Another circumstance which handicaps the enthusiastic votaries of each of the schools consists in the tendency of all reformers to claim too much for their systems. Forgetting that they have to deal with a generation of people with a hereditary belief in the power of medicines to cure disease, a people whose habits of life and thought are materialistic to the last degree, they expect to change that belief instantaneously, and cause the new method to take the place of the old in all cases and under all circumstances. In other words, they expect to cure all diseases by mental methods alone, and they seek to prohibit their patients from employing any other physician or using any medicines whatever. This is wrong in theory and often dangerous in practice. It may be true, and doubtless is, that one great source of the power of drugs to heal disease is attributable to the mental impression created upon the mind of the patient at the time the drug is administered. This being true, it follows that when a patient believes in drugs, drugs should be administered. If Christian science or any other mental method of healing can then be made available as an auxiliary, it should be employed. But this is just what the ultra-reformers refuse to do. They insist upon the discharge of the family physician, and the destruction of all the medicines in the house, before they will undertake to effect a cure by mental processes. It frequently happens that the patient is not sufficiently well grounded in the new faith, or is afflicted with some disease not readily reached by mental processes, and dies on their hands, when perhaps he might have been saved by the combined efforts of the family doctor and the Christian scientist. Be that as it may, when the patient dies under such circumstances, the Christian scientist must needs bear the brunt of popular condemnation. It goes without saying that one such case does more to retard the progress of mental therapeutics in popular estimation than a thousand miraculous cures can do to promote it. Again, much harm is done to the cause of mental healing by claiming for it too wide a field of usefulness. Theoretically, all the diseases which flesh is heir to are curable by mental processes. Practically, the range of its usefulness is comparatively limited. The lines of its field are not clearly defined, however, for the reason that so much depends on the idiosyncrasies of each individual patient. A disease which can be cured in one case refuses to yield in another, the mental attitudes of the patients not being the same. Besides, the mental environment of the patient has much to do with his amenability to control by mental processes. In an atmosphere of incredulity, doubt, and prejudice, a patient stands little chance of being benefited, however strong may be his own faith in mental therapeutics. Every doubt existing in the minds of those surrounding him is inevitably