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FAITH OR SUGGESTION?
have no rivals. In faith the whole consciousness is active.
Experience has an affective emphasis which warrants us in
speaking of an act of will or decision by which the individual
surrenders fully and unreservedly to the ideas held by
faith. ;
The final distinction between suggestion and faith—religious
faith—is a sharp one. When an individual is the subject of a
purposeful suggestion he waits for the situation to occur in which
the suggestion can be translated into action. Religious faith is
not an attitude to occurrences, but a stretching out of the whole
being towards the personal reality that stands behind all
occurrences. In faith, man experiences the reality of communion
with a higher being; and this intercourse he considers to be the
ground of everything that he experiences.
Healing Through Faith
During recent years theologians, psychologists and physicians
have taken great interest in the occurrence called spiritual or
faith healing. It provides examples of the fact that strange
powers can be set to work in man by some agency akin to
_ suggestion and faith.
In his very remarkable book, Three Lectures, K. H. Giertz, a
Swedish surgeon, says it is more than probable that in some very
intractable forms of functional nervous disorder
psychotherapeutic treatment is not alone sufficient to bring about a cure:
the word of the physician must be reinforced by the prayer of
faith which mobilises the spiritual resources of the patient.
These forces do the healing work, and recovery will not occur
without their aid.
But apart from such cases, he writes, there are others that
appear to be miraculous cures, and it is these especially that
physicians, believers and patients should together strive to
understand. There can be no doubt that, from a medical point
of view, treatment by prayer and anointing really has cured
and does cure some cases as completely as the physician or
psychologist can; nor indeed that such spiritual measures have
sometimes succeeded where all others have failed. Such healings
can, Giertz believes, properly be called miraculous, in that they
occur for no explainable reason. ‘But,’ he continues, ‘whether
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