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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
such miracles can occur as the immediate healing of an
inoperable cancer, the renewed growth of an amputated finger or the
cure of an organic nervous disease, I do not consider established.’
While it is undoubtedly against God’s original will that
illness, suffering and death should occur in this world, and
although He does not send suffering and disease, He must
tolerate them and may turn them to his own ends. They may
therefore have a place in His plan for the individual.
The prayer of faith is not a method of treatment in
competition with others. No doubt such a prayer or an act of anointing
may have strong suggestive effects, and it would be useless to
try to calculate to what extent suggestion or faith is operative in
any given instance. The question is whether the faith that does
become effective is living and true. Strange things can happen
where, from the observer’s point of view, faith seems
comparatively weak. Nevertheless from the religious point of view
the important thing is the fact that contact is made between the
patient and the God who wills our health.
We can properly think of every healing process as an
expression of Divine action whether it occurs, as far as we can judge,
through natural processes or by means beyond them. In this
. sense every physician is a fellow-worker with God. A miracle of
healing means that God intervenes directly and in exceptional
ways. A person who prays with or for a diseased man or woman
does not supplant the physician: he merely leads the patient to
the Great Physician. No treatment or method of healing,
however skilful, can replace the centrally important thing—the
contact between a living soul and the living Christ.
Those who take responsibility for another’s soul have the
same mission as the men who carried the lame man to the house
where Jesus was. Their actions were fearless and practical, but
everything they did would have been in vain if they had not
brought the patient into the presence of the Healer.
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