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

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So much for the ‘miracles’; which owe nothing to any sacerdotal magic, and to the physician are part of a familiar experience, and of a familiar interpretation. But giving up the hysterical cases—which, by the way, is to give up a good deal—and admitting that disease is in the body a material thing, and one not properly matter for the pleading of prayer, except in the spiritual sense of submission to the Divine order, between these positions is there a sphere in which spiritual influences—whether by a clergyman or a Biblewoman or a gentle friend—may so infuse peace and confidence into a sick man as to promote even in the body a renewal, a conversion, or an economy of energy which should make for recovery? Certainly; and here, I think, is the restricted, if still important, sphere of religion as medical.

To consider this aspect of the matter we must go back for a moment to certain principles. From the letters of Teresa—that noble saint—we may learn much of the greatest value to us in the present inquiry. We may learn from her to distrust the ‘ecstasies and melancholies’ which—as she said—were ‘the perils of conventual life’; she roundly denounced all that ‘letting one’s self go, outside the control of reason,’ which has its origin in ‘sick brains.’