Chapter 23

If a religion is to endure it must meet a wide range of need; it must be plastic and yet invest itself with the sanctions of History. For the conservative it must possess the note of authority and at the same time promise freedom to the liberal. It must persuade the forward-looking that it holds within itself the power to meet changing conditions. It must offer a satisfying experience to the mystic and the practically minded and deliverance to the despairing. It must be able to build into its structure new sciences and philosophies and yet it must touch the whole of life with some sense of the timeless, and above all, it must include the whole of life, nor depend upon particularized appeals or passing phases of thought. Historic Christianity has more nearly met all these tests than any other religion, for though under the stress of meeting so great a variety of needs and conditions it has organized itself into forms as different as Latin Catholicism and the Society of the Friends, so losing catholicity of organization, it has secured instead a catholicity of spirit and a vast elasticity of appeal which are the secret of its power and the assurance of its continuing and enduring supremacy.

_Their Parallels in the Past_

Now by such tests as these what future may one anticipate for such cults as we have been studying? Are they likely to displace the historic forms of Christianity, will they substantially modify it, or will they wear away and be reabsorbed? Evidently one of these three things must happen. This is not the first time in the Western world that historic and authoritative Christianity has been challenged. We should have, perhaps, to go back to the fourth century to find an exact parallel and then we should find in the vast and confused movement of Gnosticism an unexpected parallel to a great deal of what is happening about us. Gnosticism was the effort of a reason excessively given to speculation, undisciplined and greatly unrestrained by any sense of reality to possess and transform the Church. Various forces combined to build its fabric of air-born speculation and though for the time it gave the patristic Church the hardest fight of its existence, the discipline of the Church was too strong for it. Its own weaknesses proved eventually its undoing and Gnosticism remains only as a fascinating field of study for the specialist, only a name if even so much as that for the generality of us and valuable chiefly in showing what speculation may do when permitted at will to range earth and sky, with a spurious rationalism for pilot and imagination for wings.

There have been, beside, in the history of the Church many other movements possessing a great staying power and running in some cases for generations alongside the main current of religious development, until they finally disappeared with the changing centuries. Arguing from such historical precedents as these one might easily assume a like fate for the Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed here for there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neither failed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure. The expectation of the Catholic Church that Protestantism will spend its force and be lost again in the majestic fabric of Latin Catholic Christianity as it is continued amongst us, is as far from realization to-day, or farther, than at any time in the last 300 years. We need to remember also that conditions change. The right of individual initiative and judgment once secured in the region of religion is not likely ever to be lost. A good many divergent movements have literally been whipped back into line or else put out in fire and blood. Nothing of that sort is likely to happen now.

No student of history should be blind to the sequence of action and reaction. A period of excessive dependence upon authority may follow a period of undue self-assertion, but it is not likely that we shall ever find recreated exactly the conditions of the past or that religion can hereafter be held, as it has heretofore, in relatively well marked channels under the stress of accepted authorities. Prophecy is hazardous business but it is safe to assume that these modern religious cults and movements represent the beginnings of a freer, more diffused, less formal religious faith. The peculiar cults themselves may reach their term but the temper which produced them is likely to continue and with other groupings of forces produce something in the future which will at least be their parallel.

_The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the Scientific Organisation of Psycho-therapy_

As far as the fortunes of the distinctive cults themselves go, one's conclusions may be less tentative. For the most part the foundations upon which they are built are not big enough to carry an ample and secure structure. They have been made possible not only by marked limitations in historic religion itself, but also by contemporaneous tempers which, one may sincerely hope, are self-limiting, and this is said not through undue prejudice against the cults themselves, but simply because one is loath to believe that the want of critical faculty which has made some of these cults possible will not in the end yield to experience and a really sounder education. Since, moreover, some of them--and Christian Science, preeminently--depend upon faith and mental healing, whatever helps us to a clearer understanding of the nature and limits of psycho-therapy will greatly affect their future. All faith healing cults have heretofore depended very greatly upon the atmosphere of mystery with which they have been able to surround themselves. The fact that they have been able to secure results with no very clear understanding of the way in which the results have been secured has invested them with awe and wonder, so essential to every religion.

But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws, develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all this is extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. For this reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faith and mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just now strongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all.

The intimate association of religion and healing has, on the whole, been good neither for religion nor health. Of course, this statement will probably be sharply challenged but it is maintained in the face of possible challenge. As far as religion goes it has withdrawn the interest of the religious, thus influenced, from the normal expressions of the religious life to border-land regions; it has stressed the exceptional rather than the sweep of law, and the occult rather than the luminously reasonable. Where it has failed in individual cases, as it is bound to fail, it has left those thus disillusioned without any sound basis for their faith and generally has driven them away from religion altogether. It has tempted religious teachers to win a hearing by signs and wonders. Even the Founder of the Christian religion grew weary of this, as the records show plainly enough, in that He saw His true work to be thereby not helped but hindered, and if this be true of the Founder it is by so much the more true of His followers.

On the scientific side this temper has hindered honest thinking, laborious investigation and that specialization which is absolutely necessary to the furtherance of any great division of human effort. Medicine made little progress until it got itself free of the Church. Specifically the average minister is neither by training nor temperament fitted for healing work and those laymen who have assumed that office have generally been wanting in balance and self-restraint. This is not to deny the reality of a power not ourselves making for health and well-being generally, or the power of faith, or the efficacy of prayer. Least of all is God, upon this understanding, to be shut out of life. But the power not ourselves which makes for faith and healing is best known through laborious investigation, the discovery of methods and obediences to ascertained law. When we have clearly come to see the nature of psycho-therapy, the occult authority of healing cults will in the end yield to this understanding and the cults themselves be greatly weakened or displaced.

One must recognize, on the other hand, the staying power of any well-established religious system. Through nurture and those profound conservatisms which hold more tenaciously in the region of religion than anywhere else, it is possible to continue from generation to generation the unreasonable or the positively untrue, and this holds in the Church as well as outside it. None the less, the most coherent systems must reckon with their own weaknesses. Christian Science may have before it a long period of solid going or even marked growth, but its philosophy will at last yield to the vaster sweep of a truer philosophic thought. Its interpretations of historic Christianity will come up again and again for examination until their fallacies become apparent and its force as a system of psycho-therapy will be modified by simpler and more reasonable applications of the same power.

_New Thought Will Become Old Thought_

New Thought is likely to take a different course but it also will have to reckon with changing sciences and philosophies. What is New Thought to-day will be old thought to-morrow; it will be challenged by new expressions of the spirit which begot it. It will endure, therefore, only as it is open, flexible and possesses a great power of accommodation. But as long as understandings and ideals are fluid, as long as religion is under bonds to take account of all the elements which must be incorporated in it in order to enlarge and continue it, as long, in short, as the human spirit outgrows fixed forms in any region there is likely to be in religion itself something corresponding to the New Thought of to-day, but this will be true only as New Thought is not a cult at all but something larger--a free and creative movement of the human spirit.

Of all these cults it has made the soundest contribution to religion as a whole. It is also more easily assimilated, more easily absorbed. Its own distinct field will be limited by the increasing hospitality of Christian thought to contemporaneous truth. A wholly open-minded church will go a long way toward taking from New Thought its raison d'etre. Its future depends, therefore, very largely upon the open-mindedness of the older and more strongly established forms of religion.

The future of Spiritualism is greatly open to conjecture. We have already seen the alternatives which Spiritualism is called upon to face and the uncertainties which attend its conclusions. A fuller understanding of the possibilities of abnormal personality and the reach of automatism are likely to work against Spiritualism. If we find ascertainable causes for its phenomena resident within personality itself there will be no need of calling in the other world in order to explain what is happening in this. On the other hand, if there should evidence an increasing and tested body of facts which can be explained only in terms of spiritistic communications, Spiritualism will naturally make headway. But we are certainly standing only upon the threshold of a scientific interpretation of spiritistic phenomena and until the whole region has been very much more carefully worked through and far more dependable facts are in hand, one can only say that Spiritism is a hypothesis which may or may not be verified, and attend the outcome.

It is hard to believe that Theosophy and kindred speculation will ever get a strong hold upon the practical Western mind. It owes what force it has either to an excessive love of the speculative on the part of a few, or else to that particular temper which always wants something else and something new, or else to wearinesses and misunderstandings of the more shadowed side of life. Theosophy is greatly at the mercy of the positive, practical temper; it will always find a prevailing competitor in the Christian doctrine of immortality. Whatever, moreover, explains the apparent inequalities of life in more simple and reasonable terms will cut the roots of it. The movement toward religious syncretism of which Bahaism is just now the expression will not be so easy to dispose of. There will always be a temper impatient of the past, eager for unity, anxious for something big and interpenetrating. Historically this temper has from time to time emerged, particularly in the latter phases of Roman paganism, and there is likely to be a larger interchange of religious faith and understanding in the future than there has been in the past.

In general, this desire for a universal religion, simple and wanting in distinctive characters, follows a weakening of conviction, a loss of passion for accepted forms. If anything should deepen again amongst us in religion what corresponds just now to the passion for nationality these more general religious quests would suffer. A strong feeling for a church or a creed or one's own movement would displace them. They have, on the other hand, in their favour the general tendency of all religion toward simplicity, the reduction of faith, that is, to a few broad and generally shared elements. But there is no reason to anticipate a speedy breakdown of what one may call particularist religion and the substitution therefor of a faith built up out of many diverse elements and held in common by widely separated tempers.

_There is Likely to be Some Absorption of the Cults by a Widening Historic Christianity_

If the past supplies analogy or suggestion there will be some tendency for the cults and movements to be reabsorbed by the dominant religious forms from which they have broken off. A careful analysis of this statement would involve the consideration of a finality of Christianity as now held in the Western world. That is impossible in the range of a study like this. Any general statement is of course coloured by the temper of the one who makes it and to a certain extent begs the whole great question. But a careful and dispassionate examination of present-day cults would seem to indicate that they really have nothing to offer which the dominant Christianity does not possess either explicitly or implicitly. There is a solidity of human experience behind its forms and creeds which cannot be lightly left out of account. They represent the travail of twenty centuries and have behind them far older confidences and hopes. If Christianity should widen itself to the full limit of its possibilities, it would leave little room for that which seeks to supplant it and would meet the needs which have begotten the cults in far richer and more reasonable ways.

As far as the cults are mistakenly distinctive, as far as they cannot stand a careful examination, they represent what must be corrected and cannot be absorbed. Christianity can absorb New Thought far more easily than Christian Science. Theosophy in its extremer forms it cannot absorb at all. It is more hospitable to the quest for a universal religion for it seeks itself to be a universal religion and can never achieve its ideal unless it takes account of the desire for something big enough to include the whole of life, East as well as West, and to make room within itself for a very great variety of religious tempers.

_But Christianity is Being Influenced by the Cults_

If Christianity is not to reabsorb the cults in their present form, it must, as has been said over and over again, take account of them and it is not likely to go on uninfluenced by them. Already it has yielded in some directions to their contentions. If it feels itself challenged by them it must meet that challenge not so much by intolerance as by the correction of conditions which have made them possible, and here its most dependable instruments are education and self-examination. There is need of a vast deal more of sheer teaching in all the churches. The necessity for congregations and the traditions of preaching conspire to make the message of the Church far less vital than it ought to be. Preaching is too much declamation and far too much a following of narrow and deeply worn paths.

The cults themselves represent a craving for light, especially in the regions of pain and loss. Historic Christianity has lost out because it has made religion too self-centered, not that the cults are a corrective here, for they are even more self-centered--that is one of their great faults. The individual is not the center of the world; he is part of a larger order concerned for great ends for which his life can only be contributory. The Church and the cults together have forgotten too largely that life is sacred only as we lose it. We need in the churches generally a braver personal note and a very much larger unself-centeredness.

It is interesting to note that the movement of the cults, with the possible exception of New Thought, has been away from rationalism rather than in the direction of it. This is a consideration to be taken into account. It would seem on the surface of it to indicate that what people are wanting in religion is not so much reason as mysticism and that for the generality religion is most truly conceived in terms not of the known but of the unknown. If the Christian Church is to meet the challenge of the cults with a far more clearly defined line of teaching, it is also to meet the challenge of the cults with a warmer religious life, with the affirmation of an experience not so much tested by crises and conversions as by the constant living of life in the sense of the divine--to use Jeremy Taylor's noble phrase: in the Practice of the Presence of God. The weakness of the cults is to have narrowed the practice of the presence of God to specific regions, finding the proof of His power in health and well-being. If we can substitute therefor the consciousness of God in the sweep of law, the immensity of force, the normal conduct of life, in light and understanding, in reason as well as mysticism and science as well as devotion, we shall have secured a foundation upon which to build amply enough to shelter devout and questing souls not now able to find what they seek in the churches themselves and yet never for a moment out of line with what is truest and most prophetic in Christianity itself.

Sir Henry Jones has a paragraph in his "Faith that Enquires" distinctly to the point just here. "The second consideration arises from the greatness of the change that would follow were the Protestant Churches and their leaders to assume the attitude of the sciences and treat the articles of the creeds not as dogmas but as the most probable explanation, the most sane account which they can form of the relation of man to the Universe and of the final meaning of his life. The hypothesis of a God whose wisdom and power and goodness are perfect would then be tried and tested, both theoretically and practically, and, I believe, become thereby ever the more convincing. The creed would be not merely a record of an old belief to be accepted on authority, but a challenge to the skeptic and the irreligious. The Church, instead of being a place where the deliverances of ancient religious authorities are expounded, and illustrated by reference to the contents of one book and the history of one nation--as if no other books were inspired and all nations save one were God-abandoned--the Church would be the place where the validity of spiritual convictions are discussed on their merits, and the application of spiritual principles extended; where enquiring youths would repair when life brings them sorrow, disappointment or failure, and the injustice of man makes them doubt whether there be a God, or if there be, whether he is good and has power, and stands as the help of man. Recourse to their certified spiritual guides, knowing that full and sympathetic justice will be done to all their difficulties, ought to be as natural to them as their recourse to the physical laboratory or the workshop of the mechanician when an engine breaks down."[83]

[Footnote 83: "A Faith that Enquires," p. 82.]

_Medical Science Should Take a More Serious Account of the Healing Cults_

Not only the churches but the schools and particularly Medical Science need to take account of the cults. They constitute perhaps one of the sharpest indictments of present-day education. Many of their adherents are nominally educated above the average. They have secured for what they follow the authority which always attaches, in the American mind, to the fact that those who champion any movement are college bred, and yet the want of clear vision, the power to distinguish and analyze, along with the unexpected credulities which are thus made manifest, seem to indicate arresting deficiencies in popular education. It has left us unduly suggestible, much open to mass movement, at the mercy of the lesser prophets and wanting in those stabilities and understandings upon which a sound culture is to be built. When we consider what they are capable of believing who have had college or university training, we must conclude either that contemporaneous education is wanting in the creation of sound mental discipline, or else that we have a strange power of living in water-tight compartments and separating our faith wholly from our reason.

The cults which are organized around faith and mental healing at once challenge and in a measure indict modern medical science. In many directions all these movements are reactions against an excessive materialism; they affirm the power of personality as against its environment, testify that the central problems of life may be approached from the spiritual as well as from the physical and material side. It would not for a moment be fair to say that modern Medicine is ignoring this. There has probably always been a considerable element of mental healing in any wise medical practice. But on the whole, the marvellous successes and advances in Medical Science within the last thirty years and the very great success which has attended the definition of all diseases in terms of physical disarrangement has led physicians generally unduly to underestimate or ignore the undoubted power of faith and mind over bodily states.

Even as a matter of scientific investigation medicine as a whole has not taken this line of approach seriously enough. The Society for Psychical Research has something to teach the medical faculties just here. That Society, as we have seen, set out in the most rigorous and scientific way possible to find out first of all just what actual facts lay behind the confused phenomena of Spiritualism. They have given a long generation to just that. As they have finally isolated certain facts they have, with a good deal of caution, undertaken to frame hypotheses to account for them and so, with the aid of the students of abnormal personality, they are gradually bringing a measure of order into the whole region. Medical Science on the whole has not done this in the region of faith and mental healing. We are, therefore, far too uncertain of our facts. A good deal of this is open to correction. If a Society for Psycho-Therapeutic Research should be organized, which would follow up every report of healings with an accurate care, beginning with the diagnosis and ending with the actual physical state of the patient as far as it could be ascertained by the tests at their disposal, they could greatly clarify the popular mind, prevent a vast deal of needless suffering, save the sick from frustrated hope and secure for their own profession a distinct reinforcement and an increased usefulness.

_A Neglected Force_