HEALING BY FAITH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19195, 8 December 1925, Page 9

HEALING BY FAITH.

BISHOP'S STRONG CRiTICfSM. " DEBASEMENT OF RELIGION." [from: ouu own correspondent. ] LONDON, Nov. 6. Dr. Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, makes a serious attack on "spiritual healing." This is in a book just published and entitled, "Notes on Spiritual Healing." "The new popularity of the Sacrament will be dearly purchased," writes Dr. Henson, "if the price to be paid be the degradation of Christianity to the level of primitive superstition." This is in reference to the suggestion of Canon Robinson that "if the Holy Communion were definitely associated with bodily health we should hear no more complaints about 'the small attendance' at the weekly or daily Eucharist." The bishop suggests that acceptance of the views of the "spiritual healers" would lead to a reversion to the superstitions of the Middle Ages. He asserts that "the much-advertised miracles of healing which accompanied Mr. Hickson's progress round the world pass into oblivion, and leave the sum of human distress un lessened." It is claimed by the bishop that the Church's ministry is to be traced " not in the sporadic prodigies of faith-healing, but in the majestic and unfaltering movement of medical science," and,he asserts that "it cannot be the duty of the Church deliberately to return to the beliefs and methods of a primitive and superstitious past." On the assertion by a leading "spiritual healer" that "confession is a real requisite in many cases." Dr. Henson declares "If the price of physical healing by nonphysical means is to be the restoration of the ancient and long-abandoned domination of the priest in the sphere of private conscience, we ntay well ask whether ;t be not excessive ? Perhaps, in the judgment of an informed and considering man. one of the weightiest arguments against any such association of healing and religion, as the theory of spiritual healing requires, is the inevitable debasement of religion. Sick rooms are the breedingplaces of superstition, as marshes ate of tho mosquitoes which carry malaria; am the worst developments of that spiritual maladv which is known as ' sacerdotalism are connected directly with the frailty and fears of invalids." Dr Henson urges that no one, clergyman or layman, should be suffered publicly to undertake physical healing who has not been trained in medical science, and is not "commissioned by public authority," and that "tho specific duty nf the clerEvman does not include physical ! heaHng/' He refers to "the notion of •spiritual healing' which seems to be implicit in the Lambeth resolutions' passed by the bishops in council—but he declares emphatically that "any 'revival of a ministry of healing in the Church could only work out mischievously both for the health of individuals and tho efficiency of the cleigy.