The longing for freedom from pain becomes the one aim for which we are to be religious. In a time which denies all absolute ideals, which seeks the meaning of truth only in a pragmatic usefulness, it may be quite consistent to seek the meaning of religion in its service for removal of pain, and personal enjoyment. But in that case the ideal of both religion and truth is lost. It is finally not less undignified for religion to seek support for the religious belief in effects which it shares and knows that it shares with any superstitious belief on earth. Granted that the church can cure: the shaman of Siberia can cure too, and the amulets of Thibet not less. The psychologizing church knows, therefore, that it is not the value of the religion which restores the unbalanced nervous system; and yet it wants to provide for the spreading of true belief by the miraculous cures which it exhibits. This situation naturally produces the desire of the church to substitute a religious explanation for a psychological one. It is claimed that after all it is not the mental effect of the prayer, but the prayer itself, not the psychophysical emotion of religion, but the value of religion which determines the cure. Yet in that moment the whole movement in its modern shape comes into a still more precarious position. If the cure results from the inner value of the religion how can we confine it to the so-called functional diseases and abstain from any hope in organic diseases? Luther, from his religious point of view, still had the right to separate the two groups because only those functional diseases were effects of the devil, obsessions which could be banished by the minister and by prayer, while the other diseases did not result from the devil, but merely from natural causes. Such a definition does not fit into the modern system. To-day from a really religious point of view, both groups of diseases must be acknowledged to be natural or with Mrs. Eddy, as the work of the unholy spirit. Christian Science is indeed by far more consistent. If the cure results through the meaning and value of religion, there is no reason whatever why cancer and diphtheria and paralysis should not be cured as well as psychasthenia. And if, on the other hand, organic diseases cannot be cured because the psychophysical process of the religious emotion has no influence over diphtheria bacilli, then the whole process is removed to the causal sphere and it is acknowledged that the purposive meaning of religion is not in question at all. The whole system of such religious psychotherapeutics is therefore in its inner structure contradictory. It contains causal and purposive elements without any possibility of unifying them. They are loosely mixed, and the power of prayer means on one page something entirely different from what it means on another. In these respects Christian Science is by far more unified and in harmony with itself; its therapeutics is really anchored in a system.