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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More important still is the possibility that treatment, that might be effective in the early stage of a disease, may be postponed until too late, in order that a trial may be given to Spiritual Healing. It is all very well to say that ordinary medical means are recognised and that the follies of the Peculiar People and of the Christian Scientist will be avoided; but it must be remembered that a literal reading of the text of St. James undoubtedly may suggest to a deeply religious person that medical methods are of minor importance. ‘The Prayer of Faith shall save the Sick’: is it not possible that the sufferer may possess a grain of that faith that will remove mountains? And in the end that small focus of malignant disease, that might have been eradicated by the surgeon’s knife, has extended and disseminated itself until all hope of cure is gone. And such results are more likely to follow while this treatment remains in the hands of untrained laymen. There is great danger that an earnest person, with limited knowledge both of theology and of medicine, may come to regard himself as superior to theologian and physician, owing to the fervour of his faith, combined possibly with a belief that he is endowed with special powers. It is on practical points such as these that the medical man is entitled to expect an expression of the views of the Church; and in this connexion it is permissible to hope that in the examination of ‘special powers’ the authorities of the Church will be content to be sceptics, in the true sense of the word, until irrefutable proofs of the possession of these powers are produced.