THE Thames Star. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1925. SPIRITUAL HEALING.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 16425, 24 February 1925, Page 4

THE Thames Star.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1925. SPIRITUAL HEALING.

“With malice towards none: with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives usi to see the right.”—Lincoln.

Persons who have watched the rend of modern thought will not be urprised by the announcement that it the annual convention of the Spiseopalian Churches, held in Ame•ica, it was decided “to instal the iractice of the spiritual healing in ill churches represented at the con* erence.” For a number of years the > rotestant Episcopal Church has icen studying the subject of the re■ognition of this power to heal, which s so prominently set forth in the gospels that record the ministry of lesus. In Boston, New York and >ther eastern cities, certain churches lave maintained departments of work levoed to this revival of a long-neg-eeted part of the Christian teaching i ' , or several hundred years the early ihurch practiced healing as one of he demonstrations of the power of ?raver, and it is only in the later centuries that the Protestant diurches have ignored the possibilities of physical as well as spiritual •egeneration through the consciousness of the imminence of God. Pre--ious to the World War independent organisations had rained millions of ollowcrs through the recognition of

man’s oneness with God, or the oversoul, that universal source of all life In the terrible days in which thousands of young men faced death on vhe battlefields a new revelation of divinity came to many. No one can doubt that miracles were performed where the soldiers of various nations waited on the borderland between the earth life and the life beyond what we call death. Numbers who came back to take up their old vocations, they who had the experience of visioning something of the true meaning of this every-day experience of living, have been students of advanced religious thought and on every side there has been a general awakening to the real meaning of prayer in the sense that it is a constant reliance on the supreme power, a means by which harmony may be established with the divine law. Through the centuries the Roman Catholic Church has preserved faith in the healing office of prayer, In many sanctuaries are maintained the evidences of the restoration of strength to the halt and of sight to the blind. Theories may differ, methods may diverge, for creeds vary strangely, hut underneath all religious dogma prevails the one idea, faith in God. That a Protestant Church has the courage to devote attention to the work of spiritual healing proves that, despite much that seems to show retrogression among the people of this age, humanity is advancing from materialism to knowledge of oneness with the eternal forces. Perhaps, the day is not so far off, after all, when with one accord'the nations of the earth shall Jive in peace and unity, safe in the realisation of th e Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.