FAITH HEALING

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 45, 22 February 1930, Page 20

FAITH HEALING

Dealt.'■ Inge's Views

Faith',healing, miraculous ■ cures at Loiirdes, and Christian Science word on. by Dean .Inge when profiling: tho.'hospital anniversary-, sermon at Nottingham. "Spiritual healing," ho said, "has latoly become a fashionable'craze. Wo hear constantly of allcgod marvellous cures by prayer, unction-, or ■suggestion, and of extremely flourishing •businesses carried on by the priests and hotel-keepers of Lourdes. , "X am not speaking of mental- or psychical.healing, which forms a legitiniato and, in tho past, too much neglected branch of-medical science, but of the claim to work cures which science pronounces to be impossible. '.'I earnestly hope that church-people will be exceedingly suspicious, of -the fashionable tendency to dabble in the occult and supematuralism. It seems to mo a reversion to the barbarous middle ages, a movement which can end only in throwing deep discredit on any religious body, which tries to exploit it.' "If God were to give us tho perilous poiver to alter the course of nature, we surely would not be so. presumptuous as to uso it. The gifts of healing of which St. Paul speaks are perpetuated in tho labour of those who bring'the resources of science to tho relief of suffering in accordance with tho laws of Nature. I look forward to the time wheiit tho superstitions of which I have spoken will .'have-.been'.-, -discredited, when tho inter-connection-of mind and body -will bo better understood, and when : even moro than is now the case the physician of the body will also be the physician of mind and soul."