ng acquired official status, is
unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a
wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into
the varying susceptibilities of individual cases. "Suggestion" is only
another name for the power of ideas, SO FAR AS THEY PROVE EFFICACIOUS
OVER BELIEF AND CONDUCT. Ideas efficacious over some people prove
inefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some
human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas
of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction
to-day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the
whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained
it there, the mere blank waving of the word "suggestion" as if it were
a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay
on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion,
concludes by saying that "Religion [and by this he seems to mean our
popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics,
and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious] ideas will
do anything for us that can be done." And this in spite of the actual
fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely NOTHING, or did
nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue.[55]

[55] Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard
sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as
chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and,
in the Catholic Church, of earning "merit." "Illness," says a good
Catholic writer P. Lejeune: (Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218),
"is the most excellent corporeal mortifications, the mortification
which one has not one's self chosen, which is imposed directly by God,
and is the direct expression of his will. 'If other mortifications are
of silver,' Mgr. Gay says, 'this one is of gold; since although it
comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its
greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of
God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how
efficacious it is! ... I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long
illness is mortification's very masterpiece, and consequently the
triumph of mortified souls.'" According to this view, disease should in
any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain
circum