. This, so far as lam aware, is the attitude of the medical profession, which, as "an instrument in the hands of God for healing' the sick," appears entitled to a hearing.—l am, etc.,

MONO ET MUS.

10th October.