ively known as Christian Scientists], there are about thirty
organized churches, and also one hundred and twenty societies which
maintain regular Sunday services, though not yet having church
organization. There are also between forty and fifty dispensaries and
reading rooms, and a rapidly increasing literature, both of standard
works and periodicals. One of the other schools, distinctively known
as Mind Cure, has also a large number of organizations similar in
character. The number of regularly graduated practitioners cannot be
accurately estimated, but they are numbered by the thousand. Of the
million more or less of believers in the principles of mind healing,
it may be admitted that perhaps a large majority, in the event of
severe acute illness, would still make some use of old remedies, or
would combine both where circumstances would allow. Life-long habits
are tenacious; to defy the force of public opinion, the importunity of
friends and the overwhelming aggregation of surrounding belief, is a
trying ordeal. Until public opinion softens, mental healing in its
purity will be mainly employed in chronic troubles, or at least for
those which are not of a sudden and acute nature. Mind healers would
differ in acute cases, as to how far those who have had no previous
growth of trust in unseen forces should be left to those alone. In the
present stage of progress in mind healing, there should be nothing
which would require anyone to dispense with reasonable nursing nor
with common sense. Some things which are ideally and abstractly true,
can only be fully realized in the future, and it is not well to
prematurely use them before the conditions are fully ripened.

All new innovations, no matter how much needed, have had to pass
through a period when "they were everywhere spoken against." The time
is not distant when personal liberty in respect to choice in one's
method of healing may be enjoyed without unpleasant criticism or
notoriety.

The more important schools which agree in the one cardinal principle
of healing through mind, designate their respective systems as
Christian Science, Mind Cure, and Christian Metaphysics. These terms,
in common use, are somewhat interchangeable. There are also those who
combine mind healing with Theosophy, and still others who differ in
non-essentials. What is distinctively known as "Faith Cure" has
little in common with those before named. Its theory is that disease
is healed by special