A FAITH-HEALING CONFERENCE.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 467, 30 April 1890, Page 3

A FAITH-HEALING CONFERENCE.

AliscUievons Proceedings. (From Our Special Correspondent.) London, February 28. A gentleman who took a back seat at the recent Faith-healing Conference in S.E. London sends the “Daily News” an instructive description of the proceedings. “ The Conference,” he says, “ was to be held in a dilapidated-looking little hall, in a soul-depressing little street, somewhere in that desolate expanse of London lying between the Walworth Road and the Old Kent Road. Ah, me ! What wonder that people are sick and sad and ailing and miserable, and ready to be led away by any fanatical craze that seems to offer a hope of relief when, all the year round, the dead of. winter and the breezy spring and sweltering heat of summer, they are doomed to struggle along in these dreary, depressing, little lanes and alleys of Lower London ? The ‘ hall ’ was even worse than the streets the dullest, dismallesb, dolefullest little den that ever sent a man’s spirits down to zero. Somehow, almost all the people wore in black, or something approaching it# the platform was arranged in funereal drapery, and the' eight or ten good people behind the table upon it looked all of a piece with it. “ Bub our president, who was speaking when I entered, was bright and cheery and eminently inspiriting—as indeed he had good reason to be, for hadn’t he been sorely afflicted for years with ulcers in the stomach and gout in his feet? Didn’t his wife for years take twenty-seven pints—or were they half-pints ?—of milk a week, because he could take nothing else, and couldn’t he now eat and drink whatever he pleased, and didn’t he stamp across the platform like a couple of Woolwich steamhammers, just to show us that he had got rid of his gout? Who could be cheery if he couldn’t ? Bless the good man’s heart ! ’twere nothing but sheer cynical unchatitableness to doubt that he really honestly believed all he said. Mostcertainlylshould say he had been a sufferer for years with chronic indigestion and gout, and then he was seemingly a hale and hearty man of sixty years of age or thereabouts, going about from place to place—entirely at his own cost, he assured us, though only a working man —proclaiming the faith that was in him. Would that we all had a similar faith in something in Heaven above and the earth beneath, and a similiar decree of grit and energy to promulgate what we believe. Bub alack for the good man’s reasoning ! How I wished he had had a good sound rubbing in of a little logic before his indigestion had gob out of order, so that he might have had some sorb of a notion as to when a thing could reasonably be said to be proved. But though 1 couldn’t away with his arguments I liked the man.' He had a good, hearty, vigorous knock-down style of oratory, and seemed thoroughly genuine and sincere, and as bo the former state of his stomach,if youdidn’t believe him, why there in his little black bag he had a doctor’s certificate. What more could any reasonable investigator require ? “ The next good brother had nob a doctor’s certificate with him, but he could, if need be, show us heaps of doctors’ bills—all receipted, I hope, bub he didn’t say—for which he seemed to have received no benefit whatever. This speaker had a rather light and piping treble, bub he insisted upon it that he was proclaiming truth with a trumpet voice when he declared what had been done for him. Up till five years ago, I think he said, he had been in a decidedly queer way, and he had taken enough doctors’ stuff to swim in. He had lost his hearing on one eido of his head, and his eyesight was beginning bo fail; his liver was out of order too, and he was apt to tumble down in the street. In all these matters there had been a blessed improvement. I am glad to say he was perfectly candid with us. It eeemeci of course only reasonable to suppose that if his cure had come to him as he believed it had in response bo his faith, it would have been complete and perfect. Bub, good honest soul, he was fain to confess that that dull ear of his was only partially restored, but still it was capable of doing him good useful service, and for this a brother on the other side the table cried ‘Hallelujah!’ with great fervour. As to the eyes, too, all he felt justified in saying about them was that ho could still get along without glasses. * Praise the Lord !’ ejaculated the brother opposite. The liver was clearly all right, or he couldn’t have been so cheerful as he was for the most part, though I thought there was just a touch of it in a momentary lapse into the dumps when he complained of those of his own household—no doubt the best judges of the matter, by the way—who had no faith in his cure ; but then, of course, there was an appropriate text of Scripture bearing on this point.

“Then the congregation sang a hymn, and a quiet, respectable-looking man rose by the side of his ‘ dear wife 1 in the body of the hall and recounted his own conversion to faith-healing, and his own experience. He had suffered for twenty-seven years from an injury to his spine by being thrown from a horse, and he had also suffered from chronic indigestion. He had been perfectly cured, and he and his were all believers in the efficacy of faith, and though his children had been down at death’s door, and they had.been tempted to call_ in a doctor, just as a precaution against an inquest, they had held firmly to their principles. Next came a woman who spoke in a quiet, refined voice, and began with a protest against the cynical, materialistic tendency of the times, and went on to tell of her sudden deliverance from ulceratedgbronchial tubes by which a doctor had assured her she had probably been affected from her childhood. It was impossible to doubt the good faith of this speaker, or indeed of any of them, and if one were asked to account for such an experience as was related on any other hypothesis than that propounded, he feels that he could no more do it than he could account for those long lists of remarkable testimonials to the efficacy of certain treatment continually being published by advertising practitioners, which one is often compelled to recognise as undoubtedly genuine, and yet totally unreliable and worthless. These are not exactly matters for coarse and unfeeling banter and ridicule. They are full of the pathos of human suffering, of the perplexity and bewilderment of life and of Providence, And yet one feels that something is due to public sentiment when every now and again we get in our policecourts poor, ignorant, deluded mortals who have stood by in anguish while their children have succumbed to diseases which a little rational treatment would have arrested. And when one sees this fanatical teaching spreading among people already sufficiently steeped in ignoi-ance and suffering, one feels constrained to protest.”