Healing with Prayer

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XI, Issue 243, 18 October 1921, Page 5

Healing with Prayer

CHURCH AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. A NOTABLE DISTINCTION. “NO MAN CAN SERVE TWO Af ASTERS.” Auckland, Oct. 16« In the course of his charge to Synod this morning the Bishop had something to say on the much-discussed question of Christian Science and its relation to the healing of the sick with the aid of prayer. “I would urge” said Bishop Averill, “upon the clergy in particular to study carefully the report of the Lambeth Conference upon the Christian faith in relation to Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Thoosopry, particularly what isf known to-day as Christian Sicence.

“The conference generously recognised that all these revived cults were (a) the outcome of a mental revulsion from materialism, and a desire to find a spiritual meaning and purpose in human life; and (b) were to some extent, at any rate, the direct outcome of the church’s neglect to expound fully and clearly the great verities of the Christian faith; and (c) were touching the fringe of great scientific truths not yet clearly revealed or understood—but they had no shadow of doubt that they were, as cults ,a contradiction to the Christian faith. No man can servo two masters, and the Christ of Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Theosophy is not the Christ of the Bible or the Christian creed.

“Perhaps the first need of to-day is to remove the false antithesis between what arc called physical means of healing and spiritual means. If we really believe that all good gifts come from God there can bo no need to try and effect a reconciliation between the physical and the spiritual, or to draw such a line line of demarcation between secular and religious, spirit and matter, or the sphere of the physican jmd surgeon on the one hand and the true Spiritual Healer on the other. Physical means of healing can only be regarded as unspiritual when men deliberately shut their eyes to the truth that these means are the creation and gift of God.” A NOTABLE DEVELOPMENT.

“The conference, largely as a result of the wonderful testimony brought before it, was compelled to recognise that both in study and in practice there has been a notable development in the direction of healing with prayer, accompanied the laying on of hands and of anointing, whereby the power of Christ to heal and been released. ‘We would urge,’ says the report, ‘the recognition of the ministry and gifts of healing in the church, and that these should be exercised under due license and authority.’ There is probably a good deal of confusion between mental and spiritual healing—and the science of psychotherapeutics is not to be confused with the anointing of the sick —although faith and mental suggestion must always play a large part in all forms of healing. In what is really spiritual healing there is no thought of denying the reality of suffering dr of the proper office of the physician or surgeon, but in many cases which belong directly to the sphere of the physician or surgeon there is room also for the co-operation of the spiritual healer and for the direct action of God.”