IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR a
young doctor, working in the desert amongst troops stationed north of Baghdad,
talked about his dreams to two young chaplains far into the night. I was one of
the chaplains.
That doctor was a remarkable
man. He practiced psychological treatment of an impressive kind when what was
then called "The New Psychology" was very new indeed. He practiced
hypnotism, both as a means of investigating the deep mind of the patient and
also of giving him suggestions of courage, confidence and recovery. Further, he
had as great a spiritual faith and power as I have ever seen. He would go out
into the desert, and for hours he would concentrate his mind on one patient
with a kind of spiritual intention. On returning he would sometimes find
remarkable results. The patient, previously sleepless, would be asleep; or,
discontented, would have found peace of mind; or, in despair, had begun to
believe in his own recovery. In one case, a man apparently unable to walk was
walking about the ward. The doctor claimed that when he had done all he could
for a patient by all the arts of medicine, the turning point an the illness was
sometimes determined by adding this form of prayerful concentration.
Janet* tells us that when Quimby died, Mrs.
Glover
seized his manuscript books on religion and disease, copied them out, added
"interpretations" of the Bible and weird commentaries of her own.
Janet says, "This unlettered woman, who was unable to pen a grammatical sentence,
and did not understand the first principles of punctuation, undertook to write
a book." This was the beginning of the book Science and Health, described
as "the new revelation which was to make an end of all diseases."
* I have quoted some material here from my former book, Psychology in Service of the Soul
(Macmillan, 1930). That material was gathered from various sources, mainly
Janet's great work, Psychological Healing, Vol. I. Janet draws many of his
facts, as Dakin does, from The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of
Christian Science, by Georgine Milmine, published in New York and London in
1909. Since these facts have not been conclusively contradicted by Christian Scientists,
although my own book was published twenty years ago, I assume that the facts
set down in the text above may be accepted.
Leslie D(ixon) Weatherhead ~ Psychology
Religion And Healing (1951)
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