ity, put
to shame most Protestant churches. Its rituals combine in an unusual way
the simple and the dramatic. It is so fortunately situated as to be able
to keep finance--which is a trying element in Protestant Church life--in
the background. Its followers have that apostolic fervour which attaches
to movements sure of their divine commission and not yet much worn by
time. It possesses distinctly one of Sir Henry Jones' hall-marks of
religion. "It impassions the spirit of its disciples and adds
consequence to the things it sanctions or condemns."

It draws upon deeply established Christian reverences and faiths. It
secures for its authority the persistent but perplexed faith in the
Bible which the average Protestant inherits and for those who believe in
it the force of this authority is no wise weakened by the fact that by
every sound canon of Biblical interpretation it is illicit. Its very
dogmatism is an asset. It could not do its work if it were less sure.
The confusions of the systems which try the critically minded are a
contribution to the devout who find in them an added opportunity for
faith. Its experience meetings create enthusiasm and confidence. It is,
in short, more than any one of the movements we are here considering, a
clearly defined cult whose intensities, limitations and mystic
assurances all combine to produce among its disciples the temper most
favourable to suggestion and it locks up on its force as a system of
healing.

An accurate analysis of what it actually accomplishes would require an
immense and probably impossible labour--a knowledge of each case, an
accurate diagnosis when even for the trained diagnostician the thing is
difficult enough, and the following up of all reported cases. The
medical faculty would probably have done better to have taken such
movements as these more seriously and to have brought to them a trained
investigation which, except in the case of Lourdes, has never even been
attempted. Doubtless there is looseness and inconsistency in the whole
system. Almost any one who has had a practical observation of the
working of Christian Science has knowledge enough not only of looseness
and inconsistency but of what seems to the non-Christian Science mind
positive untruth. Something, however, must always be allowed here for
the way in which the mind acts under excitement and for the way in which
delusion deludes. All this combines to make any final judgment in this
region diff