Yes, but even our prayers have necessary limitations arising from our imperfect knowledge, and when St. James declared that the prayer of faith shall save the sick, he spoke at a time when scientific investigation was non-existent, and when people must have been sorely distressed by their total inability to overcome the diseases from which those around them were suffering. But for us, whose physical knowledge is so much more exact, to refuse to accept the remedies which hard and patient toil has discovered, under God’s help and guidance (there whether we recognise it or not), is both presumptuous and foolish. Spiritual Healing--i.e. a quasi-miraculous process--_must_ die a natural death, even if the agony is prolonged. It is simply pandering to charlatanism, and by its exaltation of the Health of the Body, is almost pagan in its effects. It is, moreover, an emphatic expression of individualism at a time when co-operation in every direction is the natural and right trend of affairs; for truly never did we feel so strongly as now, that no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself--as true of nations as of individuals. It is, therefore, in the highest sense, reactionary, and a sentimental attempt to put the clock back, which is doomed to failure. Take one item, which is wrapped up in this idea of Spiritual Healing, and that is Demoniac Possession. This was an ancient belief, as is shown by some of the miracles narrated in the Gospels, and there is an attempt to revive it in the present day, and with that, a practice of Exorcism as a cure for it. ‘But,’ and here I quote from ‘Religion and Medicine,’ ‘it is a significant fact that as education spreads, belief in demoniac possession dies out, and the greatest strongholds of the belief to-day are in non-Christian countries.’ A possible explanation of this is, that in Christian countries, spiritual forces have been actively at work for many generations, and that this spiritual activity has weakened the power of the forces of evil. There is, too, no blinking the question that the behaviour of insane people, or even of people supposed to be insane, might be explained on the theory of demoniac possession. For example, how often one sees people generally good and kind, and even truly religious, go suddenly into a fury of temper or violence of some kind; or in delirium we know that quite sweet, innocent people say dreadful things which one would think they could not even _know_. No doubt to some people the temporary possession by some evil spirit is a more comfortable theory than that it is a revelation of the natural man in us, when discipline and training are in some way relaxed, and that such is our _real_ nature let loose.