Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of DiseaseWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing
Most of the influence that was acquired by men who in the course of
history claimed to have a heavenly mission has been due, as with
healers heretofore referred to, to reputed cures made by them. Trace
the story of this among the Eastern nations in the old time. The
pseudo-Messiahs of the Jews always advanced as one evidence their
healing power, but so did the founders of religions among all the
other nations of antiquity. It must be borne in mind, however, that
many of the queer religions of after times were founded by men who
claimed to have a Messiahship, and put forth, as the evidence of a
divine commission, their power to cure the afflicted. Sometimes the
men who made these claims were good men. In many cases they were
apparently self-deceived. Very often, however, they had no claim to
goodness in the commonly accepted meaning of that term, for they
counseled the violation of moral precepts, made exceptions, for their
own benefit, to general laws, and exploited their followers for
selfish reasons. Provided their followers had confidence in them,
however, they continued to work cures, so that even reasonable people
were likely to be led to the thought that there must be something
supernatural about their activities. In every century there have been
two or three men who have thus secured a following, and apparently
healed many diseases.
The phenomena of faith-healing as the result of belief in the heavenly
mission of special men, are as common now as at any time. Dr. Cutten
in his "Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing" (_Scribners_, 1911)
has a chapter on "Healers of the Nineteenth Century," which shows how
many phenomena of faith-healing can be studied in recent generations.
Some of the men and the women who are mentioned secured wide
reputations throughout our own country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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