uffering."[48]

[48] H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.

"Man," to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him before
his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life
is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole
mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows
its shrunken pattern and specification ... Think of the millions of
sensitive and responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under
the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that
health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love?
exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though
unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean of
morbidity."[49]

[49] Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography. Boston,
1899, p. 54.

Although the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian
terminology, one sees from such quotations how widely their notion of
the fall of man diverges from that of ordinary Christians.[50]

[50] Whether it differs so much from Christ's own notion is for the
exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and
disease much as our mind-curers do. "What is the answer which Jesus
sends to John the Baptist?" asks Harnack, and says it is this: "'The
blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf
hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the poor.' That
is the 'coming of the kingdom,' or rather in these saving works the
kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of
need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new
time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this
work of redemption, but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of
his mission. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address
himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism.
He never makes groups and departments of the ills, he never spends time
in asking whether the sick one 'deserves' to be cured; and it never
occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere
says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a
healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All
evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the
great kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the saviour within
him.