tender plants under their care. Our churches are to the moral welfare of the community as our schools are to the intellectual. The church has been aptly termed ‘God’s Garden,’ where the art of living good lives and the making of character is helped by specially appointed gardeners. It is needless to say, however, that the light of reason or sanity, as bestowed upon us by Nature, is the light to which all other considerations must give way lest we in our turn too soon pass the borderland of knowing things as they are. MEDICAL ASPECTS OF MENTAL HEALING BY H. G. G. MACKENZIE, M.A., M.B. MEDICAL ASPECTS OF MENTAL HEALING BY H. G. G. MACKENZIE, M.A., M.B. I. _Spiritual Healing in the Light of Modern Medical Science_ I have been asked in this chapter to put together some recent expressions of opinion by members of my own profession on the subject of ‘mental’ and ‘spiritual’ healing. No attempt whatever is made to give an exhaustive summary. It will be sufficient for my purpose if I can make clear to the non-medical reader-- (1) That there is nothing new in the elaborate and confident pretensions now being thrust forward by a variety of ‘healers.’ (2) That, so far from scientific medicine ‘standing helpless in the presence of a new phenomenon,’ she is in possession of a very large amount of clinical material on which quite definite conclusions have been formed; and, as always, she is perfectly ready to consider and investigate any new evidence which might tend to mitigate the force of such conclusions. Now, there are obviously two main lines of investigation. We may consider (1) the _à priori_ reasonableness of the claim that certain bodily diseases can be cured by ‘mental’ or spiritual processes, or we may proceed to (2) an _à posteriori_ investigation of cases of alleged cures. A third method of investigation, that which is, of course, adopted in _all_ cases of scientific treatment of disease by new methods, viz. the tabulation of all cases treated, with the diagnosis, extent of disease, immediate and permanent results, negative as well as positive, noted in each case, is not usually possible, since no psychic or spiritual healer whom I have ever met seems to consider such tabulation at all necessary or even desirable. In the first place, I submit a somewhat long quotation from an admirable paper[11] by one of the greatest medical authorities in the English-speaking world, Professor W. Osler. [11] _The Treatment of Disease_, by W. Osler, M.D., F.R.S. London: Henry Frowde. 1909.