Ideas
efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others.
Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings
are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian
churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day,
whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the
whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or
gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word "suggestion"
as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid
psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but
ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and by
this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all
there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form.
Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that
can be done." And this in spite of the actual fact that the
popular Christianity does absolutely NOTHING, or did nothing
until mind-cure came to the rescue.[55]
[55] Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to
regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our
good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for
exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning
"merit.
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