Читать книгу Medicine and the Church. Being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick онлайн

3 страница из 53

The temper of our age favours an inquiry conducted in a spirit which will neither disregard the requirements of science, nor rule miracles out of court as impossible. We need not be anxious as to the results. It looks, indeed, as if science were only just now awaking to the realisation of its possibilities through psychical treatment; and as if the Church had never yet realised to the full its responsibility and its power in ministration to sickness, and its influence over the reason and the imagination.

‘Suspect everything,’ says St. Teresa, as quoted by Sir Clifford Allbutt, ‘which weakens the use of our reason; for by such a way, we shall never attain to the liberty of the Spirit.’ ‘Prayer,’ says the British Medical Journal, in the article quoted above, ‘inspired by a living faith, is a force acting within the patient, which places him in the most favourable condition for the stirring of the pool of hope that lies, still and hidden it may be, in the depths of human nature.’ Truly, it is a tribute to the intellectual temper of our day that two such quotations, the one from a medieval saint, the other from a leading article in our modern medical journal, can appropriately be adduced in illustration of the spirit in which you have edited your volume. I trust it will have many readers. That it may promote the wise and temperate study of spiritual and mental, as well as of physical, forces and disorders, is my earnest hope and desire. That it may also tend to correct shallow and superficial delusions on the part of ignorant persons who imagine that they can dispense with scientific knowledge, and ignore the facts of mortality in suffering, disease, and death, is an expectation which I pray may be fulfilled.