The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William JamesOf course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by specialmiracle have at all times been recognized within the church’s pale,almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. Itwas one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still tobe possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confessionand conversion on the patient’s part, and prayer on the priest’s, wasquite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. ChristophBlumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years.Blumhardt’s Life by Zundel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives inchapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healingactivity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition.Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical character,and in this part of his work followed no previous model. InChicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a ScottishBaptist preacher, whose weekly “Leaves of Healing” were in the yearof grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denouncesthe cures wrought in other sects as “diabolical counterfeits” of hisown exclusively “Divine Healing,” must on the whole be countedinto the mind-cure movement. In mind-cure circles the fundamentalarticle of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is whollyof the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should nottolerate ourselves on any lower terms.An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with theforce of a revelation. The mind-cure with its gospel of healthymindednesshas come as a revelation to many whose hearts the churchChristianity had left hardened. It has let loose their springs of higherlife. In what can the originality of any religious movement consist,save in finding a channel, until then sealed up, through which thosesprings may be set free in some group of human beings?The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above allthe force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in thiskind of success. If mind-cure should ever become official, respectillnessis mortification’s very masterpiece, and consequently the triumphof mortified souls.’” According to this view, disease should in any case besubmissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even beblasphemous to wish it away.107