The response you are good enough to desire can be but brief, crude, and, I fear, too blunt; but I have not time for careful consideration. I can only indicate a few points which occur to me offhand, and taking much for granted. For instance, I must avoid any discussion of those antinomies which meet us at every side of human conceptions, and be content to accept the common uses. The chief of these (for the moment) is that of the material and spiritual; without forgetting that they melt at their borders the one into the other, and that we meet with corresponding ambiguities, yet I must take them as distinct fields of human life. In our interesting personal conversation you may remember that I expressed the opinion that, on the whole, our prayers must not be for material but for spiritual things. And, speaking on the whole, sickness is a material thing. In the stories of our Lord’s miracles it has always struck me that He regarded His miracles--I must use the word for brevity--apologetically. The disciples were not to tell any man of them; or again, a miracle was performed under a compelling sense of the overwhelming faith of the pleader, which was the main thing. Faith, prayer, were to be for the needs of the soul, not of the body. For instance, the father seeing his child in diphtheria would please God better--so the experience of His world tells us--by spending his first hour in seeking the physician with his antidote rather than in prayer for a divine intervention. And when time came for prayer he would pray not for a suspension of natural law but for unity of his own will with that of the Father, and for the child’s spiritual welfare. Into the origin of evil do not fear that I shall enter; it is one of the antinomies which I have said that we must avoid, at any rate at present: I can only now say that disease is a material effect to be combated by material means, and not by religious processions or intercessions. This being my view, I would try to eliminate notions of the priest as medicine man; they are essentially pagan, though to this day they more or less unconsciously influence our thoughts on the present subject.