FAITH-HEALING A FACT.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1380, 18 August 1885, Page 3

FAITH-HEALING A FACT.

There can be no question (the Lancet says) that faith-healing is a fact. The brain is not simply the organ of the mind ; it is also the chief centre, or series of centres, of the nervous system by which the whole body is energised, and its component parts, with their several functions, are governed and regulated. There is no miracle in healing by faith ; whereas it would be a miracle, if the organism being constituted as it is, and the laws of life such as they are, faith-healing did not under favorable conditions occur. The fallacy of those who proclaim faithhealing as a religious function lies in the fact that (hey misunderstand and misinterpret their own formula. It is the faith that heals, not the hypothecated source, or object of faith outside the subject of faith. The vhole process is selfcontained. Nothing is done for the believer; his act' of believing is the motor force of his cure. We all remember the old trick for making a man ill by persistently telling him he is ill until ho believes it. The contrary of this is making a man well by inducing him to believe himself to be so. The number of “miracles” performed will be the precise number of persons who are capable of being thrown in a state of mind and body in which “faith” dominates the organic state. Pathologists will limit the area of this process to the province of functional disease; but we are not sure that they are justified by scientific facts in making this limitation, It must not be forgotten that function goes before organism in development, and that there are large classes of cases in which the disabilities of a diseased organ for a fair performance of its functions are mainly due to want of power or irregularity in action. And it is a fact in pathology that, if the functions of an organ be maintained or restored, much of the destructive metamorphis due to proliferation of connective tissue, fatty deposit, or even certain forms of atrophic change in which the nuceil of cell-life are rather denuded than destroyed, may be arrested and to some extent repaired. The vis medicairia naturae is a very potent factor in the amelioration of disease, if it only be allowed fair play. An excess of “ faith ” as a rule suspends the operation of adverse influences, aud appeals strongly through the consciousness to the inner and underlying faculty of vital force. It is well that these poor persons should be benefited by some means—itmatters little what; and if they can be “healed by faith” we ought to be very glad, and thankful too.