Faith Healing

His subordinate priests last week commanded elderly Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, to write them out an Office for faith healing. They want him to prescribe what unctions to use, how to apply them, how to "lay on hands," what prayers to utter and in what order. Perforce the Archbishop, who is Anglican Primate of All England, will prepare such Office. But his version will endure only until the Canterbury House of Bishops prepares an official prescription. It will of course have no authenticity other than exemplary in the Archdiocese of York or other subdivisions of the Church of England.*

England's demand for faith healing became apparent at last week's Canterbury convocation in London. Anglican priests and bishops want faith healing authenticated and formalized under the strict discipline of the Church for two reasons: 1) many have been anointing the sick and laying their hands on them in dismayingly haphazard fashion; 2) they wish to combat Christian Science, which they consider a growing menace to the Church of England. In sundry ways the Anglicans showed how appalled they were that London now has twelve Christian Science churches, whereas five years ago the number was only seven, and ten years ago only three. A Rev. T. F. Monahan was moved to state harshly: "I don't suppose there's any more fantastic theory than that on which Christian Science is founded, and yet I suppose there's no means of faith healing that has been so successful in many cases as what's called Christian Science."

Christian Scientists believe that pain is an illusion. If an ill person accepts that belief without doubt, then he will be cured.

Faith healers on the other hand admit that pain and disease really exist. But if the patient profoundly believes in God, God neutralizes the ill and drives it out. Ointments, laying on of hands, prayer help make the belief curative.

This identity of religion and medicine goes back to man's earliest thought. The Babylonians had no doctors as such. Nor for a long time did the Egyptians. And it was a long time before some of the priests of Aesculapius set up a separate medical guild outside the temple walls on the Island of Cos, and a longer time before the guild admitted laymen. Hippocrates (400-359 B. C.) was the Father of Medicine. His medicine was pragmatic, had nothing to do with theology.

Christianity gave a new world-impetus to religious healing. Jesus cured. The Apostles cured. After the 3rd Century faith in miracles changed to confidence in sacred relics, a confidence which persists at Roman Catholic shrines, such as Lourdes and Canada's St. Anne de Beaupre. Then the Reformation revived faith healing. Luther performed some cures through faith. The Moravians and Waldenses anointed with oil. Baptists, Quakers and Methodists produced "strokers.'' The Temple at Zion. Ill. contains a stupendous number of crutches and other physical aids discarded by cured believers.

Doctors approve to a limited extent treatment through faith. A favorable mental attitude, such as strong faith produces, can help cure disease, especially mental disease.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S. A., counterpart of the Church of England, in a resolution by its 1928 general convention was thankful for the ''growing recognition of the healing power of God.'' Faith clinics for nervous and mental disorders have been established at various churches under their bishops' approval. Patients are examined successively by a physician, a psychiatrist, a priest. The "confession" to the priest and his consolation are all that the patient often needs. They cure him.

*Although Cosmo Gordon Lang is second in command after King George V (titular head of the Church of England), William Temple, Archbishop of York and Primate of England, is a potent and virtually independent third. It would require a convocation of both archdioceses, such as met four years ago, to formulate such a new Office for the entire Church of England.

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