Parallel to this neglect of physical theory goes, of course, the neglect
of the physical factors in the disease. The physician may have justly
diagnosed that the case is "merely" neurasthenia or hysteria and not a
brain tumor or paralysis of the brain. Yet that does not mean in the
least that a real treatment which remains in harmony with the progress
of modern medicine ought to ignore the hundred physical elements which
enter daily into the disease. There are the most complex digestive
problems involved which demand a thorough understanding of chemical
metabolism, there are still more complex problems of the sexual organs
which the minister certainly ought not to discuss with his female
parishioners, there are bacteriological questions, there are questions
of the peripheral nervous system and sense organs; in short, questions
which belong to a world into which the minister as minister has never
looked. Even if he believes he might gather in an amateurish way some
information as to those questions which lie so far from his experience
as student of divinity, how can his half-baked knowledge compare with
the experienced study of the regular physician? Such physical questions
cannot be settled by the preparatory examination of the physician; they
come up every day during the treatment and what the spiritual diet which
the minister offers may help, may at the same time be ruined by the
physical diet about which the minister without chemistry cannot judge.
But let us abstract from the bodily aspect. Is the situation really very
different for the mental one? The appeal to the religious emotion, the
reenforcement of religious faith is from the religious point of view
certainly the one central effort from which everything has to irradiate.
The unity of this controlling thought is the glory of such inspiration.
But as soon as we handle this thought as a psychotherapeutic remedy,
destined to restitute the disturbed psychological equilibrium, it
becomes evident that the very uniformity of it makes it a clumsy,
inadjustable pattern. If there is anything which impresses the careful
student of psychology, it is the over-rich manifoldness, the complexity
of mental life. Even the simplest content of consciousness is a tissue
woven from millions of threads and any stereotyped influence means
crudeness and destruction. The minister's attitude towards inner life is
there directly opposite to that of the psychologist. He cannot enter
into those endless interplays of associations and memories, or
inhibitions and sensations and impulses, he cannot examine from which
remote psychological sources those ideas have arisen, how the feelings
become disturbed and the judgments sidetracked. He should not analyze
even if he could, because his whole aim is to synthesize. He asks for
the meaning and not for the structure, for the aims and not for the
elements. His therapeutic effort is therefore not even directed towards
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