Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
Its key-words are Harmony, Realization, Affirmation and Poise. Just here
New Thought is a strangely interwoven web. It makes much of "vibration"
and "friction." It is evidently under the spell of the wave theory of
light and heat. It is most dependable in its analysis and application of
laws of mental action, most undependable in trying to account for the
relation of mind to body and in its explanation of the physical
phenomena of disease. Fatigue, for example, "is evidently due to the
calling of power into a new direction. It [evidently the power] comes
into contact with dense matter, with an uncultivated portion of the
being, physical as well as mental, and meeting with resistance friction
of some sort is the natural result." One has only to compare a statement
like that with Cannon's careful study of bodily changes under emotional
states, to see the difference between speculation controlled by analogy
and the illuminating experimental methods of modern science.
When Dresser adds that "we shall eliminate disease not by fighting it,
not by studying its causes, or doctoring its physical effects, but by
seeing the wisdom of the better way," he is on dangerous ground, for if
we are not to study the causes of disease but to take as our guide the
serene generalizations of a speculative mind we are shutting in our
faces one of the doors by which we enter into that knowledge of the mind
of God, of which New Thought makes so much. How shall we know the mind
of God except as we ask endless patient and careful questions of every
revelation of the divine method, whether in sickness or health?
New Thought, however, takes a far more constructive view of suffering
than Christian Science. For New Thought suffering is at least
disciplinary and instructive: it compels reflection: it brings us to a
knowledge of the law. It is certainly, therefore, just and it may be
kind. Indeed, New Thought occasionally goes so far as to say that
suffering is also a revelation of love and must be so accepted and
entertained. Its general conclusions in this region are far more safe
than its insistence upon vibration and friction and its spacious
technicalities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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