SOUL AND BODY; 
OB, 
THE SPIRITUAL SCIENCE OF HEALTH 
AND DISEASE. 
BY 
W. F. EVANS, 
hi 
AUTHOR OF "MENTAL CURE," AND "MENTAL MEDICINE." 
" All diseases appertaining to man have correspondence with the spiritual world, for 
whatever in the whole of nature has not correspondence with the spiritual world has no 
existence, having no cause from which it can exist."- (Arcana Cclestia, 5711.) 
BOSTON: 
H. H. CARTER AND COMPANY, 
3 Beacon Str*eet. 
1876. Copyright. 
1876. 
WARREN F. EVANS. PREFACE. 
The generous appreciation which the public 
has accorded to the two previous volumes of the 
author has emboldened him to offer, for their 
acceptance, the present work. It has been pre- 
pared under many and pressing professional 
labors, which may account in part for any errors 
and imperfections it contains. The importance 
of the subjects discussed is indicated by the 
growing interest felt in them at the present time 
in the world. It is to be hoped that the work 
may contain something to meet the wants of those 
who are striving to attain a truly spiritual life, 
and that it may contribute an influence toward the 
restoration of the phrenopathic method of healing 
practised by Jesus, the Christ, and his primitive 
disciples. It has been the aim of the author to 
make the work scientifically religious, without be- 4 
PREFA CE . 
ing offensively theological. Of polemic theology 
the world has had a superabundance for the last 
three centuries. The religious nature of man has 
been surfeited and sickened with it. The sorest 
need of the world, at the present time, is not an 
increase of sectarian creeds, but a deeper and 
more intelligent spiritual life, which can come to 
us only from God, and the opening and descend- 
ing heavens. 
3 Beacon St., Boston, Mass., 
Dec. 11, 1875. CONTENTS. 
Pass 
CHAPTER I. 
The Spiritual Idea of Health and Disease .... 7 
CHAPTER II. 
The Spiritual Philosophy of the Cures wrought by Jesus, 
the Christ 39 
CHAPTER III. 
Faith and Fear, and their Relation to Health and Disease . 57 
CHAPTER IV. 
The Morbific and Sanative Influence of the Spiritual 
World, and how to communicate with that Realm of Life 
in Harmony with the Laws of Mind .... 79 
CHAPTER V. 
Prayer as the means of Spiritual and Bodily Health, and 
the Principle of Mediation 106 
CHAPTER VI. 
The Imposition of Hands, or the Magnetic Movement Cure, 
and the Rationale of its Efficiency 126 CHAPTER I. 
THE SPIRITUAL IDEA OF HEALTH AND DISEASE 
" I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth; 
On the last verge of mortal being stand, 
Close to the realms where angels have their birth, 
Just on the boundaries of the spirit-land." 
What that condition which we call health is, in its 
reality, and what is the correct idea of a diseased 
state, are fundamental inquiries. It is the office of the 
physician to promote the one and combat the other. 
But unless he has some definite conception of what 
disease is in its nature and essence, he is fighting 
against an unseen foe and at a disadvantage. If he is 
called to improve the health of a patient, to advise as 
to the best means of preserving or restoring it, his 
advice and efforts will be at random, unless he has a 
well-defined notion of what health is. The states of 
health and disease are opposites, and, as in the case 
of good and evil, if we get a correct idea of the one, 
we have the means of forming an accurate conception 
of the other. 
What we call disease, or that manifestation of it 
which conies to the cognizance of the senses in every 
morbid condition, may be organic or functional. It 
may be an actual lesion, a loss of continuity in a part, 8 
SOUL AND BODY. 
or, as is most frequently the case, only a disturbed 
action of an organ. But this is only the outward and 
visible effect of some interior and more hidden cause. 
Dr. Jahr has judiciously remarked : "We are to regard 
every given case of disease less as a local affection of 
this or that organ, causing a general derangement in 
the organism, than as a consequence of a disturbance 
in the principle which governs and preserves in har- 
mony all the vital functions of the body. From 
thence it results that, in practice, it is less important 
to remove the affection of an organ than to regulate 
the normal state of the principle of health in the 
organism; convinced that the normal state of this 
principle being re-established, all the consequences 
arising from its disturbances would also naturally 
cease, and in a much more certain and permanent 
manner, than if they had only been transferred from 
one part to another by derivatives, or momentarily 
suppressed by palliatives."-(Elementary Treatise 
upon Homoeopathy, p. 14.) 
What the essential principle of health is in the 
human body has not been settled in physiology. Va- 
rious and even conflicting opinions have been enter- 
tained regarding it. It is certain that it is something 
vastly too subtle to be reached by chemical prepara- 
tions and pharmaceutical compounds. 
Everything in this volume and in the curative sys- 
tem recommended in it, is based on the fundamental 
truth, that man, as to his interior being, is a spirit. 
This inner nature is the real manhood, - the body, 
the mere physical organism, constituting no essential SOUL AND BODY. 
9 
part of his being and existence. The soul, the mind, 
the spirit, - which terms we use interchangeably, 
though not absolutely identical in meaning, - is the 
primary source of life in the body. Mind is essen- 
tially active, or possesses force, and is the dynamic 
principle of the body and the cause of all its move- 
ments, muscular and physiological. The matter of 
which the body is composed is, in itself, passive and 
inert, having no life except that which is imparted to 
it by the all-pervading and animating spirit. There 
can be no animal or bodily life where there is no 
mind. The body in fact has no life. It neither lives 
nor dies. The mind lives in the body, and when the 
connection is sundered, the bodily envelope comes at 
once under the operation of certain chemical laws or 
forces which were before held in check by the ani- 
mating soul, and is decomposed into its original 
material constituents. The general forces of the uni- 
verse circulate in our bodily organism ; but in addition 
to this there are peculiar movements that are only 
attributable to an animating spiritual principle. That 
the life of the body is not one thing and the life of the 
mind another, that they are not distinct entities, but 
identical, is evident. On this subject Herbert Spen- 
cer, one of the leading thinkers of the day, very truly 
says: "Though we commonly regard mental and 
bodily life as distinct, it needs only to ascend some- 
what above the ordinary point of view to see that they 
are subdivisions of life in general, and that no line 
of demarcation can be drawn between them, otherwise 
than arbitrarily. '- {Principles of Psychology, p. iSl 10 
SOUL AND BODY. 
There is but one Life in the universe, and though 
this general or universal Life, which is an emanation 
from God, is that by means of which everything is 
held in being, yet the entire bodily system, with all its 
organs and tissues, is in more immediate alliance with 
the mental nature and mental functions. Without 
this correspondence and connection the body would 
exhibit only the phenomena of ordinary matter, and 
would be motionless, powerless, and without animal 
vitality. 
In studying the connection of mind and body, we are 
led irresistibly to the conclusion, that the part of the 
physical organism most intimately associated w ith mind 
is the nervous system. In this term we include the 
cerebrum, the cerebellum, medulla oblongata, medulla 
spinalis, and the nerves thence distributed throughout 
the body. It is of all the organs of the body, as Pro- 
chaska has truly observed, the most important. It is 
the more immediate seat of the rational soul, and the 
link by which it is united to the body ; it is the instru- 
ment by which the soul, so long as it is united to the 
body, produces its own uses. By it the mind acts on 
the body, and the body in turn acts upon and influences 
the manifestations of the mind. But, however great 
may be the importance of the nervous system in these 
respects, it is of further importance, because the soul, 
through its instrumentality, has the power of exciting in 
the human body various movements that are involuntary, 
but which are essential to the healthy existence of the 
body, as digestion, nutrition, secretion, excretion, and 
all the physiological processes ; these functions do not SOUL AND BODY. 
11 
remain long undisturbed, if the nervous system be 
injured. Since the nervous system is the intermediate 
organism through the instrumentality of which the 
mind acts on the body and through which it accom- 
plishes its uses in the external world, it has an impor- 
tant part in all diseases, and its proper treatment and 
management are essential to life and health. 
It is not necessary that I should enter upon any ex- 
tended description of the structure of the brain and 
nervous system. All that is known can be found in 
the more recent works on Anatomy. It is enough for 
our purpose to say, that the brain is a very complicated 
organ, and receives a more copious supply of blood 
than any other part of the system. It has been com- 
puted that one-fifth of the entire circulation passes 
through the cerebral organism, - a circumstance which 
indicates great activity and physiological and functional 
importance. As the nervous system is the intermediate 
organism through which the mind acts upon and con- 
trols the body and affects every particle of it, all dis- 
ease first manifests itself in some change here. It is 
the medium through which a spiritual disturbance ulti- 
mates itself in every morbid condition which becomes 
manifest to the senses. 
There can be but little doubt that all inflammatory 
conditions of the body have their seat in the brain, as 
being the more immediate organ and residence of the 
spirit. "Many of the older medical writers, among 
whom are Willis, Chirac, Werlhof, Silvia, and Fracas- 
sini, maintain that inflammation of the brain is the 
proximate cause of fever. More recently several modern 12 
SOUL AND BODY. 
writers, particularly Clutterbuck, have advanced the 
same opinion. There can be no doubt that the brain is 
the organ primarily affected in this disease, but the 
exact nature of this disturbance of the brain we are at 
present unable to state." - (Brigham on the Brain, 
p. 305.) 
Health and disease, in their primary causes, their 
underlying reality, are states of the spiritual principle 
in man. There is an internal and external man. This 
is recognized and taught by Paul, and is taken for 
granted in this volume. (1 Cor. xv. 44 ; 2 Cor. iv. 16.) 
Let us see if we can get the spiritual idea of health 
and disease. We often use the word spiritual without 
any definite conception of the meaning of the term. 
By a spiritual idea I mean one that is acquired inde- 
pendently of the testimony of the external senses, and 
sometimes in direct conflict with their fallacious appear- 
ances. To think spiritually is to elevate the thoughts to 
a range of action above the sensuous degree of the mind. 
In the case of disease we only perceive by the senses the 
ultimation of the spiritual disturbance. The interior 
hidden cause lies beyond their cognizance, and must be 
perceived by some mental power more interiorly pene- 
trating in its range of action. 
In the present earthly stage of our existence the 
senses have a preponderating influence over our judg- 
ment and intellectual states. Hence, in the history of 
medical opinions (science it can hardly be called), the 
prevalent theories of disease have been of a purely 
materialistic character. The various schools of medi- 
cine have come only to the recognition of the effects of SOUL AND BODY. 
13 
disease and of the outward symptoms, rather than to 
the perception of disease in its spiritual causes and its 
reality. Paul labored to call the attention of the world, 
in his day, away from things seen and temporal to 
things that are not seen by the outward eye, and which 
are invested with an enduring reality (2 Cor. iv. 18), 
but with poor success. The remedies employed for the 
alleviation or cure of disease in every subsequent age 
of Christian history have been those naturally sug- 
gested by their external and sensuous theological and 
pathological systems, and have been of a crude and 
material character. They have not been calculated to 
reach the root of the malady, but only at best to alle- 
viate the outward symptoms, and "have healed the 
hurt of the daughter of my people but slightly." But 
human nature is not wholly nor mainly material, and 
the body is not merely a nicely constructed physiologi- 
cal machine, moved by the common forces of the uni- 
verse. It is pervaded in every part, and animated by 
an interior spiritual nature, that is the source of its 
life and the spring of all its vital activities and move- 
ments. To ignore this, as is usually done in the prac- 
tice of the art of healing, is as unreasonable as it 
would be for the jeweller, in repairing a 'watch which 
keeps bad time, to confine his attention wholly to the 
hands of the chronometer, without regard to the hidden 
spring and other internal machinery. 
There is often a profound philosophy concealed in 
the radical meaning of words. Words aje the ultima- 
tion, the outward expression of spiritual ideas, and 
their roots are as the petrified remains of an early spir- 14 
SOUL AND BODY. 
itual science. What is the radical spiritual meaning of 
the words health and to heal ? The words are from the 
same root as the word whole. To heal comes from 
the Saxon helan, to cover, to conceal, and to be made 
whole. The Danish verb heeler, to heal, is equivalent 
to being whole, entire and holy. A state of health is 
a condition of wholeness, completeness, entireness, 
and the word holy is from the same root. Holiness 
and health in their radical signification are the same, 
and are a state of wholeness. In the New Testament 
to be healed is to be made whole, as in the passages, 
" Wilt thou be made whole? " and " Go in peace ; thy 
faith hath made thee whole." To be in health, to be 
holy, is to be " made every whit whole." Jesus said to 
one of the subjects of bis cures, " Thou art made 
whole; sin no more lest a worse thing come upon 
thee." This implies a restoration of the whole being to 
harmony. In the system of Christ, holiness and health 
were joined together. The one was the internal spir- 
itual state, the other the corresponding bodily condi- 
tion. 
In what does this entireness, this wholeness, consist? 
The animating principle of the body is what we call 
interchangeably the soul, the mind, the spirit. There 
is a law of correspondence, of correlation, between the 
inner man, the living soul, and the external organism, 
or the latter answers to the former as a shadow to a 
substance, an echo to the original sound, and an effect 
to a producing cause. When the soul is restored to 
health and harmony by the redemptive agencies of the 
Gospel, introduced by Christ, the body adjusts itself in SOUL AND BODY. 
15 
concordance with the restored spiritual life, for its state 
is always an effect of which the soul is the cause. In 
the Scripture idea of regeneration is not only included 
the idea of a new spirit, but a renewed body. This is 
also taught in the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg. 
When the correspondence between the two departments 
of our complex existence is complete, the body is per- 
vaded in every part, and without obstruction, by the 
spiritual principle. This is a state of wholeness or 
health. When the spiritual essence does not harmoni- 
ously pervade every part, there is something wanting in 
that part. It is no longer complete or whole. The effort, 
the conatus, the spontaneous and inherent endeavor, 
the unconscious struggle of the soul, to restore the par- 
tially sundered correspondence, is that state of unrest, 
of disquietude, of disturbance, expressed by the word 
disease (from dis, without, and ease). When the corre- 
spondence between any organ and the answering spiritual 
principle is loosened or lost, the vital tone of the part 
will be lowered, and its physiological function disturbed, 
altered, or suspended. When any part of the body 
loses its vital connection or correspondence entirely 
with the soul, it mortifies, oris made dead, as the word 
implies. The part comes under the operation of those 
disorganizing chemical forces, whose action is no longer 
checked by the vital force, just as the entire body will 
when sundered from its conjunction with the animating 
spirit. What we call disease in an organ is usually a 
partial death of the part. The spiritual life does not 
circulate freely through it. To bring back the spiritual 
principle to it, so that it will be diffused harmoniously 16 
SOUL AND BODY. 
and without obstruction through it, is to heal it or 
make it whole. 
When the soul, in the calm happiness of unbroken 
fellowship with God, the Central Life, and in the love 
of all mankind, and in a state of tranquil trust and 
faith, that allays every fear, and brings a solid and 
enduring peace, harmoniously pervades, permeates, 
and interiorly dwells in every particle, cell, fibre, and 
tissue of the body, that is holiness, wholeness, and 
health, in their highest form of manifestation. 
In its radical sense, to heal and to conceal are the 
same. Health, in a certain comprehensible sense, is 
concealment, as the word is derived from the Saxon 
helan, to cover. It requires time for the body to adapt 
Itself to the internal spiritual state, and many of the 
changes effected in the bodily condition by the ever- 
varying mental emotions are transient in their effects. 
When the spiritual disturbance has not become ulti- 
mated in permanent sensible effects, in actual lesions 
and perturbed functional action, but is, as it were, 
hidden from view (for it is only effects that are per- 
ceptible to our ordinary senses), it is still a state of 
health. 
This doctrine of health and disease will be readily 
accepted by the disciples of Emanuel Sw'edenborg, and 
all those who are acquainted with his doctrine of cor- 
respondence between the soul and body, as taught in 
that profoundly philosophical work entitled the " Divine 
Love and Wisdom." But a far higher authority has 
taught that the work of healing must commence within. 
Christ proclaimed to the world that a truly sanctified SOUL AND BODY. 
17 
spirit will cleanse its outward temple. The process of 
cure by him was from within, outward. A soul re- 
stored by love and faith to union with the divine Life 
will bring the body into harmony with it, or put it 
off and go free from it, and graduate to the climes of 
bliss. 
It is interesting to trace, in the history of Medical 
Science, the progressive development and growth of 
the spiritual idea of health and disease. In the earliest 
ages, diseases were supposed to be the result of the 
divine wrath, and it was naturally believed, with that 
view of its origin, that, in the temples of the gods, the 
divine power of healing was most likely to be mani- 
fested. Hence the temples of religion became the 
resort of the sick and infirm, and the priests were the 
only physicians. This indicates an obscure and shadowy 
realization of the truth that disease is of a spiritual 
origin, and that spiritual remedies are indicated as 
adapted to its cure. 
Great discoveries in medicine, or in any branch of 
science, are the result of an inspiration, - an influx of 
ideas from the higher realm of life and intelligence. It 
is a light descending from above. All great physicians, 
of whom there have been but few, scattered sparingly 
along the centuries of the world's history, have been, in 
a certain proper sense, inspired men. It is an interest- 
ing fact, that all the great medical lights of the past 
have been men who have seen the importance of the 
influence of the spiritual nature of man in health and 
disease. One of the first, of whom history makes men- 
tion, was 2Esculapius, the reputed son of Apollo and 18 
SOUL AND BODY. 
Coronis, and the pupil of Chiron the Centaur. He was 
called the inventor of the art of healing. In the earliest 
periods of human existence, medicine was based on an 
instinctive character, just as some animals are seen to 
resort to certain substances when they are sick, which 
are unfit to serve them for food ; and it would require 
no great ingenuity to show that those diseases to which 
man in a state of nature would be most exposed are 
precisely those in which the instinctive tastes are most 
developed. - (Jferyon's Hist, of Medicine, p. 7.) It is a 
current opinion, that probably has some foundation in 
fact, that vegetable remedies are of spontaneous and 
indigenous growth in the localities which generate the 
diseases for which they are specifics. These instinctive 
appetences are often a more unerring prescription of 
nature than the diplomatized science of medicine can 
give. The more one lives in a purely natural condi- 
tion, the more certainly will his intuitions and impres- 
sions guide him in the selection of the appropriate 
remedies for his bodily ailments ; these will often be 
those things which the so-called medical science would 
never think of prescribing, but which nevertheless have 
a perfect adaptedness to the particular case. jEscula- 
pius seems to have been the first who attempted to 
reduce these instinctive prescriptions to something like 
science. Only a few hints have been preserved as to 
his system. With the exception of the use of the reme- 
dial power of plants, it seems to have been the psychical 
or phrenopathic method, or the cure of disease by im- 
pressions on the mind. The practice of the healing art 
was connected with the religion of the day, as it always SOUL AND BODY. 
19 
should be. Faith was demanded of the patients, and 
the process of cure was accompanied with all those 
mysterious ceremonies and cabalistic symbols that were 
calculated to excite it among a rude and. uncultured 
people. Something like the modern animal magnetism 
seems also to have been practised. The patients were 
thrown into the somnambulic state, or prophetic sleep, 
in which the appropriate remedies were revealed to 
them. If the magnetic state could not be induced upon 
them, the priests themselves went into a state of ec- 
stasy, or trance, and revealed the proper mode of cure. 
Such was the system of the Asclepiades down to the 
time of Hippocrates. - (Meryon's Hist, of Medicine, vol. 
1, pp. 10, 11.) 
Hippocrates, who has been called the father of 
rational medicine, was born at Cos, 4G0 B.C. He 
represents the transition of the art of healing from the 
instinctive to the scientific, ile was the scion of a 
family who had devoted themselves to the practice of 
medicine for at least three hundred years, and had pro- 
duced some celebrated physicians before him. He 
inherited his medical faculty, and all the skill of his 
ancestors seems to have been transmitted to him, and 
to have centred in his personality. His Aphorisms, 
which are a collection of short, pithy sayings, give a 
condensed view of all that was known in medicine and 
physiology in his day. They have been translated into 
all the languages of the civilized world, been com- 
mented on by authors in all ages, and contain the 
fundamental principles of all medical science; and, 
according to Suidas, taken collectively, arc " a per- 20 
SOUL AND BODY. 
formance surpassing the genius of man." By this he 
must mean that, like all original men, who make addi- 
tions to the sum total of human knowledge, he was 
aided by light from the higher realm of intelligence. 
To him we owe the first acknowledgment and announce- 
ment of the principle which he called (physis), 
Nature, as superintending and regulating all the bodily 
functions. From this word all those who practise the 
art of healing have been called physicians. What he 
called Nature in the human body he viewed as an all- 
pervading spiritual principle. It is now universally 
adopted in physiology under the designation of the vis 
medicatrix natures, the healing force of nature. But it 
is demonstrably certain that it belongs to the spiritual 
nature, and is only an effort of the soul to bring the 
disordered body into correspondence and harmony with 
itself. 
About the time of tlippocrates, or a little previous 
(500 B.C.), the distinction between the soul and body 
was first taught by Anaxagoras, one of the most 
rational and spiritual of the Greek philosophers. Dur- 
ing the early period of the history of medicine, the 
immortality of the soul was deduced from the atomic 
theory of Democritus. All matter was deemed inde- 
structible, as being made up of simple and indissoluble 
atoms, and the soul being material - as all matter was 
indestructible - was necessarily immortal and eternal. 
This would prove equally the immortality of the body. 
But the recognition of the distinction between the body 
and the animating soul was a long step in advance in 
the spiritual science of healing. A great idea once SOUL AND BODY. 
21 
deposited by the heavens in the mind of man is never 
fully lost in the life of humanity. It seems to have 
the power of reproducing itself, perhaps in other forms, 
in every subsequent age, and without losing any of its 
original force. 
About the commencement of the Christian era, 
Athenaeus, of Attila, revived the Platonic theory of 
the existence of an immaterial, active principle called 
Pneuma or spirit, and the state of this principle was 
considered to be the source of health and disease. A 
medical sect or school was founded, under the name of 
Pneumatists, or Spiritualists, whose practice was based 
on this principle. Jesus, the Christ, seems to have 
adopted, or rather to have conformed his practice to 
that theory, and without deviating from it. A more 
material conception of this principle was afterwards 
adopted in physiology under the name of the animal 
spirits, supposed to be generated in the blood. The 
idea of a subtle fluid, called animal spirits, retained its 
place in physiology down to modern times. It is found 
in Untzer and Prochaska, but they denominate it the 
vis nervosa, the nervous force, and suppose its origin 
to be in the brain. 
After the subsidence of the Pneumatists the spiritual 
idea of health and disease seems to have been lost 
sight of in the practice of medicine. The system of 
Claudius Galen, which was purely materialistic, was 
promulgated in the second century, and for thirteen 
hundred years reigned supreme in Europe, Asia and 
Africa, and was not seriously disputed until the age of 
Paracelsus. Christianity, if there had been anything 22 
SOUL AND BODY. 
more than an external apprehension of it, would have 
been a standing protest against the dominant material- 
istic schools of medicine. Why, in writing the history 
of medicine, the theory and practice of Jesus, the 
Christ, is left out, it is difficult to conceive. This 
divinely human personage had more control over dis- 
ease than any one who ever appeared in the history of 
mankind. Whatever view we take of him, as either 
man or God, he was certainly the Great Physician of 
both soul and body ; and the principles on which his 
practice was based deserve the profoundest considera- 
tion and study. And it is certain that he employed no 
chemical remedies. His method of cure was psychical, 
and not material. 
After ages of pure materialism in the science of med- 
icine, the spiritual idea of health and disease was 
revived by John Baptist Van Helmont, and has never 
been fully suppressed. It has, ever since his day, 
claimed recognition more or less in the practice of the 
art of healing. He pursued the study of medicine for 
thirty consecutive years with the ardor of an enthusiast, 
and with an entirely independent spirit. Having re- 
nounced all antecedent systems, all academic dignities, 
and the schools where only superficial and futile mat- 
ters were taught, he consecrated himself to the discovery 
of truth from its original source. He became deeply 
imbued and saturated with the spirit of the mystic 
philosophy of Thomas a Kempis, and John Tauler. 
lie adopted as his fundamental maxim the principle 
that "all truth and wisdom come from God, to whom 
man unites himself by prayer, contemplation, and good SOUL AND BODY. 
23 
works." To imitate Christ became the ruling motive 
and central aim of his life, and in order to copy this 
divine model more closely in the relief of human misery, 
he devoted himself to the study of medicine in the 
untrammelled ardor of an independent genius. Such 
men are always inspired, and will say and do things 
beyond the comprehension of the age in which they 
live, and his works are as unintelligible to the mass of 
mankind as are those of Jacob Behmen. 
The governing principle in the human body, and the 
source of all its physiological movements, he denomi- 
nated arduous, perhaps from the Greek word 
(arche), signifying origin or first principle. It was not 
a mere blind force, like the vis vitce of later times, but 
was possessed of intelligence, and endowed with the 
power of regulating all the movements, voluntary and 
involuntary, of the body, and remained in it until its 
chemical dissolution. If I get the true conception of 
it, he viewed it not merely as the animating principle 
of the human body, but also as the universal life, and 
something allied to God or proceeding from him, that, 
like the Holy Spirit, is the everywhere present organiz- 
ing principle of nature ; for without it, he affirmed 
that everything would go to confusion, and the universe 
would return to its original chaos. For some reason it 
would be difficult to define, he located it more particu- 
larly, in the human body, in the pyloric orifice of the 
stomach and in the spleen. From this central and 
commanding position it directs all the functions of the 
other organs, watching the integrity of each, and main- 
taining the harmony of the whole. 24 
SOVL AND BODY. 
In regard to therapeutics, he laid it down as the first 
condition of the favorable operation of a remedial 
agency, that it comport writh and be agreeable to this 
sensitive spiritual principle. When the archceus is 
offended by any injurious or disagreeable agent, he is 
seized with fear, which produces disordered movements, 
and the image which this trouble depicts in it becomes 
the seminal idea of the disease. There is reason to be- 
lieve that the radical interior spiritual disturbance which 
underlies all bodily disease, which consists only in 
functional disorder, may be reduced to fear, or unbelief, 
which is closely allied to it. Van Helmont taught that 
these disturbances of the archceus, or the spiritual prin- 
ciple of life and health, may be occasioned by various 
morbific causes, as miasms, epidemics, poisons, virus, 
unsound food and drinks, etc.- (lienouard's History 
of Medicine, p. 511.) 
In the system of Van Helmont we find stated, in a 
symbolical and obscure way, the truth that all diseases 
arise from some disturbance of the spiritual essence of 
man. He may have seen this only through a glass 
darkly, or he may have seen it more clearly than he 
thought it expedient to express, and, like a greater 
Physician before him, concealed spiritual truths in par- 
ables and veiled them under sensuous images. 
In harmony with his psychical pathology, he believed 
in the efficacy of the most subtle agents, and that the 
actual virtues of remedies resided in their aura or 
odors, as in that form they approached nearer to the 
spiritual animating principle of the organism ; w'hich 
view Hahnemann, in the latter years of his practice, SOUL AND BODY. 
25 
adopted. Van Ilelmont had faith in the efficacy of cer- 
tain words, and of amulets and talismans. Also, there 
can be but little doubt that, long before Mesmer, he 
practised something like animal magnetism. A great 
truth, like that of the spiritual origin of health and dis- 
ease, deposited in the mind of humanity has a divine 
vitality in it, and the power of reproducing itself in a 
clearer form in subsequent ages, and is the seed of a 
future harvest. Such was the work of Van Helmont. 
The doctrine of the influence of the mind upon health 
and disease was greatly advanced by George Ernest 
Stahl, who, while physician to the court of Weimar, 
was appointed to be professor in the university of 
Halle. He was one of those original independent 
thinkers and investigators, who seek knowledge not so 
much by extensive reading as by observation and medi- 
tation. He relied more upon his intuitive perceptions 
of truth, than upon books, and as a natural conse- 
quence he trusted more to the influence of the spiritual 
nature of man in the cure of disease than upon medi- 
cines. " His principal title to glory in medicine," says 
Renouard, " is for having recalled the attention of his 
contemporaries to the natural tendencies of the animal 
economy to the reaction of the vital forces - or the 
soul - in diseases, a reaction and tendencies which the 
physico-chemical doctrines too much lost sight of." - 
{History of Medicine, p. 534.) 
His first inquiry was to learn, if possible, what life 
and health are - in what they essentially consist. He 
adopted the humoral pathology, supposing the health 
of the body to consist in the conservation and main- 26 
SOUL AND BODY. 
tenance of the fluids in a state of integrity and perfect 
mixture. But this could be viewed only as an effect, 
and it was necessary to inquire what is the fundamental 
principle that is the cause of this? Stahl maintained 
that it could be nothing but the anima, the immaterial and 
rational soul. The use of the body is to be the passive 
instrument of the soul, by which it accomplishes cer- 
tain uses in the material world. Without the body, 
the soul could not put itself into conscious relation 
with external things, and consequently its knowledge 
must be circumscribed. lie taught, as also Descartes 
has done, that all motion implies and requires the aid 
of a spiritual motive agency. This is emphatically 
true of the human body. All voluntary muscular mo- 
tions are certainly of this character, as none of the 
five hundred muscles of the body are a force, but only 
the instrument of a force. It is equally true that the 
unconscious and invisible physiological movements and 
processes are effects, of which the soul or spirit is the 
producing cause. Stahl remarks : "If the movements 
of the animal economy depart, in any respect, from the 
normal mode, then the physician should understand 
that it is his duty to calm them, or to restrain them, or 
to excite them, in a word, to act upon them conformably 
to the natural indications. It is of the highest impor- 
tance to him to have constantly in view the natural 
synergy of the soul, in order to show himself the min- 
ister, rather than the governor; in other words, the 
physician should study to follow the movements and 
tendencies of nature, rather than to believe himself SOUL AND BODY. 
27 
authorized to dare attempt something, without having 
due regard to her tendencies." 
lie affirmed that every pathological affection was the 
result of the reaction of the soul against the morbific 
agent, and that the totality of the symptoms of any 
given case of disease only represent and indicate the 
succession of vital movements. This is a truth of great 
practical importance. It would follow logically from 
it that it was the duty of the physician, cither to remain 
an inactive spectator of the struggle, or intelligently to 
aid the soul in her efforts to restore the body to a state 
in which it will be her unobstructed and passive instru- 
ment. As phenomena, or sensible appearances, are not 
the unseen realities of things, so the symptoms are not 
the disease. A symptom is an external sign or token 
which indicates the existence of something else - some 
more inward disturbance. The symptoms are what we 
see, but the causes often lie beyond our sight, and that 
unseen and spiritual something, which is not cognizable 
by the senses, is the main thing to which we are to 
attend. A symptom is that which happens in the body 
in concurrence with some spiritual change or struggle. 
This we can aid only under the guidance of a true spirit- 
ual insight and intelligence. Without this, with our 
bungling and crude remedies we should be in constant 
danger of deranging the wise combinations of the soul, 
the supreme regulator of the economy. We should be 
liable to impede and hinder the efforts of the soul to 
restore the correspondence between itself and the physi- 
cal body. With this view of disease, medicines cease to 
be of primary importance, and " the great art of life is to 28 
SOUL AXD BODY, 
manage well the restless mind." In the language of an 
intelligent physician, " The influence of the mind, - of 
mental emotion - in causing and curing disease, are 
altogether too much disregarded by medical men. 
While grief, fear, and remorse are as depressing as any 
measures to which we ever resort, hope and faith are 
more powerful tonics than bark and wine. Innumerable 
instances might be adduced in proof of this."- (Brig- 
ham on the Brain, p. 303.) 
If it is admitted that man is a " living soul," then 
this must be acknowledged as the only real thing in hu- 
man life. All attempts to account for the vital phe- 
nomena of the organism without this admission must be 
obscure and unsatisfactory. The professor of Halle, 
from his intuitive spiritual perceptions, affirmed that it 
is the soul of man which presides directly and without 
any intermediary agency over the external organiza- 
tion, from the moment of the fecundation of the ovarian 
germ, and it continues to influence and direct all its 
physiological functions until the connection and corre- 
spondence is sundered by what we call death. That the 
soul acts directly, and without any intermediate principle 
on the body, is undoubtedly an error. But the doctrine 
of Stahl, under the name of animism, became prevalent 
in Germany. In France the theory of the vital princi- 
ple was adopted, which seems to have been conceived 
as an indefinable something distinct from both the mind 
and the body. Barthez first brought this doctrine 
prominently to the notice of physiologists. The vital 
principle of Barthez appears to have been borrowed, 
with modifications, from the sensitive soul of the SOUL AND BODY. 
29 
ancients, or the archceus of Van Helmont. It is dif- 
ficult to form a definite conception of it, as it was taught 
by him. Hoffman affirmed that the principle of life in 
the human body was of an intermediate nature between 
the soul and body ; but Barthez declared that it was 
neither an extremely subtle matter intermediate between 
soul and body, nor a simple " modality of organized 
matter." But if it is neither of these, it is, as Herbert 
Spencer would say, something unknowable and even 
unthinkable. We can form no idea of it, and conse- 
quently it is to us as nothing, and can have no place in 
the modern positive science. It does not belong to 
things known. The more recent doctrine of the vis 
vitce, the vital force, now generally adopted in physi- 
ology, is not open to the same objection, yet all attempts 
to demonstrate the existence of any such dynamic prin- 
ciple distinct from the soul or separate from it are 
necessary failures. If such a thing could be proved, it 
would not necessarily be true, that " the body without 
the spirit is dead," for it might be supposed capable of 
living indefinitely after the soul had vacated its material 
tenement. We are constrained to believe that all the 
functions of animal life are phenomena or effects, of 
which mind or soul is the cause. The body lives and 
acts from the animating mind, and the whole material 
universe exists from, and is moved by, the spiritual 
world, which is as its animating soul. 
There may be, as some have taught, a universal 
element or principle, pervading all things, of an inter- 
mediary nature, through which the mind or soul acts 
on the body, and the spiritual world on the material 30 
SOUL AND BODY. 
universe. It is not matter, as it is known by other 
properties, but is the universal substance, or that which 
underlies all material existence. It is not pure spirit, 
but is intermediate between mind and matter, a tertium 
quid, through which the former acts upon the latter. 
It is the connecting link, the bond of conjunction be- 
tween the world of spirit and world of matter. It 
bridges the discrete chasm between them. It is con- 
densed, using the term to express merely an analogy, 
to constitute the spiritual body, as it is called by 
Swedenborg and Paul, or the perisprit of Allan Kar- 
dec, or the nerve-projected form of Kerner. It is the 
medium through which mind communicates with mind, 
either while in the body or out of it, and by means of 
it all spirits are held in sympathy. Through its subtle 
vibrations, thought, as an interior language, is trans- 
mitted to other minds independent of spatial distance 
and limitations. It is that by means of which medi- 
cines affect the spiritual principle in man, and through 
this modify the vital manifestations. Through this 
intermediary principle, in the. so-called magnetic treat- 
ment of disease, the mind of the physician becomes a 
subtle and potent force to affect the organic functions 
of the body of the patient. The proper state of this 
semi-spiritual principle, or substance in the body, has 
been supposed necessary to its health. Its morbific 
action, consequent upon some abnormal spiritual 
change, produces the symptoms of disease. It is not 
a fluid, as all subtle agents have been called, but is 
rather a principle, a force, a something most real, for 
which science has no name. In the human body it SOUL AND BODY. 
31 
constitutes the bond of sympathy between the different 
parts, and reduces a variety of organs and functions to 
a harmonious whole, so that if one organ suffers all are 
affected more or less with it. It is the underlying 
cause of what is called the reflex action of the cerebro- 
spinal system, so that an effect produced in one part is 
transmitted to other and remote parts. In consequence 
of this mysterious connection of parts, Bain affirms 
that there is not a muscle of the body that could not be 
reached directly or indirectly by pressure on the tip of 
the forefinger. - (flftnd and Body, p. 32.) 
In the science of medicine this reflex action of 
one organ upon another, through the interrelation of 
their nerves, is called sympathy, and denotes the 
correspondence of affections or sensations between 
different and often distant parts or organs of the body, 
so that an affection of one, whether morbid or health- 
ful, is transmitted secondarily, reflected or echoed as it 
were, and often in a greatly modified form, to the 
others, or one of the others. A marked illustration of 
this is seen where an affection supervenes without any 
apparent morbific cause acting directly on the organ, 
but only from the reaction of some other organ 
primarily affected. Thus we often find a soreness of 
the throat, or a loss of voice, in some uterine affec- 
tions. What we call the symptoms of disease are 
effects produced by this law of sympathy or correlation 
of parts ; and they are often of no importance only as 
they indicate the seat of the primary disease, which 
may be quite remote and in some distant part of the 
organism. The itching of the nose is a sympathetic or 32 
SOUL AND BODY. 
symptomatic affection, occasioned by an irritation of 
the intestinal canal by worms or other causes. But all 
these phenomena indicate a common life, or some 
subtle principle pervading the organism and univer- 
sally diffused through it, and binding all the parts into 
a concordant whole. This is the spiritual body 
through which all the organs have sympathy with 
each other, and through which we have sympathy 
with the whole spiritual world, because the elements 
that compose it pervade all worlds and occupy all 
space. 
Having traced the gradual growth of the spiritual 
idea of health and disease, I could not properly dis- 
miss the subject without some mention of the teaching 
of one of the latest schools of medicine, that founded 
by Samuel Hahnemann. In regard to Homoeopathy, 
the language of a distinguished scholar and practi- 
tioner of the old school is appropriate: ' ' The time 
has gone by when- the pleasantries relative to the 
infinitesimal doses of this system can be regarded as 
good arguments against it. We are certainly com- 
pelled to take this doctrine into serious consideration, 
since men commendable for their scientific titles and 
medical position, members of faculties, hospital physi- 
cians and eminent practitioners, have embraced it, and 
become its public defenders ; since journals have been 
established, and societies instituted in different coun- 
tries, to make public its principles and practice. 
Before this pervading propaganda, it is not permitted 
to any man clothed with the medical priesthood, and 
comprehending the dignity and importance of his SOUL AND BODY. 
33 
ministry to remain indifferent."- Rentmard's Hist, of 
Medicine, p. G54. 
That homoeopathic medicines cure disease, or aid 
what we call nature to do it, is an established fact, and 
as fully confirmed by experience as the efficiency of 
any of the specific remedies of the old school, as the 
use of quinine in intermittent fever, or mercury in 
syphilis. It is proper to inquire on what principle 
these cures are effected. On tins subject fortunately 
we have the testimony of Hahnemann himself. As 
diseases, according to him, result from a dynamic or 
spiritual disturbance, they require a spiritual remedy. 
He says that diseases are but the immaterial altera- 
tions of an impalpable vital principle; hence he con- 
cludes that we must combat them by forces of the 
same kind, that is to say, by the spiritual essences and 
virtues of medicines.- (Organon, Sec. 53.) 
One of the most intelligent practitioners of the new 
school remarks, that the practical efficiency of the 
remedies of homeopathy "are dependent upon the 
science of correspondence, which, by bringing poison 
and disease together with a completer fitness, poisons 
the disease and kills it; and, secondly, upon the small- 
ness of the doses, or we should rather say the use of 
the spirit and not the body of the drugs, which use 
gains its cause by no destruction of our tissues, but by 
giving the body an attitude that neutralizes the dis- 
ease, and then itself ceases after a certain duration 
of effects. Drugs given in the latter way are more like 
ideas than material bodies, and when they have served 
their purpose they either vanish of themselves or may 34 
SOUL AND BODY. 
be countermanded by their appropriate antidotes." 
(Wilkinson's Human Body and its Halation to Man, 
p. 349.) The system constitutes the transition from 
the material to the spiritual in the cure of disease. 
That what is usually called magnetism is that which 
gives efficiency to homoeopathic remedies, is evident 
from the testimony of the founder of the system unin- 
tentionally given. In the first place, he urges upon 
physicians the importance of preparing their own medi- 
cines, which, on the supposition of their magnetic or 
psychometric effect, would be necessary. lie asserts 
that the length of time a powder is rubbed, or the 
number of shakes we give to a mixture or dilution, in- 
fluences their effects upon the patient. Rubbing or 
shaking, which can only impart to the medicine a mag- 
netic influence, is so energetic in developing the inhe- 
rent virtues of the substance, that Hahnemann wras 
forced by experience to reduce the number from ten, 
which he first employed, to two. These magnetic con- 
cussions, vibrations, and frictions are probably effica- 
cious in imparting to the medicinal substance a sana- 
tive virtue, that the infinitesimal quantity could not 
otherwise possess. There is a subtle power in the 
human hand that the science of medicine has not rec- 
ognized. The human essence that passes out of the 
soul and out of the body is called in the philosophy of 
Swedenborg an emanative sphere, and wre are there 
taught that it is densest in front and more feeble in the 
back-a fact confirmed by Reichenbach-and also 
that this sphere in its fulness passes out of the hands 
and arms, because all the interior principles of man's SOUL AND BODY. 
35 
spirit extend to and terminate in his hands (A. C. 
10241), and all the active powers of the soul are con- 
centrated in his hands and arms. In consequence of 
this they become a most important and efficient heal- 
ing instrumentality. 
I can easily conceive that the nature of the sub- 
stance of a drug thus manipulated, might modify and 
give direction to the magnetic influence and therapeutic 
effect of it. Some of the imponderable essence of the 
drug might remain in the dilution, and this, under the 
psychic influence of the hand, might be made to pro- 
duce marked effects. The above view contains a rea- 
sonable theory of the demonstrated usefulness and effi- 
ciency of the Homoeopathic Materia Medica. Viewed 
in this light, the system must be looked upon as one of 
the most important modes of administering psycholog- 
ical or spiritual medicine, and is a great advance on all 
the older systems of medication, and one better adapted 
to the present state of human nature. 
By the extreme dilutions of homoeopathic pharmacy, 
the medicine is reduced well-nigh to its spiritual essence, 
and becomes imponderable, and when vivified by the 
sanative magnetic virtue of the human hand it affects 
the spiritual root, the seminal principle of the disease. 
The most subtle imponderable forces in nature are the 
most potential, as light, heat, electricity, and magnet- 
ism. All medicines have a spiritual essence, which 
gives them their efficiency, and through which alone 
they are capable of affecting the imponderable vital 
force. Their subtle emanations, unrecognized by our 
outward senses, pervado the atmosphere, which is their 36 
SOUL AND BODY. 
common storehouse. It is possible and not improb- 
able,- for there are more things in heaven and earth 
than our philosophy has ever dreamed of, - that these 
imponderable and potential virtues and essences can be 
controlled by the intelligent spirit of man. They per- 
vade space as an everywhere present, subtle element, 
analogous to the rarified nebulous dust, from which 
philosophers say that worlds are made. A neutral 
substance, as sugar-of-milk globules, may be charged 
with these medicinal and subtle properties, and when 
they come in contact with the highly sensitive surface 
of the stomach they are absorbed into the spiritual 
organism, and produce marked effects. I have exper- 
imented with these neutral substances for several years, 
and, when psychologically and magnetically medicated, 
they have proved themselves an efficient remedy. In 
this direction will be the next stadium of advance in 
the homoeopathic practice. 
The views given above, of the source of the efficiency 
of homoeopathic remedies, I am happy to find con- 
firmed by the experience and testimony of so distin- 
guished a practitioner as Dr. Arthur Lutze, of Ger- 
many. He says: " Some years ago, I made the 
discovery, and have verified it by repeated observa- 
tions, that animal magnetism is the vivifying, efficient 
power of our potencies. Every one who frequents my 
clinics has seen that the most violent pains often 
yield to a pass of my hand, to a breath, to a word. 
The zodmagnetic power may be transmitted to natural 
objects, pure water, pulverized sugar, wood, etc. I 
have the most striking proofs, showing that a powder of SOUL AND LODY. 
37 
sugar upon which I had breathed, or a glass of water 
which I had touched purposely, has produced the most 
marvellous effects. The thing happens in this wise: 
the noxious constituents of the drug are removed by 
attenuation; but the peculiar specific principle, which 
constitutes, so to say, the soul of the drug, remains, and 
is wonderfully excited during the shaking by the mag- 
netic influence, and is rendered capable of curatively 
affecting the disordered nerves."- {Manual of Homoe- 
opathic Practice, p. 34. 
To impart through the hand a spiritual virtue to an 
otherwise neutral substance, ought not to be deemed 
unreasonable by one who believes in Jesus, the Christ, 
who, in feeding the multitude with the five loaves, took 
them in his hand, at the same time looking up to 
heaven, and elevating his thoughts and desires to 
that celestial realm of life. In the institution of the 
sacramental supper he also took the bread and the 
wine in his hands before giving them to his disciples, 
also casting an imploring gaze towards the abyss of 
light and life in the heavens. Why this, unless it was 
to impart to the sacramental elements a spiritual virtue 
and influence? A physician who loves Christ, and is 
aiming to follow his steps, and reproduce his benefi- 
cent career in the relief of human misery, though he 
may come after him at a respectful and humble dis- 
tance, ought not to be accounted worthy of ridicule, if 
he does the same with the medicines he prescribes and 
administers. 
Magnetism, under the direction of a higher spiritual 
science and intelligence, will, in the future, be the 38 
SOUL AND LODY. 
most efficient agency for the cure of disease. In the 
hands of one whose " life is hid with Christ in God," 
there must be in it a divine potency for the removal of 
all those spiritual disturbances which underlie every 
morbid condition of the human body. If a man is in 
vital union with God, the central and only Life, and is 
grafted into him by a living faith and all-absorbing love, 
the sphere of his presence will be full of a divine sana- 
tive contagion, that will infect the suffering, trusting 
patient with life, health and peace. 
If such a physician of soul and body exhibits a heart- 
felt interest in the case of the unhappy invalid, and a 
sincere desire to make him well and happy, he lets in 
upon his darkness a beam of divine sunshine. The 
patient insensibly absorbs good from his personality, 
even though his medicines may be inert or perhaps 
noxious. His sympathy, cheerfulness, faith, and hope 
are his credentials as an envoy of one of the highest 
arts of heaven, and the patient looks upon the face of 
that physician as that of an angel-a legate of the 
skies, a messenger of the Gospel of health and peace. SOUL AND BODY. 
39 
CHAPTER II. 
THE SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE CURES WROUGHT 
BY JESUS, THE CHRIST. 
" The spirit which in Christ we breathe 
Is life to come." 
The cures attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, the 
Christ, and, in an eminent sense, the Son of God, I 
accept as historic verities, but do not deem them 
miraculous, in the theological acceptation of the word. 
His power to effect them was derived from a spiritual 
intelligence, and a clear perception of the true relation 
of the body to the soul or spirit-a knowledge beyond 
the grasp of the sensuous age in which he lived. After 
a careful study of the phenomena of his life, accom- 
panied with an affectionate appreciation of his char- 
acter amounting to adoration, it has seemed to me 
that his system might be reduced to something like a 
science, or, at least, to a statement of certain fixed 
and intelligible principles, the most important of which 
it is the object of this chapter to unfold, divesting them 
of all metaphysical discussions and distinctions, and 
bringing them within the apprehension of the spiritual 
consciousness of every person who is not in the bond- 
age of the senses. 
Human nature, in the present stage of our existence, 40 
SOUL AX!) BODY. 
is complex-a dualitjr in unity. In other words, there 
is an external and internal manhood, the body and the 
soul or spirit, and the former derives all its life from 
the latter. The body is the form of the spirit, and 
gives it limitation in space and time. Or as Sweden- 
borg, in his peculiar language, states it: " The soul is 
the very essence of man, and the bodj' is its form, and 
essence and form make one, as esse and existere, and as 
the cause producing an effect, and the effect itself." - 
(T. C. R., 111.) The body and the soul are one, and 
the soul is that one, as the body is only the outward 
manifestation of the spirit. In the language of the 
great spiritual philosopher quoted above, the body can 
say to the spirit, as Christ said to the Father, " All 
thine arc mine, and all mine thine; thou in me and I 
in thee ; he who sees me sees thee ; we are one as to 
person and as to life ; the reason is because the soul is 
in the whole and every part of man; for the life of the 
soul is the life of the body, and there is a mutuality 
between them." - (T. C. R., 112.) 
As the whole material universe is a crystallization 
or ultimation of spirit, so the external body in man is* 
derived from the soul, and is an evolution of it, and 
life is imparted to it by influx, and received according 
to a law of correspondence or correlation. The soul, 
from its higher realm of life, can say to the body, 
" Because I live you live, and without me you can do 
nothing." The most unreal thing in human nature is 
the body, which, to the sensuous range of the mind, 
seems to be all. It is only a reflection, a shadow, an 
outside boundary of the spirit. SOUL AND BODY. 
41 
The spiritual principle in man is threefold, or exists 
in three distinct degrees. The outermost, which lies 
next to the body and the external world, is what wo 
call sensation; the interior is intelligence; and the 
inmost is love. Or, we may affirm there is a spiritual 
principle of sensation, one of intellect or intelligence, 
and one of love, manifesting itself, or coming to con- 
sciousness, in affections, desires, and emotions. All 
beyond this is divine, as the love is the side of human 
nature that lies next to God, and brings us in vital 
contact with him. In curing disease the soul should 
retire inward upon itself, and act upon the patient 
from this divine realm of its existence. Jesus was 
distinguished from all persons of human history by his 
vivid consciousness of God within. This was the 
secret of his power. He bore into human hearts the 
strong conviction of a divine presence, and men were 
made to feel the invisible Reality that was ever work- 
ing within him, and through him upon others. It was 
from this there went forth a virtue for the moral heal- 
ing of the soul and the calming of its doubts and fears. 
Renan, in his "Life of Jesus," has very truly said: 
" The highest consciousness of God that ever existed 
in the breast of humanity was that of Jesus." The 
central point of our existence is divine, and God is 
incarnated in the whole of humanity, but men have 
not known this and perceived it, as did Jesus of Naz- 
areth. With him it wras not a theory, a speculation, 
an hypothesis, but an intense consciousness, a living 
verity and reality. From this divine depth of his 
being he spake and acted, oftentimes losing sight of 42 
SOUL AND BODY. 
the human element in his complex nature, and he stood 
forth before the people as the God-Man and the Man- 
God. Hence his wonderful power over diseases of 
mind and body, for, as Paul affirms, " All power is of 
God." (Rom. xiii. 1.) 
Dr. Carl Hase has given a view of Christ, that the 
majority of mankind have adopted within the bounds 
of Christendom. In his " Life of Jesus " he says : "The 
fundamental thought of this book is this-that a divine 
principle revealed itself in Jesus, but in a purely human 
form. From this thought I have not varied. Let 
those to whom our Christ is no Christ consider that to 
us, and to many like-minded, he is a Master and Saviour 
on this stand-point of ours." Whatever he was, and 
whatever unsolved mysteries there may be about his 
nature and his relations to God and the other world, it 
is enough for us to know that, somehow through him, 
God acted upon men, and through his mediation men 
had communication with the Divinity. 
All life is of God. There is no such thing as 
created life, either in angels, men, animals or plants. 
On the contrary, all life is 'continual influx from the 
Deity, the only fountain of being. This only needs to 
be perceived by physiologists to rectify and essentially 
modify all their conclusions respecting the so-called 
vital principle, as if it might be detected in the midst 
of the structures and tissues that it animates. There 
is no vital principle that lives in any corporeal form in 
any other sense than that in which the heat of the sun 
lives in the opening flower in the garden. Is there any 
heat in a plant exceot that which comes from the sun, SOUL AND BODY. 
43 
and yet can a plant live without the heat and light ? 
As the structure of the plant is the created receptacle 
for the inflowing and animating heat, so man's form is 
a created receptacle for the influent life proceeding 
from the infinite and uncreated source of all life. He 
who would cure disease by the method of Jesus, the 
Christ, should be the last link in a chain that should 
fasten upon the patient, and through a long range of 
intermediate being place him in communion with the 
Central Life. There is a spiritual world which is 
perpetually acting upon the natural world, and all life 
in the material realm is by influx from the spiritual. 
In the system of Christ and the method of cure 
practised by him, one is struck with the little attention 
that was paid to the body, and to mere material 
remedies. This was based upon a true philosophy of 
man's spiritual nature. The lowest or on« of the 
lowest manifestations of life is sensation, and this is 
not in the material body, but belongs to the spiritual 
organism. The eye does not see, the ear does not 
hear, and the sensory nerves do not feel. That sensa- 
tion is in the body, is an apparent, but not a real 
truth. To treat any disordered sensation or uncom- 
fortable and diseased feeling as if it were in the body, 
is to apply the remedy where the disease is not located. 
To cure disease we must always go beyond the out- 
ward body-must go behind the veil of sense to the 
real man, and thus carry the remedial agency into the 
realm of spiritual causation. The patient must be 
taken above and out of the body, and be made, so far 
as possible, to forget the body, that he may become in 44 
SOUL AND BODY. 
his consciousness only spirit, and " blossom into 
soul." 
To know spiritually what needs to be done in a 
given case of disease is half the cure. There are 
certain so-called diseased conditions of some organic 
structure where what is needed is to bring back the 
living spirit to it. Tire connection between it and the 
spiritual principle is partially sundered, and the spirit- 
ual life does not circulate freely through it. So far it 
is, as it were, dead. To bring back the spiritual life 
to it, by removing all obstruction to its influx and free 
course, is to cure the disease. For it is a fundamental 
axiom of a true spiritual physiology, that the soul is 
the only life of the body and of every part of it. And 
how to restore the harmonious connection between the 
part or organ and the animating spiritual principle is 
the great practical question in the cure of disease. It 
is effected by the power of spiritual intelligence. This, 
which Swedenborg expressively denominates " the 
light of life," teaches what ought to be willed, and that 
silent volition becomes a power to effect the desired 
change. The Baconian maxim, that "Knowledge is 
power," is emphatically true of spiritual intelligence. 
The cure of the disease must be effected through the 
spiritual principle, if that is the life of the outward 
organism. The body is only the shadow of the real 
man, an appearance of which the spirit is the living 
reality. The disease is, in a certain sense, only a 
false seeming, a wrong belief, a fallacy of the senses, a 
confirmed and wrong thinking, and an abnormal state 
of the consciousness. As the universe is the thought SOUL AND BODY. 
45 
of God, as Agassiz somewhere affirms, so every 
diseased condition of the body is a wrong thinking. 
Change that false belief, that wrong state of the con- 
sciousness which is the inmost life, and the disease is 
cured from the root. In the system of Christ faith 
thus becomes the grand remedial agent. " Thy faith 
hath made thee whole." Desire and prayer attract 
toward us the spiritual good we need, and place the 
inner man in a state of receptivity, and by faith w'e 
grasp and appropriate it. 
It will greatly aid us to come into this state of 
saving faith if we bear in mind that the testimony of 
the senses and of our feelings is generally, if not 
always, fallacious, and they give us only apparent 
truth. We affirm from the evidence of the senses that 
the sun rises and sets ; but it does neither the one nor 
the other. Color seems to be in a rose ; but it is only 
a sensation in us. The stove feels hot, as we often 
affirm ; but the heat is in us ; and a piece of iron red- 
hot and one sixty degrees below zero produce the 
same sensation. The blue dome of the heavens seems 
to be far off in space ; but this is only a sensuous 
appearance, for it is only the all-surrounding atmos- 
phere that touches and interpenetrates every part of 
our bodies. So the spiritual world seems to be far 
removed from us in the abyss of space, but really it is 
as near to us as we are to ourselves, for we are already 
in it and a part of it. This fallacious testimony of the 
senses is the obstacle to faith in the cure of disease. 
A man in an ague chill feels cold. He covers himself 
with blankets, and draws near the fire. But the 46 
SOUL AND BODY. 
nearer the fire he gets the colder he feels, and for a 
good reason, - he is not cold at all. Tested by the 
thermometer he is about five degrees above the normal 
temperature. So in nearly all diseases our feelings 
are a false guide in forming a judgment as to our real 
condition. To cure ourselves or others of disease we 
must rise in our conceptions out of the sphere of the 
senses to the realm of reality, to the spiritual percep- 
tion of things that are and as they are. 
To relieve pain is one of the highest functions of the 
good physician. But what is pain, and in what part 
of our complex nature is it located? It is certain that 
what we call pain is not in the material body, nor is it 
a sensation; for in pain the ordinary sensations may 
continue uninterrupted, while the pain is something 
distinct and superadded. This is now a settled prin- 
ciple of physiology. "It is a very important fact 
that the sensibility to pain is distinct from the power of 
ordinary sensation. This distinction was first fully es- 
tablished by M. Beau, of Paris, who has shown conclu- 
sively that the sensibility to pain may bo diminished or 
suspended while ordinary sensation remains." (Dal- 
ton's Physiology, p. 411.) 
Whatever it is and wherever it is located, whether in 
the spirit or body, it has a depressing influence upon 
the vital force, and, when prolonged in any high degree 
of intensity, it sunders the connection between soul 
and body. Bain lays it down as a fundamental prin- 
ciple that " states of pain are connected with an abate- 
ment, and states of pleasure with an increase, of some 
or all the vital functions." He also further observes SOUL AND BODY. 
47 
that " The remark has occurred to various speculators 
that there is a close connection between pleasure and 
high vitality, or the vigor of the system, and between 
pain and the causes of diminished vitality, or the 
feebleness and exhaustion of the system." Plato and 
Aristotle, in their views regarding pleasure, included its 
being a restorative to nature. Kant has a few striking 
expressions of the same tendency, although their effect 
is greatly spoiled by the context: "Pleasure is the 
feeling of the furtherance, pain of the hindrance of 
life."- (Mind and Body, the Theories of their Relation, 
p. 59.) 
To solve the mystery of pain, and to show mankind 
how to control or relieve it without the use of narcotic 
drugs, that always lower the vital tone of the system, 
would be the highest triumph of medical science. 
It seems to be occasioned by a misplacement of the 
spiritual principle of sensation, its transferrence from 
its proper location in the sensory nerves to a nerve of 
function. This is well illustrated by that common and 
most painful affection, sciatic rheumatism. The sciatic 
nerve is a motory nerve, but when the spiritual prin- 
ciple of sensation takes possession of it, it becomes 
most acutely painful. The same is true of toothache 
and neuralgia. They are not sensations, but a mis- 
placement of the sensory degree of our spiritual organ- 
ism. To relieve it, wherever it exists, let it be remem- 
bered that the movements of spirit are under the direc- 
tion of will, and the cure consists in gently, firmly, 
tranquilly and lovingly ordering the spiritual principle 
of sensation to its proper residence in the sensory 48 
SOUL AXD BODY. 
nerves. Tins is true of pains in the stomach, liver, 
kidneys, or any organ or part of the bodily structure. 
In all these cases a nerve of function seems to be 
making an attempt to become a nerve of sensation, and 
this occasions what we call pain. 
Disease, using the word in its etymological sense, 
rather than for a lesion or destruction of an organ, is 
always in the spiritual nature. Its location in the body 
is a fallacy of the senses. As a familiar illustration, 
take nausea, or sickness at the stomach. In this case 
there is no lesion, but only a disturbed function. It is 
certainly a feeling, and a disagreeable one, and all 
feeling is in the spiritual department of our complex 
nature, the body being entirely destitute of it. In the 
light of consciousness, it is a sensation that can have 
no existence out of the interior manhood. A dead 
body has, and can have, neither pain nor sea-sickness. 
Sunder the connection, the vital conjunction, between 
the material organism and the animating spirit, and 
there is no disagreeable sensation (the radical idea in 
the word disease) in the former. Does it not follow 
that the affection is not in the body at all, and that its 
location there is a fallacy? But is it not a peculiar 
condition of the stomach? Viewed in the light of a 
spiritual intelligence, which rises above the testimony 
of the senses, I answer, it is ; but the question still re- 
mains, Is the condition of the bodily organ an effect or a 
cause ? From the standing-ground of a spiritual intui- 
tion, I affirm that all bodily conditions are simply effects, 
of which some state of the spirit is the cause. To form 
a correct judgment, we must go behind the veil of the SOUL AND BODY. 
49 
senses and their fallacies. It is one of the profound 
maxims of Jesus, the Christ, that we are not to judge 
from appearance, but to judge righteously or rightly. 
(Jno. vii. 24.) And one of the difficulties he met in 
imparting the ideas of his spiritual philosophy to the 
sensuous multitude was, they judged after the flesh. 
(Jno. viii. 15.) 
He had many things to say to them of which they 
were not receptive, for they could only be spiritually 
discerned. 
What we call physical strength is not a property of 
the external body, as the muscles are not a force, but 
only the instruments of a force. There is no such 
thing as physical strength or bodily power. All causes, 
all forces, are spiritual. As strength is not in the body, 
so weakness, debility, infirmity, and impotency are not 
conditions of the outward organism, but of the inward 
man - the soul, the mind, the spirit. The body is 
strong only by virtue of its connection with the interior 
man, and in proportion to its vital union with it. It 
moves only as it is moved by a force distinct from itself. 
So far as the correspondence between the bodily organ- 
ism and the all-pervading and animating spirit ceases, 
or is loosened, so far is it weak and diseased. The 
great object of every system of medicine is to keep the 
body in such a condition as to render it a fit organ of 
the spirit, so that the latter can act through it, in the 
external world, without obstruction. When it ceases 
to be such an instrument, the living soul spontaneously 
puts it off, as having no further use for it. 
If disease is, as I have shown, spiritual in its origin 50 
SOUL AND BODY. 
and nature, then it can be cured only by spiritual forces 
and remedies. The progress of science at the present 
time is towards a wide and far-reaching generalization. 
Starting with the demonstrable fact that heat is con- 
vertible into mechanical and other forms of force, there 
is a probability that all forces are but different mani- 
festations of one primary force under different forms. 
There is but one Life in the Universe, the different 
forms and degrees of that all-pervading vitality being 
only varied manifestations of it. So there is a unity 
of force in all the phenomena of material nature, and 
when that force is discovered, and the laws governing 
it in some measure ascertained, it will be found to bo 
spiritual in its nature, and having an important relation 
to the life of the human organism, and will be available 
for the cure of disease as no known agent has ever 
been. 
In the cure of disease, Jesus made use of only mental 
or spiritual force ; but no unaided human personality is 
adequate to the results which were effected by him. 
He was in sympathetic conjunction with the divine 
Life and the sphere of the angel world. More than 
twelve legions of angels were his auxiliaries in his 
beneficent w'ork. (Mat. xxvi. 53.) In perfect harmony 
with the laws of our spiritual nature, we may be con- 
joined to the higher realm of intelligence and life, and 
our natural powers be augmented by the sympathetic 
union. The principle of psychometry, discovered by 
Dr. J. R. Buchanan, in 1842, is the principle which 
joins the whole human family in the same bundle of 
life. It was found that certain persons by holding 51 
SOUL AND BODY. 
in their hands various material substances, such as 
metals and medicines, experienced marked effects from 
them, and in the case of drugs, nearly the same in- 
fluence as if taken into the stomach. The experi- 
ments were originally made, and often repeated, under 
such conditions as to show that there was no absorp- 
tion, but that the influence was purely dynamical. A 
letter held in the hand affects the psychometric or sym- 
pathetic sense with the mental and physical states of the 
writer. The same is true with the contact of the hand 
with the clothing or person of another. I have found, 
in my experiments with it, that actual contact is not 
necessary. The same effect is produced by directing 
the thoughts to the object or person through any dis- 
tance of space. We have here a principle that unites 
the whole human family in this world and the next in 
the same community of life. It is the conjunctive tie 
that connects the whole realm of mind, and by which 
tbe intelligence and emotional states of the whole are 
communicated to each, and the states of each, by means 
of it, become the common property of all. By it we 
may come into union with the whole world of mind, 
and with all the vital and organic forces of nature. 
With our powers thus reinforced, through the delicate 
psychometric, or sympathetic sense, which all persons 
possess in some degree, the mental states and force of 
one person become communicable to another through 
the touch or contact of the hands, and, in fact, many 
miles away. This transmission of mental and emo- 
tional states to another may be aided and accelerated 52 
SOUL A XT) CODY. 
by a gentle volition, when the patient is passive ; for 
passivity induces impressibility and receptivity. 
It is through this property or law of spirit, which is 
essentially and necessarily communicative, that the life 
of an association of spirits, organized for the accom- 
plishment of a particular use in the kingdom of God, 
may be centred upon one personality, who thus be- 
comes, in the language of Swedenborg, a subject spirit, 
and a medium of transmitting his light and life to 
another or others. After what has been said upon the 
nature of disease, there is no room to doubt the effi- 
ciency of spiritual forces in its cure. Through the 
principle of psychometry, or, as we should define the 
word, soul-sympathy, instead of soul-measurement, we 
may come into communion with the whole realm of life, 
with God and the angel world, and may become trans- 
parent to those influences, so that they can flow through 
us to others, as light through glass. Thus it was with 
Jesus, the Christ. 
He who is called to cure disease should be the 
humble, willing, and passive agent of the power or 
powers that call him. He should come into a living 
fellowship with an angelic association, whose use is to 
minister to minds diseased, and to become their subject 
messenger and organ of communication with others. 
Or, as Paul directs, " Let every soul be subject to the 
higher powers." (Rom. xiii. 1.) To this divine use he 
should unreservedly consecrate himself as his life-work. 
He should come into a deeper sympathy with the in- 
terior realm and its living inhabitants, the world of 
life, and the seat of all causation. With a soul opened SOUL AND BODY. 
53 
upward toward the spiritual realm to receive of its 
inexhaustible stores, he should be open toward the 
patient to impart. In this way all that can be done 
in a given case will be accomplished; and what cannot 
be thus done no one need attempt in his own strength. 
One cause of failure in the psychopathic mode of 
treating disease is that the practitioner aims to do all 
by his own will, which oftener than otherwise obstructs 
the action of the living healing influence, that must 
come from the interior world of spirit, and be a power 
issuing from the serene depths of the infinite abyss of 
life and light. As it was with Jesus, so should it be 
with us, - the place where we treat the patient should 
be the point of communicative contact with the uni- 
versal realm of life. Then, as Paul said, when we are 
weak, we shall be strong, and approach the unhappy 
invalid, on the side of his greatest needs, in all the 
omnipotence of self-conscious weakness, and, hence, in 
all the plenitude of the blessings and gifts of the 
spirit. By a complete self-abnegation, we should make 
our own personality a vacuum to be filled with the 
higher influences of the angelic realms, which will rush 
down with spontaneous alacrity to fill our self-induced 
emptiness. 
What goes under the general name of psychometry is 
a force - a dynamic influence. It is that by which 
mind acts on matter, and matter on mind. Perhaps 
it is the primary force, the root from which all other 
forces spring, and to which they are reducible. It is 
that by means of which matter is animated by spirit 
the body by the soul, and that through which our men- 54 
SOUL AND BODY. 
tai states, or, if you will, our mental force, may be 
communicated to material substances, so that they will 
impart them to sensitive persons when in contact with 
them, or near them. Psychometry, or soul-measure- 
ment, the detecting the character, the mental and 
physical traits of another person through something 
that has been in contact with him, is not the proper 
designation of the principle. It is only one of 
its functions. The word does not fully define it, 
and perhaps there is no word that does so. It is 
sympathy with all nature, with all mind, with the 
totality of life. It links every human being with the 
sum total of existence, the vital whole. By means of 
it, Jesus gathered into himself all the living forces of 
the universe, and imparted them to others for the cure 
of diseases of mind and body ; for it is a force that is 
not only passively received, but can be actively trans- 
mitted to others. He could say by virtue of his 
psychometric sensibility, " All power is given unto me 
in heaven and in earth." Consciously united to God, 
the Central Life, and with all the powers of universal 
nature, what could he not accomplish? 
The principle or force brought to light by psychom- 
etry, is that which lies at the basis of correspondence, 
correlation, pre-established harmony, mutual adapta- 
tion, reciprocity, affinity, union. It is that by means 
of which medicines affect the spiritual principle in man, 
and through that the body. It is the soul of things, 
the animus mundi, and the primal force. Its reception 
by Jesus, and its employment for the cure of disease 
philosophically solves the mystery of his beneficent SOUL AND BODY. 
55 
career. It is that which renders inspiration in any age 
of the world a possibility and a present reality. By 
means of it, the receptive mind may become enriched 
by the spiritual treasures of other minds by communi- 
cative contact with them, and our intellectual poverty 
may be relieved by the reception of the emanative 
sphere of the whole realm of light and life. Life is 
essential activity, and all spirit is essentially commu- 
nicative. No state of thought or emotion can be 
concealed in the depths of our own consciousness. 
The whole realm of spirit is bound together by a golden 
tie, a common life that connects the whole in one. 
Touch the cord at any point, and it vibrates along the 
electric line, and its effects are felt in the most distant 
world on the boundary of creation, whose inhabitants 
look out on empty space. Every life is a circle that 
cuts the circle of other lives, and these still others, and 
the centre of each is a point in an omnipresent Divin- 
ity- 
The marvels of healing wrought by Christ and his 
early disciples are explained by taking into the account 
their conscious relation to the whole realm of vitality. 
By a faith, which had its root in love, they laid hold of 
eternal life. The main feature of the Gospel system, as 
a line of moral action is the cure of diseases of mind 
and body. "He called his twelve disciples unto him, 
and gave them power over unclean spirits to cast them 
out, and to heal all manner of sickness, and all manner 
of disease." (Mat. x. 1.) Jesus represented in his 
personality, the principle of life. As the Father had 
life in himself, so he gave to him to have life in himself; 56 
SOUL AND BODY. 
and through him, that the world might have it more 
abundantly. The place where he stood was always the 
point where the heavens touched the earth, and mingled 
their tranquil life of love with all disturbed human con- 
ditions. His power to cure disease consisted in his 
clear perception of its spiritual nature, in an intuitive 
knowledge of what spiritual changes needed to be willed 
and effected in every individual case, in his acting from 
the divine realm of his being, and in his being endued 
with power from on high, by the restoration and adjust- 
ment of his human nature to its proper relations to the 
universal life. And what he did we can, in some de- 
gree, accomplish. For it was a power that he imparted 
to his disciples, and one which should have been con- 
tinued in the ministry until the present day. It will be 
revived in the world when religion is no longer a dry 
and lifeless theology, but a life of love, - when to be a 
Christian is not to yield an unintelligible assent to cer- 
tain dogmas, as destitute of life as the leaves of winter 
that have fallen from their vital connection with the 
parent tree, but to follow Christ in doing good to all; 
and when human nature shall be studied, not in the 
obscure light of a superficial physiology, which views 
man only as so many pounds of matter, and not as a 
spirit, in the mysterious depths of whose being are 
already glowing the fires of immortality, and whose 
wonderful powers, usually latent and dormant in the 
present life, but which sometimes in certain individuals 
flash out to astonish a sensuous world, are but the 
" stirrings of deep divinity within." SOUL AND BODY. 
57 
CHAPTER III. 
FAITH AND FEAR AND THEIR RELATION TO HEALTH AND 
DISEASE. 
" Whate'er we hope, by faith we have, 
Future and past, subsisting now." 
The Christian idea of salvation includes in it some- 
thing more than the pardon of sin, and the releasing 
of the offender from an arbitrary punishment. It is 
the restoration of the soul to union and harmony with 
God, and of the body to correspondence with the re- 
deemed spirit. Jesus, the Christ, in the office of the 
Great Physician, undertook the divine task of carrying 
a healing influence, in the highest sense of the terms, 
to every department of our disordered human nature. 
It was his aim to cure the body through the restored 
soul. But what was the fundamental idea in his 
method of cure? It stands out prominently in the 
Gospels, and on almost every page. There are two 
opposite mental states, which, more than any others, are 
the body's health or malady. The inmost principle of 
health, according to his system, is faith. " Thy faith 
hath made thee whole," and "Be it unto thee accord- 
ing to thy faith," express a general law of the relation 
of the body to the sovereign mind. The principle of 
fear, which is allied to doubt, to unbelief and to mcl- 58 
SOUL AND BODY. 
ancholy, and without which those states could not 
exist, is the spiritual essence of disease. In its acute 
form, such as is experienced in a sudden fright, it 
affects every organ and fibre of the body. It creates 
everywhere a morbid action. In the form of anxiety 
and doubt, it gains in chronicity what it loses in inten- 
sity. So the effects of faith, when it is energetic, and 
according to the degree in which it is exercised, are felt 
everywhere throughout the organism. It sends a thrill 
of life and health through every particle and tissue of 
the bodily structure. Its effects are both immediate 
and lasting, which can be predicated of no other 
remedy. We are saved by faith, soul and body, and 
tliis is the fundamental idea of the Christian system. 
This law of faith is fully illustrated in the Gospel nar- 
ratives, and in the beneficent career of Christ. The 
influence of a genuine faith is the divine secret that he 
revealed to an unbelieving and darkened world. The 
relation of faith to health, of soul and body, and of 
fear and unbelief to disease and misery, are the funda- 
mental principles of his spiritual science of healing. 
In perusing the Gospel history, we find that no cures 
were ever wrought by him except through the faith of 
the patient, or of some one else. Where there was a 
lack of this essential condition, he performed no cures. 
(Mat. xiii. 58.) His whole life is an exhibition of 
the triumphs of faith over disease, misery and death. 
It was in him a living power that united him to God 
the Central Life. We are told by Paul that it was 
an element in God's omnipotence, and that by it he 
created the worlds. (Heb. xi. 3.) In the subjects of SOUL AND BODY. 
59 
his remarkable cures, it was a receptive condition, and 
rendered them admissive of the sanative virtue that 
went forth from his personality. 
If faith is the spiritual principle of health, and so 
essential to the restoration of the disordered organism 
to its normal state, it becomes an inquiry of the utmost 
practical importance, " How can we obtain this saving 
faith ? " This question is answered by Paul, who gives 
a condensed view of all that can be said on the subject: 
" By grace are ye saved through faith ; and that not of 
yourselves, it is the gift of God." (Eph. ii. 8.) 
Faith is power; for since it is the gift of God, it is 
something of the life of God in the soul *of man. 
" Lord, increase our faith" is one of the most compre- 
hensive prayers ever offered. It is the application of 
the creature to the Creator for the supply of one of our 
deepest needs. If by sincere prayer we put our souls 
into a receptive condition, the faith we need flows in 
from God. Christ commanded his disciples to " have 
the faith of God." (Mark xi. 22.) The mind must 
be held passively open toward him, and the faith of 
God will flow into it as surely as the light and heat of 
the sun will come into our habitations when thrown 
open to receive his influence, or the surrounding air 
will rush in to fill a vacuum when the communication 
is opened. 
God gives faith just as he gives the power of 
thought. He does not think for us, but only imparts 
to us every moment the ability to think ; but we must 
think for ourselves. So it is in regard to faith. A 
soul that looks up to God receives from him the 60 
SOUL AND BODY. 
power to believe unto salvation - using the word in 
the sense attached to it in the Gospels - but we must, 
by a voluntary act, believe that we are being saved 
now from disease of soul and body, and by a divine 
obstinacy hold ourselves in that position. If our faith 
be genuine, and comes from God, we shall not be 
disappointed. For, as Solomon has said, "As a man 
thinketh in his heart, so is he." Such a faith is the 
reality of things, or, as Paul affirms, it "is the sub- 
stance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not 
seen." (Ileb. xi. 1.) There is a profound spiritual 
science in the above passage, which the church and the 
world will some day better understand. 
Hundreds of facts have been collected by medical 
writers to illustrate the influence of what is called 
imagination, in causing and curing disease. But these 
marvellous effects are not miraculous, but take place in 
harmony with invariable law. The principle that 
underlies them all, if we analyze the mental state 
involved in these cases, is not what is properly called 
imagination, but that of expectant attention; or, in 
other words, fear in causing disease, and faith in 
curing it. No principle is now better established in 
the science of medicine than the influence of the mind 
over the bodily condition, and yet no systematic efforts 
have been made by medical men to utilize it and make 
it of practical importance in establishing a system of 
psychical medicine, or the practice of mental thera- 
peutics. On the subject* of the influence of the mind 
over disease, and its effects upon the condition of the 
body, Pereira remarks: "Affections of the mind, by 80UL AKO BODY. 
61 
their influence over the corporal functions, favor or 
oppose the action of morbific causes, and modify the 
progress of diseases. The methodical application of 
them as remedies constitutes the psychical method of 
cure. Regarded as therapeutical agents they are by 
no means unimportant, though their employment is 
necessarily limited, on account of the difficulty experi- 
enced in producing and controlling them." - (Materia 
Medina and Therapeutics, vol. l,p. 6G.) 
But the difficulty referred to above is not so great as 
it might seem, provided the influence of the mind on 
the body is governed by law. The intensity of this 
acknowledged influence is greatly increased, when 
there is a belief, faith, or expectation that certain 
phenomena will occur. This expectation seems to be 
the fundamental cause of the action of the mind on the 
bodily functions, and powerfully affects them for good 
or ill, according as that expectation is of a favorable 
character, which constitutes what, in a medical sense, 
we call faith; or it may be associated with an appre- 
hension of evil, and then it is fear. In the sense in 
which we use the word, faith includes hope, and is the 
expectation, and, in its highest form, the foreseeing, of 
a wished-for event; fear, one not wished for. They 
are not purely intellectual states or acts, but are 
movements of the emotional and affectional depart- 
ments of the mind, and consequently stirrings of the 
inmost life-principle of man. The faith of which I 
speak is not a mere belief of the intellect, as when we 
•recognize the truth of the proposition that the angles 
of a triangle are equal to two right angles. " Bain, 62 
SOUL AND BODY. 
who defines the primordial form of belief as expectation 
of some contingent future about to follow on our 
action, holds that James Mills erred, in common with 
most metaphysicians, in calling it a purely intellectual 
state."-{Influence of the Mind on the Body, by 
Daniel Hack Tube, p. 25.) 
Faith, as we have seen, is the gift of God, but its 
exercise is a voluntary act of ourselves. The world 
needs to be educated to its use as a remedial agent. 
The gift of oratory, or painting, or music, is no more 
the subject of improvement by education, by discipline, 
by culture, than is the gift of faith. We can disci- 
pline ourselves to believe for the cure of our diseases, 
as well as to sketch from nature. In either case, we 
possess the power, the ability, the gift, and its intelli- 
gent use, according to the laws of mind, is what we 
need. The education of a power is, as the word in its 
radical significance implies, an educing, or drawing out, 
of what is within us. It is calling into conscious 
action of a latent, undeveloped, or unused power of 
our nature, and by use - such is the law of our nature 
- it is improved, increased, and perfected. 
It is among the most certain principles of mental 
physiology that expectation, either in the form of faith 
or fear, will effect organic or functional changes in the 
direction of health or disease. Faith is always salutary. 
This is universally admitted by all medical practition- 
ers, and their testimony goes far toward confirming 
and establishing, on a scientific basis, the Christian 
doctrine of faith in its application to the cure of dis- 
ease. Its influence will sometimes overbalance the SOUL AKD r.ODY. 
63 
natural action of medicines, as in the case, mentioned 
by Dr. Tuke, of the medical student at Leyden. Feel- 
ing the need of a cathartic, he looked in the index of a 
medical work for the word "pill," which he supposed 
must be a purgative, but, without knowing the com- 
position, took one containing opium, hyoscyamus, and 
other astringents ; but, under the influence of the ex- 
pectation that cathartic effects would follow, he was 
thoroughly purged by it. In this case, the influence of 
faith was greater than that of a powerfully astringent 
medicine. When a person swallows a bread pill, under 
the impression that it will act as a purgative, that 
expectation or faith will cause the same increased 
peristaltic movements of the intestinal canal as would 
be caused by a cathartic drug. This is what is usually 
called the effect of imagination, which, in this case, 
can mean nothing but expectant attention, or faith. 
The doctrine of Christ, as to the saving influence of 
faith, is fully supported by the highest medical author- 
ity. Unzer, in his profound work on the " Physiology 
of the Nervous System," under the head of the influ- 
ence of expectation and foreseeing, affirms that "the 
expectation of the action of a remedy often causes us 
to experience its operation beforehand." But faith 
would produce the same, and, perhaps, even greater 
results without the medicine, for "all things are pos- 
sible to him that believeth." (Mark ix. 23.) 
Dr. II. Holland, in his " Chapters on Mental Physi- 
ology," has demonstrated the effect of directed con- 
sciousness, or the concentration of the attention upon 
any of the bodily organs. But Hunter, a hundred 64 
SOUL AKD LOVY. 
years before him, says : "I am confident that I can fix 
my attention upon any part until I have a sensation in 
that part." This is a fundamental principle in the in- 
fluence of the mind upon the body, and contains the 
gist of all that has been written upon the subject. But 
this concentration of the mind - the mental force - 
upon any part of the body is greatly intensified in its 
effects when it is accompanied with a belief that certain 
results or changes will follow. It then becomes ex- 
pectant attention, which is the essence of faith. 
The distinguished physiologist, Muller, expresses 
himself as decidedly as Unzer in regard to the influ- 
ence of expectation, which is only a form and degree 
of faith. He says: "It may be stated, as a general 
fact, that any state of the body, which is conceived to 
be approaching, and which is expected with confidence 
and certainty of its occurrence, will be very prone to 
ensue as the mere result of that idea." He makes 
only one condition: " If it do not lie beyond the 
bounds of possibility." 
It may be stated as a general law of our nature, 
more certain in its operation than any medicinal prepa- 
ration, that faith accelerates, and fear and unbelief retard, 
the action of the natural forces - the vis vitoe- in the 
cure of disease. If this is true, the therapeutical sys- 
tem of Jesus, the Christ, which is founded upon faith, 
is the only one in harmony with the spiritual nature of 
man, and its efficiency has been proved without calling 
in the aid of the excited religious faculties, which ai;e 
important auxiliaries to its sanative effects. There are 
few men in the history of medicine who have had more SOUL AND BODY. 
65 
practical experience in the treatment of disease, and 
who were better fitted by nature and education to ob- 
serve the action of the various sanative devices usually 
employed, than the justly celebrated Dr. Rush. His 
testimony to the good effects of inspiring confidence, 
which is faith in an intense form, where doubt is quies- 
cent or excluded, and belief is conjoined with tranquil 
emotion, is clear and explicit. "I have," he says, 
" frequently prescribed remedies of doubtful efficiency 
in the critical stage of acute diseases, but never till 
I had worked up my patients into a confidence bordering 
upon certainty of their probably good effects. The suc- 
cess of this measure has much oftener answered than 
disappointed my expectations." The phrenopathic 
method of cure adopted by Christ, and practised by him 
eighteen hundred years ago, is founded upon the un- 
changing laws of human nature, and consequently may 
be as efficient to-day as it was then. 
We use the term faith in a medical sense, rather than 
in its religious aspect, yet the definition of faith by 
Paul will cover both : " Faitli is the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Ileb. 
xi. 1.) It is the proof, the demonstration of 
things that lie beyond the range of the senses. Faith 
is not opposed to knowledge, but only to that degree of 
knowledge which we acquire by our external senses. 
In this respect it agrees with the higher range of science. 
"By science," says an aide writer, "we understand 
many things which are apparently contradicted by sight, 
such as, to mention the most obvious instance, the 
motion of the earth. Both science and faith are op- 66 
SOUL AND BODY. 
posed to merely sensible perception, as transcending it; 
but as science transcends sensible perception, so faith 
transcends science." - (Scientific Bases of Faith, by J, 
J. Murphy, p. 191.) 
It is the office of faith to extend our knowledge be- 
yond the range of the senses. It is not the belief of 
what is incapable of proof, but in its highest form it is 
an intuition, an inward-seeing, and hence is the demon- 
stration of what is not cognizable by the senses. The 
senses act only within a limited range, and even within 
their circumscribed limits their decisions have to be 
corrected by faith and science, which in their higher 
forms become as one, so far as they are intellectual 
states. But faith is not a purely intellectual state. 
As the word is used in the Gospel system, it has its 
root in love, which is the inmost life of mafi. It is not 
only belief, it is confidence, trust, and includes in it 
hope, or the expectation of something the heart craves. 
It contains in it the spiritual good which we desire and 
for which we hope. For it is the substance, the under- 
lying principle and reality of the things which the mind 
stretches forth its arms to grasp. We come into a men- 
tal appropriation of everything we really possess by faith. 
This is one of the laws of our being, and health is no 
exception to it. While a person believes that he is sick, 
he is mentally and spiritually diseased, and this Will be 
ultimated in a corresponding bodily condition, for the 
reason that the body lives only from the animating 
soul, and its condition is only an effect of which the 
state of the spiritual principle is the cause. 
That faith and fear, in their different forms and de- SOUL AND BODY. 
67 
grees, affect our spiritual condition, no one would be 
hardy enough to deny. That they should affect the 
body is equally reasonable, aside from the demonstrated 
certainty of it from consciousness and experience. The 
underlying reality in what we call matter is nothing but 
spirit. Material things, as they are only effects, can 
have no independent existence. They have the root of 
their existence in mind, for all things owe their origin 
and continued being to God, who is an infinite and 
everywhere present Spirit. The materialistic school of 
philosophy, reasoning from the fallacies of the senses, 
and rising no higher, sees a realm of matter, and sup- 
poses mind or spirit to be one of its functions. The 
idealistic or metaphysical school, reasoning from con- 
sciousness, believe in a world of spirit, and that matter 
is only its sensuous manifestation. In this latter view, 
which I intuitively adopt, " the deepest realities of the 
universe are not material but spiritual," and the only 
real thing in the life and health of man is in the state 
of the spiritual nature, call it by what name you will, - 
the pneumo, of Plato and Paul, the arclweus of Van Hci- 
mont, the anima of Stahl, the esprit of the French, the 
geist of the German language, or the soul of the 
English. 
There are two distinct currents of thought that are 
drifting the scientific world into the recognition of the 
essential spirituality of what we call matter. The one 
is that brought prominently to notice many years ago 
by Bishop Berkeley, - that all we know of matter is by 
its power of producing certain sensations in us. All 
the properties of matter are only sensations, and it is 68 
SOUL AND BODY. 
certain that sensations are phenomena of mind and 
belong to the spiritual nature of man. ZMill adopts a 
similar view, and affirms that matter is known to us 
only as a " permanent possibility of sensation ; " that it 
is nothing else, and has no other meaning. According 
to this view, things have no reality to us only as they 
are perceived, or are capable of being perceived, and 
perception is a purely mental act or state. This theory 
will always commend itself to those who are highly 
spiritually developed. 
The other view, tending in the same direction, is the 
new doctrine of force, that has been recently intro- 
duced into science. All the conceivable properties of 
matter are only different forms of force. But there can 
be no force that does not, in its final analysis, resolve 
itself into something spiritual, as mind is the only 
causal agent in the universe, and consequently matter 
in its essential reality is spiritual. This view places on 
a rational foundation the influence of the mind upon 
the body, which is a fact of consciousness, and also the 
effects attributed to faith in the Christian system in 
the restoration to health of the disordered physical 
organism. 
Every material thing envelopes an analogous spiritual 
one with which it is in correspondence, and the interior 
is the cause of the existence of the exterior, which can 
be viewed by the intuitive reason only as an effect. 
Things may be at the same time both substantial and 
material. This is emphatically true of the human 
body. By substance I mean the underlying reality of 
any object discerned by the senses. This interior es- SOUL AND BODY. 
69 
sence, in the human body, is in close relations with the 
mind, and is affected by its varying states. 
Almost every disease known to medical science has 
been produced by fear as its only discernible cause. 
This, as a spiritual condition, is the seminal principle of 
most if not all diseases. The first and best prescription 
to be given to a patient is found in the words of Christ, 
" Be not afraid, only believe." (Mark v. 3G.) What- 
ever the disease, this is always indicated as the best 
prophylactic, and lays the foundation for the curative 
agency to be employed. Fear will, with unerring cer- 
tainty, predispose the system to the unfavorable result 
that is anticipated, while faith will increase arid augment 
the so-called vital force against the morbid condition. 
It will do more ; it will impart a healthy tone to all the 
organs of the body, and send life to every department 
of our complex being. 
This salutary or saving faith may exist in very dif- 
ferent degrees, and its effects will be proportioned to 
the degree in which it is exercised. "Be it unto thee 
according to thy faith," expresses an unalterable mental 
law. There may be the simple recognition of the pos- 
sibility of recovery. This raises the patient out of the 
region of absolute despair upon the plane of hope. It 
may exist as an expectation, that within certain fixed 
limits, a day, a week, a month, a year, recovery will 
be consummated. But the highest degree of faith is 
where there is a divinely inwrought conviction that we 
are saved, or being saved noiv. We need a degree of 
faith, which, like that of Abraham, is not staggered at 
any philosophical or scientific impossibility, but which, 70 
SOUL AND BODY. 
with an unyielding tenacity, lays hold of the Infinite 
Life. Faith makes things possible which would otherwise 
be impossible. The following stanzas of Wesley, in 
glowing language, express the highest degree of faith a 
human soul can exercise : - 
" In hope against all human hope, 
Self-desperate, I believe; 
Thy quickening word shall raise me up; 
Thou dost thy Spirit give. 
The thing surpasses all my thought, 
Yet faithful is my Lord; 
Through unbelief I stagger not, 
For God hath spoke the word. 
'Tis done : Thou dost this moment save, 
With full salvation bless, 
Redemption through thy life I have, 
And spotless love and peace." 
Faith naturally and spontaneously looks up to some 
power above us, to some being or person who is able to 
help us and save us. It can find no enduring resting- 
place short of the Infinite One, in whom we live and 
move and have our being. It places the soul in vital 
relations with the source of all existence, and the foun- 
tain of mental and bodily health. There is a faith that 
so lays hold on God that eternal life is brought within 
our present grasp. Its language is, " The Lord is my 
light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear? the Lord is 
the strength of my life : of whom shall I be afraid ? 
(Ps. xxvii. 1.) The inwrought divine conviction that 
we are saved, or being made whole now, which some- SOUL AND BODY. 
71 
times rises to an intuition and actual foreseeing, makes 
the result for which we have hoped a present reality. 
If we hold ourselves with a divine stubbornness in that 
attitude of assured and unyielding faith and confidence, 
the body will gradually adjust itself in harmony and 
correspondence with the state of the soul, and by it 
out of weakness we shall be made strong. (Heb. xi. 
34.) 
I have made these observations on the relation of 
faith to health, because it is a subject that has been 
banished from the Christian pulpit, and has dropped 
out of the thought of the Church, though it occupied a 
prominent place in primitive Christianity. In this 
respect, I could wish that in these latter days we might 
come back to the fathers, and, more than that, to the 
God of the fathers, and demonstrate to the doubting, 
hesitating scientific mind of the present age, that there 
is a power that can save to the uttermost- soul, spirit 
and body - all that come unto it. Then Christianity, 
shall be shown to be what in theory is claimed for it - 
the depositing by the heavens of a new life in our 
humanity. If it came down from God out of heaven, 
it is eternity projected into time, in order that " mor- 
tality might be swallowed up of life." In a world of 
sickness and sorrow, where thousands of diseases con- 
stitute death's standing army, which is hurrying man- 
kind to the grave as if God had repented the making 
of them, may Christianity become what it was in the 
divinc-human personality of Christ, a spiritual power 
not only able to bring men to the consciousness of the 
pardon of sin, but that carries its " saving health" to 72 
SOUL AND BODY. 
the body as well as the soul. Using the word miracle 
in its proper signification of a surprise, a wonder, there 
never was an age when such an exhibition of spiritual 
power was more needed than now. And, if needed, it 
will be given. If the paralyzed or dead Church cannot 
be galvanized into such manifestations of life, God will 
raise up those outside of its sectarian walls that can be 
made the depositories of such spiritual gifts. 
Christianity, introduced into the wrorld by Him whose 
name it bears, is a great fact-a divine fact - in the 
history of the life of humanity. It was introduced into 
the current of the world's life at a time when that world 
was dead in trespasses and in sins, encrusted with a 
gross materialism, and sunk in sensuality and car- 
nality. It has elevated society to a higher plane of 
spiritual life and civilization. Its essential principles, 
both ethical and doctrinal, are as immutable and eter- 
nal as the principles of geometry, and will enter as an 
important factor into the future progress and develop- 
ment of the human race. While we would not ignore, 
or undervalue, the other great religions of the world, 
nor put a low estimate upon the effects they have had 
in the spiritual elevation of the different peoples who 
have embraced them, yet it seems to me there is no 
religious system which brings the soul into such inti- 
mate relations to the spiritual world, and such close 
and living communion with God, as does Christianity 
in its genuineness and unadulterated purity. We say 
nothing of its many counterfeit imitations. As it 
came from its Author it is not a religion of form, a 
mere mechanical contrivance to take the place of the SOUL AND BODY. 
73 
movements of the heart of man, but a religion of the 
soul, a religion of the spirit. Its genius is well ex- 
pressed in the words of Christ: " God is a Spirit, and 
they who worship him must worship him in spirit and 
in truth." (Jno. iv. 24.) 
The Christian idea of saving faith is not the intel- 
lectual assent or credence given to any system of doc- 
trines which profess to teach something about Christ, - 
which is only a counterfeit palmed upon the world by 
a sectarian ecclesiasticism, - but it is the affectionate 
trust, the loving confidence, of the soul in a personal 
and living Christ for a present deliverance and salva- 
tion. Such a faith, by a known psychological law, 
brings the soul into a vital sympathy with him, and 
the trusting, believing soul is so joined to him as to 
receive the influx of life and light from him. By this 
simple act we receive the current of his spiritual life 
and power into our own being. Our life is so inter- 
locked and intermingled with his that we live because 
he lives. We come into an influential communication 
with his higher condition, and are vitally connected 
with him, as the branch to the vine. (Jno. xv. 1-5.) 
By a psychological law, known to modern science, we 
come into such a living sympathy with him that we can 
say with Paul, " I am crucified with Christ; neverthe- 
less, I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the 
life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of 
the Son of God." (Gal. ii. 20.) Thus psychometry, 
or the sympathetic sense, the action of mind on mind, 
throws a flood of light upon many otherwise unintel- 
ligible passages of the Scriptures. 74 
SOUL AND BODY. 
Mark this general law of our spiritual nature: To 
come into psychometric relations or sympathetic com- 
munication with any being or person who is on a higher 
plane of life than our own, when we are in an admissive 
state, is always salutary, or saving, to both soul and 
body, and can but elevate us to a more exalted mental 
and physical condition. Faith in a risen, ascended, 
and personal Christ, does this with undeviating and 
unerring certainty. Hence, salvation from sin and 
disease, by faith in Jesus, whose very name signifies a 
Saviour, is based upon a fundamental law of our 
spiritual being. 
By this sympathetic connection with Christ, and 
through him with the angel-world, the inner world of 
spirit, the powers of the soul are greatly augmented. 
In this way the apostles, on the day of Pentecost, 
received "power from on high." (Luke xxiv. 49.) 
But what did they receive, and what has become of 
this power in the church ? They manifestly ever after 
this enjoyed a higher degree of inspiration, and an 
ever-increasing and progressive revelation to them of 
spiritual truths which before they were in no condition 
to recognize or receive. But the crowning gift, in- 
cluded in the baptism of the Spirit, or the influx of life 
and light from on high, was the power to control 
themselves and others, and to fasten healing and saving 
impressions upon the minds of men. This power they 
ever after possessed, and all the marvels of healing 
wrought by them, in their subsequent career, were 
effected under its influence. This power, to savingly 
impress men, is analogous to what is usually called SOUL AND BODY. 
75 
magnetism, only it is exalted and ennobled and made 
divine by an influx from the opened heavens. Says 
Prof. C. G. Finney, who possessed it in an eminent 
degree, "It is a mysterious fact, often manifested in a 
most surprising manner, that sometimes a single sen- 
tence, a word, a gesture, or even a look, will convey 
this power in an overcoming degree." He gives some 
most marvellous facts, bordering upon the miraculous, 
in his own personal history, of the effects of his own 
look or gaze while under the influence of "power 
from on high." 
In the account given of the cures wrought by the 
apostles, it is interesting to notice the influence that 
seemed to attend this mysterious ocular transmission. 
Through the eye the psychic or soul-force is transmis- 
sible to another, as well as through the hand. It is 
through the eye that the attention or a concentration 
of the thoughts is fixed upon another. To gaze upon 
one always affects them, and, in the case of highly 
sensitive persons, in a marked degree. The mental 
power may be concentrated into the eye, which becomes 
the organ of its transmission to others. Baron Reich- 
enbach demonstrated that the odyllic flame goes forth 
from the eye. In the New Testament so-called mira- 
cles of healing, we find incidental hints of this ocular 
transmission of a psychic or spiritual force. In the 
account of the cure of the cripple at the gate of the 
temple it is said to have been preceded by the combined 
magnetic gaze of both Peter and John. " And Peter, 
fastening his eyes upon him with John, said, Look on 76 
SOUL AND LODY. 
us." After this he commanded him to rise and walk. 
(Acts iii. 4.) 
The same is noticeable in the account of the cure at 
Lystra of the man who had been a cripple from his 
birth, and who had never walked. "The same heard 
Paul speak: who steadfastly beholding him, and per- 
ceiving that he had faith to be healed, said, with a 
loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped 
and walked." (Acts xiv. 8-10.) 
We do not see how it can degrade these miracles, as 
they are called, to show that they were effected in 
harmony with the laws of magnetism. For magnetism, 
if it is an established fact, is as much a law of God as 
gravitation or chemical affinity, or even the Decalogue. 
The great error of the religious world has been in 
separating God from nature, and in their conceptions 
eliminating a divine power from those events that 
occur in harmony with established law', which is prac- 
tical atheism. 
" Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God." 
A law of nature is only the uniform mode in which a 
divine power acts. A genuine faith sees in all the 
beautiful objects of earth what Jerome calls radios 
Deitatis, radiations of the Deity. It sees all things to 
be full of God, and the whole material universe is 
viewed, in a certain sense, as Deum explica,turn, the 
unibidings or manifestations of God. Of the seasons, 
it can say with Thompson: - SOUL AND BODY. 
77 
11 These as they change, Almighty Father, these 
Are but the varied God. The rolling year 
Is full of thee." 
But we concede that these effects cannot be pro- 
duced unless we are in sympathetic alliance with higher 
powers. In the case of the cure of the cripple at the 
gate of the temple, it was claimed to have been done 
in the " name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth," or by virtue 
of a power proceeding from him. (Acts iii. 6.) Faith 
in Christ brings us into such a vital connection with 
him that we come into a fellowship or community of 
state with him. It is a truth, which I have confirmed 
by hundreds of successful experiments, that when we 
are in a susceptible condition, if we direct our thoughts 
to another person through any distance of space, we 
shall be affected by his state, and sometimes in a most 
remarkable degree. Sometimes, when we are highly 
sensitive, the influence of that other takes well-nigh 
entire possession of us. The same spiritual law holds 
good in its application to God and to Christ. Faith in 
him, which is only another name for union with him, so 
joins us sympathetically with God, that we feel his in- 
fluence and are receptive of his life. The highest 
Christian life attainable is such a union with God, 
through a living faith, that we can say, " The Father 
is in me, and I am in the Father." In the sublimest 
of all prayers ever addressed to the willing and listen- 
ing ear of a present God, Christ prays that his disciples, 
or scholars, might become one with God as he and the 
Father were one : "As Thou, Father, art in me, and I 
in Thee, that they also may be one in us. I in them, 78 
SOUL AND BODY. 
and Thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." 
(Jno. xvii. 20-23.) Through the sympathetic sense in 
its highest applications, such a union with God is seen 
to come within, the range of the possibilities and actual 
laws of the human spirit. God is in us, when we are 
receptive of his influence, or rather effluence, the sphere 
of his life that goes forth from him, just as the sun is 
said to be in a room that is opened to admit his light 
and heat. We are in God, when we are in direct com- 
munication with him by faith, and are in an attitude 
admissive of spiritual life from him, - as when you ask 
a servant or a child to put one of your choice flowers in 
the sun, he carries it from the shade into the sunlight, 
where it can imbibe its life-giving light and heat. He 
who can say from a living faith in God, and out of his 
inmost consciousness, " The Father is in me, and I am 
in the Father," and " I and my Father are one," is in 
the higher Christian life, whatever may be the dogmas 
that compose his creed, which may be an intellectual 
and scientific chaos, yet he will be a positive divine 
power for good in the world. It is by the heart, rather 
than the intellect, that the soul of man is united to 
God and heaven. SOUL AND BODY. 
79 
CHAPTER IV. 
THE MORBIFIC AND SANATIVE INFLUENCE OF THE 
SPIRITUAL WORLD, AND HOW TO COMMUNICATE 
WITH THAT REALM OF LIFE IN HARMONY WITH 
THE LAWS OF MIND. 
" Rooted here we stand, and gaze 
On those bright steps that heavenward raise 
Their practicable way." 
In studying the system of cure adopted by Christ, and 
the theory of health and disease on which his practice 
was based, we find that great prominence was given to 
the influence of the world of spirits over the mental and 
physical condition of men. Many diseases were attrib- 
uted to a spiritual influx, or a disorderly psychological 
control of the patients, as in the case of paralysis, epi- 
lepsy, chorea, and the loss of the power of speech. In 
all maladies of a nervous character, and such to some 
extent is every disease, there is good reason to believe 
that there is an affinitive attraction between these condi- 
tions and those in the world of spirits who are in a state 
corresponding to them, or having a causal relation to 
them. The connection may be an involuntary and un- 
conscious one on the part of both. Swedenborg has 
reproduced the theory of Christ, and shown, from his 
own experience, the effects that various classes of 80 
SOUL AND BODY. 
spirits have upon the human body. His doctrine on 
this subject is clearly stated in his numerous works, but 
especially in the " Arcana Celestia " (5711 - 5727). If 
this doctrine is true, as it is disclosed in the Gospels, 
and more fully restated in the writings of that remark- 
able man, Emanuel Swedenborg, the cure of all those 
diseases, even where the morbific spiritual influence 
does not amount to obsession, must consist in a read- 
justment of the relations of the patient to the spiritual 
world. How this can be done is a question of great 
practical importance. Can we so communicate with 
that unseen realm of life and its inhabitants, as to be 
able at will to change, to some extent, our relations to 
it, and choose our associations? In what follows, in 
this and the next chapter, we shall aim to make this 
plain. 
By the increasing light of science and philosophy 
the wide and dim domain of mystery is being gradually 
narrowed down. Many a penetrating ray is projected 
into its solid darkness, and the hitherto invisible 
appears in sight. Discovery is casting its piercing 
gaze into the region of the unknown and what was once 
deemed the unknowable. As' Prof. George Bush has 
said: " The progress of scientific research, at the pres- 
ent day, has distinguished itself not less by the wideness 
of the field over which its triumphs have spread, than 
by the soundness and certaintj' of the inductions by 
which it is sustained. It is equally indisputable that 
we are approximating the true philosophy which under- 
lies the enlarged and enlarging spiritual experiences and 
phenomena of the current age. That this philosophy SOUL AND BODY. 
81 
when reached will conduct us into the realm of the 
spiritual as the true region of causes, and disclose new 
and unthought-of relations between the world of matter 
and of mind, is doubtless a very reasonable anticipation, 
and one that even now is widely, though vaguely, enter- 
tained." 
In the writings of Swedenborg he affirms that he en- 
joyed open communication with the spiritual world for 
twenty-seven years of his life, and conversed with 
spirits and angels with all the facility with which we 
converse ■with each other. This is a most remarkable 
averment, which the majority of scientific men will 
deny, but which others will accept and endeavor to 
explain. lie himself endeavored to divest the fact of 
all marvel and mystery. He claims it to have been 
done by no extraordinary powers or exceptional endow- 
ments. He affirms that his revelations were no miracle, 
because every man as to his spirit is in the spiritual 
world. The two realms of life are not sundered by 
distance of space, like the hemispheres on our maps, 
but are a unity like soul and body. 
" Scenes of earth 
And heaven are mixed, as flesh and soul in man." 
If his remarkable experience was not a miracle, it 
must have been in harmony with the laws of mind. 
This brings its repetition within the range of a present 
possibility and practicability. How far his habits of 
mental abstraction, from his long-continued scientific 
pursuits and mathematical studies, had fitted him for a 
conscious and normal intromission into the spiritual 82 
SOUL AND BODY. 
world it is impossible to say. But we affirm that if his 
long-continued and varied experience of communicat- 
ing with the intelligences of the inner or higher sphere 
of life was in harmony with certain fixed and ascer- 
tainable psychological laws, then by discovering those 
laws, and availing ourselves of that knowledge, we can 
doit as well as he. He was subject to no trance, and 
was in no abnormal state of either body or mind. He 
never lost sight of this world while viewing the living 
realities of the other. He did not open the ever-pres- 
ent heavens, and then shut the door in the face of 
mankind and throw away the key, but left it still ajar, 
and even wide open. 
To show how this experience, extending over a period 
of more than a quarter of a century, took place, and how 
it may be reproduced in us, and repeated by us, will 
require an investigation into the laws of psychology, 
and an inquiry into the nature and philosophy of 
thought and of language. What we call language, 
written or spoken, is the ordinary medium of communi- 
cation between one mind and another in the present 
stage of our existence. Of this noble gift one has 
eloquently said: "Of all the faculties wherewith God 
has endowed his noblest creature, none is more divine 
and mysterious than the faculty of speech. It is the 
gift whereby soul speaks to soul; the gift whereby 
mere pulses of articulated air become breathing 
thoughts and burning words; the gift whereby we 
understand the affections of men, and give expression 
to the worship of God; the gift by which the lip of 
divine inspiration, uttering things simple, and unper- SOUL AND BODY. 
83 
fumed, and unadorned, reacheth with its passionate 
voice through a thousand generations, by the help of 
God."- {Prof. Farrars Origin of Language, p. 1.) 
We may define language to be the sum total of all 
those articulate sounds which man, by the aid of the 
faculty of speech, has produced and accepted as the 
signs of all those inward and outward phenomena with 
which he is made acquainted by sense and thought. 
These living sounds are those " shadows of the soul" 
that we call words. Lord Monboddo defines language 
to be " the expression of the conceptions of the mind 
by articulate sounds." - {Origin and Progress of Lan- 
guage, p. 5.) 
But language, like everything else, is both external 
and internal. It has, as it were, a bodjr and a soul. 
Thought may be transmitted from mind to mind without 
the intervention of words, and that transferrence of our 
conceptions and feelings to another is language, by 
whatever means, and in whatever way, it is effected. 
In the spiritual world, to which our inner nature already 
belongs, language is the perception of ideas, the com- 
munication of thought without the intervention of any 
material medium. Spiritual things are the most vitally 
real. In that world thoughts are things, and ideas are 
among the most real entities of the universe. An idea 
(from etSio, to see) is that about which we think. It is 
the living image and soul of things, which is but rudely 
and imperfectly represented in the objects of the mate- 
rial creation, like the first efforts of a child at drawing. 
Thought is an internal sight or vision. {D. L. and W. 
404.) To know and to spiritually see, are identical. 84 
SOUL AND BODY. 
One way of communicating with the spiritual world is 
by a perception of the outward images, or external 
symbols, which by a law of correspondence the thoughts 
of angels and spirits assume. 
Under certain conditions, they are projected outward 
and become objective realitjes, and living representa- 
tives. This accounts for what is errroneously called 
materialization. They are symbols (from abv, with, 
and /?a,Uw to throw), as if they were a visible image 
thrown outward with the thought. For, in the other 
realm of existence, thoughts become visible things and 
objective realities, and they are visible in proportion to 
their intensity. A spirit, on being disrobed of the out- 
ward body, must, from the necessity of the case, be 
introduced into the midst of spiritual realities. These 
are mental creations, or projections. Thoughts are sub- 
stances, and to spirits, that alone can be substantial 
which is spiritual, and consequently that alone can be 
real. We in common parlance reverse these terms, and 
denominate that substantial w'hich is material, and 
comes under the cognizance of the senses. On leaving 
the body, the spirit leaves the region of dead matter, 
and comes into a sphere of existence where itself and 
its emanations are the real substances or substantial 
realities. Consequently what is here subjective be- 
comes there objective. A spirit's thoughts and ideas 
become to another spirit just as much a bona fide 
objective reality as the spirit himself, for how can we 
separate them ? Thought is always in the mind of him 
who thinks, and is an activity of the thinking substance. 
Is not a spirit spiritual, and is not his thought, like SOUL AND BODY. 
85 
himself, spiritual also? If so, does not the one come 
to the cognition of a fellow-spirit by the same means as 
the other ? In the present world we can only perceive 
each other's spirits through the intervening medium of 
the body, except as it is manifested through written or 
vocal expression. But in that higher realm the mate- 
rial body is laid aside, and the cognizance of the in- 
terior being is immediate and direct. Why, then, shall 
we not perceive the thoughts as well as the subject from 
which they flow ? 
What John saw in a vision in the Isle of Patmos, 
when he was in the spirit on the Lord's day, or in the 
interior state, was but the externalization, or symboli- 
zation, or objectizing, of thought. These living images 
of things are full of meaning, if we know how to trans- 
late them into thought and then into words. But it is 
not the highest style of communication with the realm 
of mind and spirit. It is a sort of spiritual picture- 
writing, and abounds in Ezekiel, Daniel, the Apoca- 
lypse of John, and to some extent in Swedenborg. 
Mind can communicate directly and immediately with 
mind without the intervention of spoken or written 
words. That thought can be transferred from one per- 
son to another, I have proved by experiment during the 
last twelve years, and that not only when the person to 
whom the thought is to be communicated is in the mag- 
netic state, but it succeeds equally well with subjects 
who are highly impressible, though not in the magnetic 
sleep. We can come into psychometric or sympathetic 
relations to other minds in this world or the next, so 
that their thoughts, as well as their feelings, shall be 86 
SOUL AND BODY. 
transferred to us, and ours can be transmitted to them. 
This is the same as the interior word, the inward voice 
of the society of Friends, and the cogitative speech of 
Swedenborg. 
The interior language of ideas or of thought is the 
same in every part of the world and through the whole 
realm of mind. In the nine hundred distinct languages, 
and the thousands of dialects, of the world, there may 
be as many different names for a tree, a mountain, or a 
river, but the idea and the thought of those external 
objects are the same everywhere. Spoken or written 
language, as the medium of transmitting our thoughts 
to other minds, is an imperfect means of communica- 
tion. 
Prof. William Dwight Whitney truly says: "Our 
own mental acts and states we can review in our con- 
sciousness, in minute detail, but we can never perfectly 
disclose them to another by speech; nor will words 
alone, with whatever sincerity and candor they may be 
uttered, put us in possession of another's consciousness. 
In anything but the most objective scientific descrip- 
tion, or the direct reasoning on subjects the most plain 
and obvious, we want more or less of the individuality 
of the speaker or writer, ere we can understand him 
intimately; his style of thought and sentiment must be 
gathered from the totality of our intercourse with him, 
to make us sure that we penetrate to the central mean- 
ing of any word he utters. A look or a tone sheds 
more light upon character or intent than a flood of 
words can do." 
Spoken language is impotent and inadequate to ex- SOUL AXD BODY. 
87 
press our feelings and emotions, which give to words 
their deepest meaning. How often must we labor by 
painful circumlocution, by illustrations, by similes, by 
gesture and attitude, to place before the minds of others 
a conception that is clearly present to our own con- 
sciousness I But the language of the spiritual world, 
being the direct transmission of thought and emotion 
from one mind to another, is not attended with this 
defect. The thoughts of one, with their accompanying 
emotions, are daguerrotyped upon the consciousness 
of the other, and are reproduced there with only slight 
if any diminution or variation. All spirit is essentially 
active, and essentially communicative and receptive. 
We may receive by influx, or, if you prefer the term, 
by inspiration, thoughts from the general sphere of 
intelligence in the spiritual world, or from individual 
spirits, and these will naturally and spontaneously 
clothe themselves and find an outward expression in 
the words that lie in our memory. Thought naturally 
embodies itself in words, and it has been a question 
among philosophers whether thought is possible with- 
out words. That words are an aid to thought there 
can be no doubt, as they are its proper basis, continent, 
or ultimate; but that they can originate one single 
thought, I deny. Our thoughts spontaneously clothe 
themselves in the words we have learned as their rep- 
resentatives. But it is equally true that we may have 
feelings and perceptions that external language is 
wholly inadequate to express. There are cognitions 
and perceptions that are ineffable. Paul, when caught 
up into the third heaven, saw things that it was not 88 
SOUL AND BODY, 
lawful, or, as the Greek word he uses signifies, not 
possible, to utter. And he speaks of the spirit making 
intercession for us, or of forming within us desires and 
yearnings of soul, and heart-longings, that cannot be 
worded, or expressed, by external language. (Rom. 
viii. 26.) 
In the language of the spiritual world, which is in- 
nate in every human soul, and which consists in the 
communication of ideas and thoughts from one mind to 
another by a direct impress, each understands the 
other as face answers to face in a mirror. The com- 
munication is also more rapid, more full and complete, 
than by the use of external signs, or what we call 
speech. The undeveloped germ of a volume may be 
conveyed to another in a flash of time, an intuitive 
glimpse. It is also true that, in the realm of spirit, 
thought becomes distinctly audible. The Scandinavian 
Seer, from his varied experience, affirms that "ideas, 
as they are expressions of speech, are sonorous among 
spirits and angels, and also that the tacit thought of 
man is audible to spirits and angels," and "that the 
speech of an angel or spirit with a man is heard as 
sonorously as the speech of a man with a man." (A. 
C. 6624. II. and II. 248.) It might have been better 
to have said, " heard as distinctly, though in a different 
way." 
Language is the ultimation, or outward expression, 
of thought and feeling. Speech is an audible thinking, 
or it is the spoken instrumentality of thought. It is 
clearly as much a part of the Creator's plan that we 
should talk as that we should breathe. Thought SOUL AND BODY. 
89 
naturally ultimates itself in some outward form of ex- 
pression- by words if we have them, but if not, by 
signs and gestures. The doctrine is by no means un- 
common in philosophy that thought seeks expression 
by an internal impulse, that it is driven to expression 
by an inward necessity, for everything spiritual tends 
to communicate itself. It tends to outward utterance 
in some way, as the fully matured embryo tends to 
burst its envelope, and come forth to independent ex- 
istence. Hence, Herder, in his masterly treatise upon 
the "Origin of Language," makes the proposition 
"that language arose with the first spark of conscious- 
ness." Prof. Hajjim Steinthal, one of the most phil- 
osophical linguists of Europe, asserts, "that the con- 
ditions and relations of consciousness are the actual 
forces themselves that produce language." Language 
is the spoken means by which thought is communicated 
- not created - and it is only this. Language is not 
thought any more than the casket is the gem that it 
holds ; nor is there a mysterious and indissoluble con- 
nection between them, so that the one cannot for a 
moment exist without the other. We may have a well- 
defined thought for which we can find no word, and we 
may hear or meet with a word that to us has no mean- 
ing. This we know from our consciousness is possible, 
though Dr. Bleek, in his materialistic view of language, 
asserts that " no cognition can come into man's con- 
sciousness otherwise than in and through language.'' 
But thought must be anterior to words, for the reason 
that a cause must be prior to an effect. Man thinks, 
and, therefore, speaks, and language could not exist 90 
SOUL AND BODY. 
without thought any more than tne body could live 
without the soul. 
On this part of the subject, and on the relation of 
thought and language, I wish to make one additional 
remark before proceeding to show how we may commu- 
nicate with the spiritual world whenever we please in 
harmony with the laws of mind. If ideas may be re- 
ceived by influx or inspiration from the higher realm, 
they can be reproduced and communicated to others 
only through the words we possess. The more exten- 
sive and perfect is our knowledge and use of language, 
the more easy and satisfactory will be the transferrence 
of those inspirational ideas to others through us. 
Hence language becomes one of the most important 
and useful of human studies. 
, In the realm of spirit to which our inner being now 
belongs, knowledge is communicated not by the slow 
and laborious process of teaching by verbal instruction, 
but by direct transmission from one mind to another. 
In an angelic society or association, each possesses the 
knowledge of all, and all of each. It is effected through 
the law of sympathy or psychometry, the operation of 
which we see in the present life in the case of suscepti- 
ble persons. It will some time furnish the world with 
a new and most valuable system of education. He 
who has this sympathetic sense (and all possess it in 
some degree) ean come into a receptive relation to any 
mind in the universe. He must first suspend all active 
voluntary thought, and assume an attitude of perfect 
passivity. This is a state of mental emptiness or men- 
tal blankness, a self-induced vacuity. In this condi- SOUL AND BODY. 
91 
tion, direct the thoughts or attention to some person at 
a distance, or even on another continent. This directed 
consciousness causes him to be mentally present, and 
his image stands before you without any intervening 
distance. 
This is a real spiritual presence of the person, and it 
will be vivid and influential in proportion to the 
intensity of your thought of him, and the degree of 
your mental abstraction. All other persons and ob- 
jects should be banished from the thoughts, and his 
image alone will be daguerrotyped upon the mind's 
susceptible blankness. The spiritual presence and 
sympathetic union or conjunction will be more complete 
if we think of him from an affectionate remembrance 
of him. In this state of spiritual presence his mental 
and physical condition will be transferred to us. His 
thoughts and feelings will flow into us, and be repro- 
duced in our own mind. If his mental state is above 
ours, his influence will elevate us in the scale of life 
above our natural level and ordinary intellectual 
status. If he is below us in the mental scale and in 
moral feeling, he will tend to pull us down to a lower 
plane, while our influence will serve to raise him to a 
higher level. In this state there is a community of 
thought and feeling, a reciprocity of life. In this way 
two minds flow together like two drops of water in 
contact. If our mind is completely empty, the other's 
thoughts and emotions will flow in and fill the void, 
and we shall have a conscious perception of them. 
What is still more strange, his thoughts will endeavor 
to embody themselves in the words we have laid up in 92 
SOUL AND BODY. 
the storehouse of our memory. They also, in some 
degree, affect the inner ear, entering it by an internal 
way. The spontaneous tendency of thought to ulti- 
mate itself, or find some mode of outward expression, 
will be seen in an almost imperceptible effect upon the 
organs of speech. This effect is similar to what takes 
place when one reads a letter or a book with the mouth 
closed. In this case the ideas represented by the 
words enter the mind through the eye, or, rather, arise 
in the mind through the sight of the words, for the 
thought is in our minds and not in the words. They 
produce a slight tremulousness of the tongue and vocal 
organs, and are, as it were, heard within. It is a 
voice without a sound," a deep and calm revealing." 
Here is a presence as real as our own soul, and while 
our spirit is thus brought face to face with another 
spirit, we may ask him a question, and the answer will 
come back in thought as an echo from his mind, and 
will be a true response of his inmost feeling in regard 
to it. For in the world of spirit, to which the soul 
now belongs, every one is externally what he is inter- 
nally, and no one can say what he does not feel. In 
this life we can say one thing and mean quite another. 
But in that world no one can act a part, or use words 
that belie his real sentiments. " For there is nothing 
covered that shall not be revealed ; and hid that shall 
not be known." (Matt. x. 26.) In that inner realm 
wre know as also we are known. (1 Cor. xii. 13.) A 
man there speaks as he thinks, and cannot express 
himself otherwise. This is also true of the higher 
stages of the magnetic condition, which present phe- SOUL AND BODY. 
93 
nomena analogous to those of life in the spiritual world. 
In it the soul is freed in some degree from material 
limitations and restraints. 
The spiritual laws, in harmony with which these 
phenomena occur in the present world, are unerringly 
and undeviatingly applicable to communication with 
disembodied mind, and the intelligences of the inner 
realm of life. By directing our thoughts to some one 
with whom we feel an affectionate sympathy, he is at 
once present to our spirit. Distance between us is 
annihilated; for it is one of the fundamental laws of 
communication with the spiritual world, laid down by 
Swedenborg, that thought occasions presence, and love 
conjunction. All spirit is essentially communicative 
and essentially receptive. 
We must bear in mind, that, in the higher realm of 
being, thought sustains the same relation to language 
that words do here. We ask a question in this univer- 
sal language of thought, and the mind addressed has a 
perception of the thought, and answers back through 
the same medium of communication, and we perceive 
the cogitative reply, which is directly impressed upon 
the sensitive mind, and it may be imparted to others 
so far as it can be embodied in the words we have at 
our control. This is perfectly natural and easy, and 
we can thus converse with an intelligence of the inner 
realm of life with greater facility, and certainty of being 
understood, than we can with each other in our social 
relations in this world. It is demonstrably true that 
there are thousands of persons, who, by the sympa- 
thetic sense, can receive a clear and well-defined 94 
SOUL AND BODY. 
impress of the thoughts and feelings of another person, 
thongh thousands of miles away. In this way, and by 
the same law, thought can be transferred from the 
spiritual world to minds in this sphere of life. This 
law has its highest application in communion writh God 
in Christ, and then with angels, and "the spirits of 
just men made perfect," the wise and good of all ages 
and all lands. By it we can come into sympathetic 
receptive relations with the sphere of any higher intel- 
ligence of the other world, - with Socrates, Plato, 
Confucius, Zoroaster, and, far above all, with Jesus, 
the Christ. 
It is through this law of mind, that prayer addressed 
to God, to Christ, and even to the Virgin Mary, and to 
the saints of the Roman Calendar, - so far as they are 
real and living beings,-is necessarily answered by a 
reflex influence from the personality addressed. This 
places prayer on a solid philosophical basis, and shows 
that, if sincere and going forth from the heart, it must 
in some degree be answered. It explains how and why, 
in all ages, millions have received essential spiritual 
benefit from it, and it has been as necessary to them as 
their daily bread - not from a mere mechanical form- 
ula, but from the outcrying of the inmost soul to some 
living higher power, of whom a definite conception can 
be formed. It must arise from love and be offered in 
faith, otherwise it is like a cloud in a dry time without 
rain, or a well without water. Such a cloud may 
assume a thousand forms of beauty and be gilded by 
the rays of the setting sun, but it brings no refreshing 
to the thirsty ground. Spirit must respond to spirit, SOUL AND BODY. 
95 
mind to mind, soul to soul, from the necessary laws 
and properties of its nature. This principle of sym- 
pathy, or psychometry as it is generally denominated, 
as an attribute of all mind, renders the relation of 
prayer to its answer as certain and reliable as that, 
under certain conditions, between a sound and its echo, 
or the reflection of our image from a mirror. The 
heavens must respond to the yearning soul that directs 
its imploring gaze to their silent abyss of tranquil life 
and love. At any time, in any hour of extremity, we 
can call to our aid some living power above us, who, 
by the law of sympathy, shall impart his thoughts to 
illuminate our intellect, his love to warm our hearts, his 
strength to reinforce our infirmity, and augment our 
natural gifts and powers, and his quiet bliss to send a 
ray of sunshine into our darkness. The sphere and in- 
fluence of others, especially of those in the superior 
range of life, may thus become an exalted elevating in- 
fluence to strengthen our tottering steps in the path of 
well-doing, to fortify the feebleness of our virtuous res- 
olution, to give firmness to our wavering purpose, and 
may come upon our blasted joys and hopes like a gentle 
rain of heaven upon a fading flower. The discovery of 
the sympathetic sense as an essential property of human 
nature has put it in our powrer to telegraph our ideas 
and feelings, not only across the Atlantic, but to any 
individuality in the highest heavens, with the certainty 
of an immediate response, with the instantaneous 
celerity of winged thought. No spirit, from the infant 
mind to the Godhead, of whom we have any knowl- 
edge, can be so remote in space as to be out of our 96 
SOUL AND BODY. 
reach, or beyond our call. In harmony with this law 
of our spiritual nature, Jesus, the Christ, said, and still 
says, to his disciples, "If I go away, I will come 
again ; I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to 
you ; I will manifest myself to you: and lo, I am with 
you always, even unto the end of the world." (Jno. 
xiv. 3, 18, 21 ; Matt, xxviii. 20.) 
We can now see how such apparently incredible 
promises can be fulfilled, and how, wherever thought can 
penetrate, we can come into hailing nearness to any 
mind in the universe. By this sublime power we can 
penetrate through all these outside creations to the 
inmost Central Life, who says, " Call upon me, and I 
will answer." For as long as God thinks of us we are 
in his presence, and as long as he loves us we are 
saved. If it be true that we exist by virtue of a con- 
tinual derivation of life from him, we shall live as long 
as his being lasts. The stream of our life will not fail 
until the fountain is dried up. And if God is love, and 
by virtue of the properties of an infinite Spirit, which 
take him out of the limitations of time and space, he is 
everywhere and in all things, we cannot by any possi- 
bility stray from the infinite Father's presence, and his 
boundless, irrepressible and everlasting love. 
The sympathetic sense, when fully understood, will 
solve the mysterious experiences of all religions, bring 
within the range of undeviating law all that has been 
deemed supernatural and miraculous, and will be found 
to be the hidden spring of most, if not all, the varied 
and ever-varying spiritual phenomena of the present 
day. It is the unseen and potent tie that vitally con- SOUL AND BODY. 
97 
nects all human souls with the ever-present heavens 
above, and interfuses their life and influence through all 
earthly conditions. By it we can come into receptive 
communication with individual spirits, with angelic 
associations, or with the general sphere of life and 
intelligence in the superior realms. We see also what 
Swedenborg, the pioneer and John the Baptist of a new 
age, means by a somewhat obscure form of expression, 
where he speaks of the extension of thought into the 
heavens, as if our thoughts were a responsive radiation, 
or vibration, from that realm of mind, and as if between 
the operations and manifestations of mind there and 
here, there was an unbroken sympathetic and vital con- 
nection. It was with him a favorite expression, and 
to many minds without meaning. In many parts of 
his works he speaks of the extension of thoughts into 
societies in the world above, in such a way as to lead to 
the impression that there is in the other world a diffused 
element of thought not unlike that of light in the present 
world. There is an incessant radiation or vibration - 
a perpetual efflux of thoughts - into which, as an intel- 
lectual atmosphere, all spirits come, and apart from 
which their minds cannot act, and into this general 
sphere of thought, feeling and intelligence we may come 
here and now. This general sphere of light and intelli- 
gence has, in the remotest ages of human history, been 
called the Logos, the Word. To come into communica- 
tion with it, when the soul is admissive of it, is to be 
placed in a receptive relation to the interior essence of 
all language and all knowledge. It is of this that the 
apostle John speaks. (Jno. i. 1-14.) The Word 98 
SOUL AND BODY. 
of God in its reality is not an external book, but an 
interior light that comes to the soul of man. The Word 
of the Lord came to Moses, to Isaiah, to Jeremiah, to 
Ezekiel, and to the prophets of all ages. This is that 
of which Paul speaks as the living Word. " The Word 
of the Lord is living and powerful, sharper than a two- 
edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of soul 
and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a discerncr 
of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Ileb. iv. 
12.) For under its illuminating influence the thoughts 
and interior character of men become clearly percepti- 
ble. John speaks of the Logos, or impersonal Word, as 
that in which there is life, and that life is the light of 
men, and as " the true light that lighteth every man 
that cometh into the world." 
Hyppolytus, as translated by Bunsen, speaks of the 
Logos or Word, not as a book or personality, but as 
" the light-bringing voice, anterior to the morning star." 
Among many ancient nations this general sphere of 
light, life and intelligence, which they called the Logos, 
received divine adoration, and as a universal principle 
of nature was worshipped. "In the Zendavesta," says 
Bishop Marsh in his Michaelis, ' ' we meet with a being 
called the Word, who was not only prior in existence, 
but gave birth to Ormuzd, the creator of good, and to 
Ahriman, the creator of evil." John probably adopted 
the use of the term Logos, as expressive of the living, 
spiritual light of the universe, and the inmost essence 
of all language and all knowledge, from the oriental 
philosophy,.for Christianity preserved all that was good 
and true in all antecedent systems of religion. This SOUL AND BODY. 
99 
living Word has been in all ages and all lands the 
inexhaustible fountain of every genuine inspiration. 
Bunsen affirms, "that the Logos, as the inward Word 
of God, inspired all the holy men who were called to 
be the teachers of mankind."- ( Christianity and Man- 
kind, vol. 1, p. 405.) As this interior and living Word 
is the spiritual root of all language, and ultimates itself, 
or comes to an outward expression, in the nine hundred 
distinct languages and their still more numerous dia- 
lects, the Brahmins, in the hymns of the Vedas, raised 
language to the rank of a deity, and addressed hymns 
to her, in which she is said to have been with the gods 
from the beginning, achieving wondrous things, and 
never revealed to man except in part. - (Max Muller's 
Science of Language, p. 77.) 
The idea of this interior and living light, as an ever- 
present source of inspiration, has been preserved to 
the Christian world by the followers of George Fox, 
and the Society of Friends. When the church was 
sunk in materialism and formalism, and were in bond- 
age to the letter, which spiritually killeth (2 Cor. iii. 
6), they called the attention of mankind to the in- 
ward light of truth - the living Word. To this 
interior light, which is the soul of all language, the 
attention of the world has been more fully recalled by 
Swedenborg. When he speaks of the spiritual sense 
of the Word, and gives it prominence above the mere 
letter of the Scriptures, he does not use the term sense 
for the meaning or signification of their mere verbal 
utterances, but for the spiritual sensing of the Word, 
if such a term were allowable. It is a conscious per- 100 
SOUL A XT) BODY. 
ception of the light of truth. The meaning extracted 
from the mere letter by the science of correspondence, 
is not, according to him, the spiritual sense, but only 
a higher literal sense. The true spiritual sense is what 
he denominates a state of or inward illu- 
mination. It is a direct revelation to the individual 
soul, which has no necessary connection with the letter 
- the external book. On this subject he says : " The 
internal sense is of such a nature that in it all things 
are to be understood, even to the minutest particulars, 
abstractedly from the letter, and just as if the letter 
did not exist; for in the internal sense is the soul and 
life of the Word, which does not appear unless the 
literal sense is, as it were, evanescent." (A.C., 1405.) 
The spiritual sense or perception of the Word, the 
living light of heaven, is the soul or spirit of the letter, 
and may exist independent of the letter, just as the 
soul of man may have an existence without the body. 
When the attention is directed to the body alone, and 
the material organism fills the whole range of vision, 
wre perceive nothing of the soul or spirit. The spiritual 
sense is "the light that lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world," that which has inspired all the proph- 
ets of ancient and modern times, and it is the percep- 
tion of truth that the angels possess, who cannot 
speak one word of any earthly language, - 
" For mortal words are not for them 
To utter or partake." 
The language of the spiritual realm is that of thought 
and ideas. But these living ideas find an imperfect SOUL AND BODY. 
101 
outward manifestation or representation in the words 
that lie in our memory, into which they flow as into a 
prepared vessel. 
External language is a clay image, to be made a liv- 
ing soul by the animating breath of the influx from 
above of spiritual light. The interior and living Word 
is the divine Promethean spark to give vitality to the 
lifeless statue. No external book is the Word of God, 
or can have much illuminating power, unless it is read 
directly under an open window of heaven ; and that 
living light will teach us more in an hour than we can 
learn in a lifetime without it. External language is 
not truth itself, just as a statue of Washington is not 
the man himself, but only an outward representation 
of him to our senses. External words, written or 
spoken, are the principal medium of transmitting our 
thoughts from one mind to another. As the Swedish 
philosopher and seer remarks : " Men, while they live 
in the body, cannot speak each other, except by 
languages distinguished into articulate sounds, or ex- 
pressions, and cannot understand each other unless 
they are acquainted with those languages. Whereas 
spirits and angels can converse with each other by an 
universal language distinguished into ideas of thought 
itself, and thus can converse with every spirit of what- 
ever language or nation he had been in the world. 
Every man, after death, comes into this universal lan- 
guage, which is an attribute of spirit, and one of its 
diving and essential properties." (A.C., 2472.) The 
spiritually minded may come into it here and now, for 
it should never be forgotten that, as to our inner being, 102 
SOUL AND BODY. 
we are already in the spiritual world, and may con- 
verse with its inhabitants. But let us remember the 
words of Paul: " Though I speak with the tongues of 
men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become 
as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." (1 Cor. 
xiii. 1.) 
If it be true that diseases both of mind and body are 
often, if not always, caused by a morbific spiritual in- 
fluence, arising from our interior association with those 
in the other world who are not in harmony with our in- 
most life, then, in accordance with the principles laid 
down in this chapter, we can change our connections 
with those in that realm of life as well as we can 
choose our society here. This readjustment of our 
relations to the spiritual world, our separation from 
our former associations, and the coming into new con- 
nections, is what is called, in the language of Christ, a 
judgment or crisis, which comes from a Greek word 
meaning to separate. When the relations of the whole 
world to the spiritual realm are changed, it is a general 
judgment, of which there have in the his- 
tory of mankind. When it is used in relation to the 
individual it is a particular judgment, or separation. 
"The Lord executeth judgment for all that are op- 
pressed." (Ps. ciii. G.) It is for such a separation from 
a disorderly and oppressive spiritual influence that 
David prays: " Save me, 0 God, by thy name, and 
judge me by thy strength. Hear my prayer, O God ; 
give ear to the words of my mouth." (Ps. liv. 1, 2.) 
One of the most efficient means of effecting such 
judgments, or separations, is by the instrumentality of SOUL AND BODY. 
103 
prayer, of which we shall speak more fully in the next 
chapter. 
The discovery of the sympathetic sense, and to some 
extent the laws that govern it, opens a new epoch in 
the spiritual history of mankind. By means of it we 
can come into communicative contact with the higher 
spheres of life and intelligence. Through it we can 
reach up to the heavens, and the angel-world can 
reach down to us, and the order of life and mode of 
thought that prevail above can thus become ultimated in 
our earthly abode. The earth and the heavens will 
meet and mingle into one. By this mysterious power 
or property of our nature we may be borne upward to 
a superior range of thought and perception, above the 
fallacies of the senses, the prejudices of education, 
and the force of long-established opinion, where truth 
is seen without an obscuring veil, and the soul will be 
carried onward in its progressive flight by the higher 
and diviner forces of life. Science has demonstrated 
that there are two currents in the atmosphere, a higher 
and a lower. The latter sweeps the earth's surface, 
and is the abode of clouds and mists, and is charged 
with all impure exhalations. Rising through this 
the adventurous aeronaut is caught by a current that 
carries him in the opposite direction. Corresponding 
to these, there are two currents of thought, one of 
which moves in the region and direction of the exter- 
nal senses and belongs to the range of the animal life. 
This is charged with earthly fallacies and falsities. It 
is the region of venerable and moss-covered systems 
of error older than the pyramids. Rising above it to 104 
SOUL AND BODY. 
the spiritual range of the soul's life and perception, we 
are seized by a current of thought that modifies and 
reverses all our previous opinions and stereotyped be- 
liefs. Old theologies, with their hoary creeds and 
semi-barbarous dogmas, disappear from view and lose 
their hold upon the mind. The iron-clad, hard-hearted 
system of ethics that grows out of their falsities as 
naturally as moss from rotten wood, and that crushes 
out all the spontaneous instincts of the human heart, 
making faith to consist in believing, under the pains and 
penalties of heresy, what the intuitive reason instinc- 
tively rejects, and moral right in doing what we do not 
wish to do, and wrong in doing what we love, vanishes 
as a law of human conduct. These two opposite cur- 
rents of life and thought at present meet on the plane 
of the earth. There is, on the one hand, the sponta- 
neous endeavor of the heavens to tranfuse their light 
and social order into our lower condition ; on the other, 
the want of receptivity in us and a conservative repug- 
nance and repulsive antagonism to the change. From 
the warring of these two spiritual forces will be born 
gigantic controversies, political revolutions, and social 
convulsions, the result of which will be the progress of 
the race and the advancement of the human mind to 
an elevation never before attained. The times are ripe, 
and rotten ripe for change, and it will surely come. 
Would God it might be effected as noiselessly as the 
growth of the acorn into the tree. It is a fact that, in 
the age in which we live, the heavens are coming nearer 
to the earth than in any previous epoch in human his- 
tory. The sooner the religious world recognizes this SOUL AND BODY. 
105 
obvious truth, and adjusts itself to the new order of 
things in the kingdom of God on earth, the better it 
will be for it. The infant movement, already come to 
the birth, should be nursed by its natural mother, the 
church. But if that mother abandons her offspring in 
the wilderness, the angels will bring it bread and 
water from heaven. The infants Romulus and Remus 
are said to have been nursed by a wolf; nevertheless 
they grew into the Roman empire, the mightiest civil 
and military power of ancient history. 
" Through all the dreary day, 
They often come from glorious light to me : 
I cannot feel their touch, their faces see; 
Yet my soul whispers, they do come to me. 
Heaven is not far away, 
Heaven is not far away." 106 
SOUL AND BODY. 
CHAPTER V 
PRAYER AS THE MEANS OF SPIRITUAL AND BODILY 
HEALTH, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF MEDIATION. 
" True prayer is not the imposing sound 
That clamorous lips repeat, 
But the deep silence of a soul 
That clasps Jehovah's feet." 
Faith finds its appropriate and natural expression 
in prayer, which, in the system of cure adopted and 
practised by Christ, and by his primitive followers, 
occupies a prominent place, and demands consideration. 
There may be the prayer of form, or the prayer of faith 
and love. These are essentially different in their 
nature and effects. In the one case a person prays 
because it is a part of the external religious life that 
he is trying to live, or it may be he prays from a sense 
of duty, as a sort of task imposed upon him. In the 
prayer of faith and love it is no longer a task or duty, 
but a spiritual necessity. The soul is drawn to the 
mercy-scat from an irresistible divine attraction. 
It is a spontaneous breathing of the soul, and as 
natural as the respiration of the body. It is the com- 
munion of the living soul with a living and present 
God. Such was the prayer of Christ, who, when away 
from the cares and labors of the day, spent whole nights SOUL AND BODY. 
107 
in communion with the All-Father in nature's sublimest 
temple, the solitude of mountains. On one occasion 
it is said that as he prayed, "The fashion of his coun- 
tenance was altered, and his raiment was white and 
glistering." (Luke ix. 29.) In the parallel passage 
in another of the Gospels, it is said that "his face 
shone as the sun, and his raiment was white as the 
light." (Matt. xvii. 2.) Such spiritual transforma- 
tions, in a degree, have been enjoyed by many since. 
In this intense communion of the soul with God and 
contact with divine things, others have had similar ex- 
periences. We read of the devout Payson, that at 
times his mind almost lost its sense of the outward 
world, in the ineffable thoughts of God and perception 
of his presence. It is a truth of the intuitive reason, 
that God is the Infinite Life, and such intimate fellow- 
ship with the primal and only source of our being must 
have its influence upon the health of the soul, and 
through this upon the body. 
It is mentioned of Cowpqr, that in one of the few 
lucid hours of his religious experience, which sometimes 
came like the sun breaking through a stormy cloud, 
such was the experience of God's presence which he 
enjoyed in prayer, that he thought he should have died 
with joy, if special strength had not been imparted to 
him to bear the disclosure. 
Of one of the Tennents we read, that on a certain 
occasion when engaged in prayer, so overpowering was 
the revelation of God which opened upon his soul, and 
with such augmenting intensity of effulgence as he 
prayed, that at length he recoiled from the intolerable 108 
SOUL AND BODY. 
joy as bordering upon pain, and besought God to with- 
hold from him further manifestations of his glory, ex- 
claiming, " Shall thy servant see Thee and live?" 
We have read of Edwards on the banks of the Hud- 
son river in secret converse with God, and he has given 
us a description of the interior sense of Christ which he 
enjoyed, and which he "knows not how to express 
otherwise than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul 
from all the concerns of this world ; " and sometimes 
the veil of sense became so thin and transparent that 
the realities of the other world were seen through it. 
Sometimes, like John in Patmos, he was in the spirit, 
and seemed to be alone in the mountains or some 
solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly con- 
versing with Christ, and rapt and swallowed up in God. 
(The Still Hour, by Prof. Austin Phelps, pp. 9-11.) 
Such communion with God is rendered possible by 
the laws governing the intercourse of spirit with spirit, 
of mind with mind. It brings the soul in spiritual 
contact with the only fountain of life. All creeds and 
liturgies and priestly intercessors are removed, and the 
soul, " by a new and living way," comes into the holy 
of holies, and has fellowship with God. Most men 
have lost the perception of God and all divine things, 
and, in a spiritual sense, live far from him, and at a 
distance so remote in their inner consciousness, that 
the separation of the west from the east is proximity, 
is cohesion, compared to it. But in every human soul, 
overlaid as it may be by a deep covering of externality, 
there is a divine realm that constitutes a point of contact 
between itself and God. It is here that the divine and SOUL AND BODY. 
109 
human meet and mingle, and God has his habitation. 
If we call upon him from out this sacred penetralia, in 
sickness, in sorrow, in trouble, he will hear and answer. 
In the Christian system prayer is made a prominent 
instrumentality in the cure of disease. Its plain asser- 
tion and promise are, "The prayer of faith shall save 
the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up." (James v. 
15.) To one who comprehends the true philosophy of 
prayer this will not seem unreasonable. We have seen 
how, through the sympathetic sense, mind affects mind, 
and that without regard to distance of space. The 
most intense and influential action of one mind upon 
another is that which goes forth in prayer for another, 
a supplication that does not consist in a few compli- 
mentary epithets addressed to the Deity, nor a series 
of nicely wrought sentences projected from unfeeling 
lips in the direction of the throne of God, but which 
fall short of the mark ; but in the attitude of a soul that 
struggles as for life, and wrestles with God in words of 
burning earnestness, if the feeling of the soul from 
which they spring is not too deep for all external utter- 
ance. There is a prayer that cannot be " worded," as 
the original term employed by Paul signifies. (Rom. 
viii. 26.) Prayer becomes oftentimes more efficacious 
in proportion as it becomes internal. Says Dr. James 
Freeman Clarke: "The deepest prayer of all is not 
only without utterance, not only without words, but 
even goes down below the region of distinct thought. 
It is simply turning to God and opening the heart to 
him, to receive whatever influence he may send. (Chris- 
tian Doctrine of Prayer, p. 143.) This is a form of 110 
SOUL AND BODY. 
prayer practised by the Society of Friends, and recom- 
mended by the Mystics of all ages, as Madame Guyon, 
Fenelon, Tauler, and others. In this form of prayer 
the soul can only pour out itself upon another in a bliss- 
ful agony of intercession. When such a spirit of 
prayer enters into words, they are " heart deep," and 
radiant with love and spiritual life. 
There are deep places of the soul of man that are 
near the region where Divinity is incarnated in human- 
ity. When prayer issues de profundis, out of the 
depths, it carries a divine fragrance with it from the 
temple of God in man, and when wafted upon a suffer- 
ing, unhappy one, it has a life-giving spiritual potency 
in it. The mental weakness of the suppliant is rein- 
forced with the might of God's omnipotent love. It is 
in perfect harmony with the laws that govern the influ- 
ence of mind upon mind, that " the effectual fervent 
prayer of the righteous man availeth much." (James 
v. 16.) I do not see how it could do otherwise. That 
it was useless, and without effect, would seem more 
incredible to me than the most marvellous answer to 
prayer in the cure of the sick. It is in perfect har- 
mony with the Gospel system of spiritual medication. 
I affirm, in opposition to Tyndall, and men of less intel- 
lectual stature who follow in his shadow, that it is in 
accordance with law, unbending and invariable spirit- 
ual law, that sincere, earnest prayer for the sick should 
affect them in the direction of health. They may not 
recover, but the influence of the spiritual force, going 
forth in the prayer, was in the direction of saving them, 
and if one should arise instantly and walk, or be raised SOUL AND BODY. 
111 
to newness of life progressively, in response to prayer, 
it would be no miracle, no violation of the laws of the 
human spirit. Prayer addressed to the living God, and 
not to a metaphysical abstraction, must, in harmony 
with the known principles of psychometry, be attended 
with a reflex influence issuing from the Divine Mind, 
and when this is added to the influence of our own 
thoughts and feelings when intently directed to an- 
other, it must avail much. 
We have shown how efficacious prayer must be when 
offered in behalf of others. It is then called inter- 
cession. ♦ It is equally efficient when we pray for our- 
selves, which is called supplication. Those who 
believe God has inspired men with his own thoughts, 
and empowered them to reveal his will to mankind, 
have, in the divine promises, a solid foundation for 
their faith, and a means of direct access to him. He 
has given us exceeding great and precious promises, 
that by these we might be made partakers of the 
divine nature. (2 Pet. i. 4.) What God has spoken 
he speaks now. His promises have never lost their 
vital hold upon the Divine Mind. They do not belong 
to the dead past, but to the living present. The 
existence of God is a nunc stans, an eternal now. 
The past, even with us finite beings, has no existence 
out of our memory. It is all in our minds. The 
future never was and never will be. There is no 
future. All existence is included in the divine moment, 
the ever-moveless now. The words a man utters are a 
part of himself. So by the promises of God we come 
into contact with the Divine Being, and are made 112 
SOUL AND BODY. 
partakers of his life. Hence prayer based upon these 
promises must possess a sanative celestial virtue. To 
an assured faith, which is the substance of the thing 
hoped for, the promise contains the blessing for which 
we seek. As there is no future, the promise of God is 
not a pledge to give us something at a remote day ; 
but it is the envelope of the present good we need. 
Some one has illustrated it by our every-day money 
transactions. We accept a bank-note for money. It 
passes current for such. Yet it is not money, but only 
a promise to pay us money on demand. So there is in 
the divine promise, owing to its living connection with 
the mind of God, the blessing for which We ask. 
" Whate'er we hope, by faith we have, 
Future and past subsisting now." 
In the promise is enclosed the spiritual good which 
may become ultimated in the bodily health we seek. 
God is all and in all. To appropriate him on the side 
of our most urgent need is the highest function of the 
prayer of faith. " In him we live and move and have 
our being." (Acts xvii. 28.) If he is to us the foun- 
tain and continual spring of life, he must be the inmost 
source of health. An assured and appropriating faith 
can say, in the language of David, " Why art thou cast 
down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within 
me? Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him 
who is the health of my countenance and my God." 
(Ps. xlii. 11.) Or, in the inspired utterance of Charles 
Wesley: - SOUL AND BODY. 
113 
" The well of life to us thou art, - 
Of joy the swelling flood; 
Wafted by thee, with willing heart, 
We swift return to God. 
" We soon shall reach the boundless sea; 
Into thy fulness fall; 
Be lost and swallowed up in thee, - 
Our God, our all in all." 
The crowning gift of God to man is the Holy Spirit 
- the emanative sphere of the divine life. It is not a 
personality, but an influence proceeding from God 
through Christ. The Holy Spirit is the inmost life of 
all created things. By it God is everywhere present in 
nature, and becomes the hidden spring of life in the 
human body. To this effect we have a remarkable 
passage in the writings of Paul, showing the relation 
of the Holy Spirit to life and health. "If the spirit 
of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in 
you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also 
quicken (animate, make alive) your mortal bodies 
because of his spirit that dwelleth in you." (Rom. 
viii. 11.) It is here expressly affirmed that the divine 
emanative sphere, or the Holy Spirit, is that which 
imparts life and health to our mortal or diseased and 
dying bodies. In sickness this must become our 
highest need. This remedy is always indicated, 
whatever may be the disease, though it may not be 
included in the prescriptions of medical science. 
There is in it a divine sanative virtue for the resurrec- 
tion of our disordered minds and bodies to happiness 114 
SOUL AND BODY. 
and health. For what can be better in sickness than 
to receive by faith an increased supply of the primal 
source of life? It is always accessible, a remedy at 
hand, and within the grasp of an assured faith, and is 
dispensed without money, and without price. In this 
inmost need, God, by the Holy Spirit, gives himself to 
us as freely as he gives the light and heat of the sun. 
If we need sun-light or sun-heat we have only to let 
him shine into our rooms, and he will fill them with 
his vivifying beams. If we desire the gift of the Holy 
Spirit in any of its divine offices, - to illuminate our 
minds with the inmost essence of truth ; to solve our 
doubts ; to remove our fears, and to impart to us life, 
health and peace, - we have only to open all the 
windows of the soul to the sun of heaven, and it will 
fill every capacity of the mind, and pervade every 
department of our being. The love of God is a 
changeless, irrepressible desire to impart to us from 
himself all spiritual good, limited in its amount only 
by our finite capacity and want of receptivity. "If 
ye then, being evil, know .how to give good gifts unto 
your children ; how much more shall your heavenly 
Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him." 
(Luke xi. 13.) 
God may impart good to us directly from himself, 
for the soul of man, in its inmost centre, may have 
immediate access to God and communion with him. 
This is its chief dignity and glory. But he much 
oftener blesses us through the instrumentality of others. 
For to impart to another any good which comes to us 
from God blesses the giver equally with the recipient. SOUL AND BODY. 
115 
In this we have an illustration of the mediatorial 
principle which is seen everywhere in the universe. 
Wherever one thing or person becomes instrumental in 
imparting good to another, and constitutes a means of 
communication between the source and the recipient of 
the good, we have an exhibition of the principle of 
mediation. He who subserves such a use is a medi- 
ator, who, in the highest sense, is one who receives 
from the higher or inner realm of life that he may 
impart, and who, in communicating to others, receives 
an ever renewed supply, according to the principle, 
" Give and it shall be given to you." 
To pray for another is to act such a part. To mediate 
and to intercede are the same in idea, using the latter 
term in its etymological sense (from inter, between, and 
cedo, to come.) Everything in the universe may be 
deemed a medium or mediator that becomes the means 
through which a salutary effect is produced, or an in- 
fluence imparted. To mediate between a higher and 
lower range or plane of spiritual life, it is necessary 
that the mediator should partake of both conditions 
between which he mediates. (A.C., 4570, 5411, 5413, 
5686.) Thus Jesus, the Christ, has always been 
deemed, in the church, a mediator between heaven and 
earth, between God and man, and is the highest repre- 
sentation of the law of intercession, or the mediatorial 
function, in the history of mankind. As the embodi- 
ment of the living Word, the eternal Logos, on one 
side of his complex being he came in conscious con- 
tact with the Infinite and celestial, on the other with 
the finite and earthly, and conjoined the two in the 116 
SOUL AND BODY. 
unity of his divinely human personality. We are told 
by Swedenborg, the apocalyptist of the North, - and 
the statement is inherently rational,- that there are in 
the other world intermediate spirits through whom in- 
flux descends from the higher to the lower grades of 
spiritual life. Flowing through these the sphere of the 
higher is so modified as to be adapted to reception by 
the less unfolded minds, and thus has an elevating in- 
fluence upon them. (A.C., 4047, 5427, G435.) Ac- 
cording to his disclosures of the laws that regulate life 
in the other world, there are such intermediary spirits, 
and even associations of spirits, between all the 
heavens, and between the intermediate world and the 
earth. There is no principle of more importance in 
religion or the art of healing, than the influence of 
mind upon mind, of spirit upon spirit, of life upon 
other life ; for our individual nature, our personal iden- 
tity, is modified by it, and our character and destiny 
are shaped by it in this world and the next. To raise 
the lower to a higher level is the steady aim of Provi- 
dence. But the influence of the higher upon the less 
elevated, unless it was modified and tempered by its 
transmission through such intermediates, could not be 
received, or, if received, would cause great disturbance 
and suffering. There are associations of redeemed 
spirits whose use and function in the divine economy 
are the instruction and elevation of spirits newly come 
to consciousness in the other world, and even of those 
still on the earth so far as they can gain access to 
them. They seek, as an organ of communication, 
some one or more who are intermediate between the SOUL AND BODY. 
117 
two planes of mental life, and who may be as a con- 
necting link, so that their higher state may be im- 
parted to those less elevated or developed, but so modi- 
fied as to be adapted to their receptive capacity. This 
is the true idea of mediatorship, a principle belonging 
to Christianity, and of universal application in this 
world and the next. To be such a mediator, after the 
pattern of Christ, is the divinest and most exalted 
function that we can accomplish in life. Such a use 
we may be fitted to perform here and now. Says an 
eloquent author: "Man, in his highest moods of 
thought, aspires to God. God meets and accepts the 
sincere aspirations of man. A mediator is one who, 
by the influence of his life and doctrine, quickens, 
facilitates, and fixes this spiritual intercourse between 
the soul and its Creator. 
All higher minds do, in fact, mediate between their 
less gifted fellow-creatures and the great realities of the 
invisible world. The sages and poets of heathendom 
kindled the first glimmering of a religious life in fierce 
and brutal natures, and made them capable of civiliza- 
tion. Moses and the prophets were the mediators of a 
truth that struck deeper into the heart of humanity, 
and prepared it for a higher spiritual development." - 
(Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty, by John Janies 
Taylor, p. 49.) 
Moses is twice called a mediator in one of the Epis- 
tles of Paul. (Gal. iii. 19, 20). There are some 
persons whose presence is always mentally and physi- 
cally healing. Their personality seems to be charged 
with influences from on high, and their sphere, is full of 118 
SOUL AND BODY. 
a sanative contagion. They are a tower of strength to 
the weak and tempted, and the mentally unhappy are 
affected by them far off and near. The true idea of a 
physician is that of a doctor or teacher, as the word 
implies ; and in the highest and divinest sense he is one 
who can "minister to minds diseased." He is one 
through whom the "light of life" issuing from the 
serene depths of the angelic heavens may flow to 
others. This is emphatically true of all real physi- 
cians, of whom the Christian centuries have produced 
but few, scattered sparsely as signal fires of hope along 
the battlements of heaven. They have been men who 
aimed not merely to repair the disordered body, but who 
have searched for the hidden haunts of the seeds of 
disease in the spiritual and mental condition of the 
patient. There are many men in the medical profession, 
of high scientific culture, but they are inaccessible and 
unapproachable, surrounded with an impenetrable wall 
of ice ; and from this frigid intellectual zone in which 
they dwell their life cannot flow out to others. There 
are also occasionally those who occupy an equally ele- 
vated plane of mental and scientific culture, who can 
" condescend to men of low estate," whose generous 
sympathies embrace the whole of humanity ; and through 
them the light of life may descend to the humblest of 
earth's suffering people. These become, if they adopt 
the art of healing as their function in the social body, 
the mediators, the intercessors, and the true priests of 
humanity, and, in a limited and mitigated sense, the 
Messiahs, the Christs of the world. By an inspiration 
from the ever-present heavens, their personality is SOUL AND BODY. 
119 
charged with spiritually healing virtues for soul and 
body. There is always in their treatment of disease, 
to whatever school they belong, and whatever method 
they adopt, the intervention of some hidden power that 
gives efficacy to their remedies, and would, under the 
proper conditions, be equally salutary without any kind 
of medication. It is not magnetism merely, but some- 
thing more ; it is magnetism augmented by the peculiar 
and imparted influences of higher intelligences and 
angelic helpers. These principalities and powers in 
heavenly places are ever with them, and their influence 
is always felt, though they may be invisible like the 
moon and planets of our system, whose power is ever 
felt on land and sea, though they are concealed in the 
daytime from our vision by an excess of light. 
" The tidal wave of deeper souls 
Into our being rolls, 
And lifts us unawares 
Out of all meaner cares." 
There is no doctrine more clearly recognized by 
Christianity than the ministry to us of spirits and 
angels. (Ps. xxxiv. 7; Ps. xci. 11-12; Heb. i. 14.) 
We see it as a. fact in the life of Christ. After his long- 
continued temptation in the wilderness of Judea, angels 
came and ministered unto him. (Matt. iv. 11.) In the 
deep soul-struggles of Gethsemane, ' ' there appeared unto 
him an angel from heaven strengthening him." (Luke 
xxii. 43.) It is everywhere the teaching of the Scrip- 
tures that angels are only human spirits passed into 
the heavens. The influence of the spiritual world may 120 
SOUL AND BODY. 
be salutary and sanative, or it may be morbific, accord- 
ing to the state of those with whom we come into sym- 
pathetic relations. That their presence with us may 
serve to ward off disease, and by parity of reasoning aid 
in curing it, is unequivocally stated in Ps. xci. 10, 11 : 
"There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any 
plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his 
angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways." 
We have seen, in a previous chapter, how mind always 
responds to mind, and spirit to spirit, according to the 
laws of its nature. In consequence of this law of sym- 
pathy, prayer must always in some degree be answered. 
This, first of all, should be addressed to God and 
to Christ. Prayer has been viewed by the religious 
world as an act of worship. In the highest sense of 
that term it can properly have only the Divine Being 
for its object. But may we not ask the aid of wise and 
good spirits - of saints and angels? If we may not 
with propriety pray to them, may we not, in humble 
dependence upon God and submission to him, invoke 
their aid and presence ? In the hour of our extremity, 
may we not say, in the language of Hamlet? - 
" Angels and ministers of grace - defend us ! " 
Or may we not use the language of the hymn of 
Charles Wesley, composed when in sickness? - 
" Angel of covenanted grace, 
Come, and thy healing power infuse." 
The angel of the covenant, or the angel of Jehovah, 
so often mentioned in the Old Testament, was a mes- SOUL AND BODY. 
121 
scnger of Clod, so filled with the divine influence and 
presence as properly to be viewed as the representative 
of God. If we pray for the coming of Christ to us 
according to his promise, he will come to us " in the glory 
of the Father, and with the holy angels." The invoca- 
tion of saints and angels has always been practised by 
one great branch of the Christian church. The Roman 
Catholic defends the invocation of the saints, who are 
only the spirits of good men and women, by the distinc- 
tion between dulia and latria, - a distinction well 
taken, and by the intelligent portion of that religious 
community well maintained. 
In offering to them the inferior respect expressed by 
the word dulia, he says he does not worship them as 
he adores God, but differently. He addresses them as 
living beings, in a higher world, who are full of sym- 
pathy for those below, and asks their aid and presence, 
and their prayers and intercessions with God. Viewed 
in that light it docs not seem unreasonable, especially 
if we can rise above the deep-rooted prejudices of early 
Protestant education. Whenever we ask assistance of 
any kind from one of our fellow-beings, we, in a certain 
sense, pray to him. We direct to him our desire and 
thought, and that is the essence of prayer, whether it 
be uttered vocally or be unexpressed in external lan- 
guage. But if we always keep in mind that all good 
must come, from God, its primal source, it is just as 
proper, and as much in harmony with the laws of divine 
order, to ask those in the other realm of being to help 
us in times of extremity. If to ask a good man, who 
is yet in the world, to aid us involves nothing objec- 122 
SOUL AND BODY. 
tionable, and is not robbing God of the worship that 
belongs to him, why is it improper to ask him to aid ns 
after he has graduated to the higher and better world ? 
It may be objected, that to ask aid of those in the 
other world implies their presence with those who in- 
voke them, who may be in different lands, thus attrib- 
uting to them a sort of omnipresence, which is supposed 
to be an incommunicable property of the Deity. To 
this we answer, that to be present in ten or a thousand 
different places is not omnipresence. All spirit is out of 
the limitations of time and space. This constitutes the 
grand distinction between spirit and matter. A man 
speaking in public is present to a thousand auditors in 
different places at once, through the medium of sight 
and sound. A man who writes a book, or an article 
for the periodical literature of the day, is present, by 
his thought and the sphere of his life, to ten thousand 
readers in different parts of the country, and even in 
other lands, through the medium of his book or essay. 
The operator of an electric telegraph is present, through 
the subtle force that is transmitted by the wire, in all 
the offices on the route at the same moment. There- 
fore it may be easily conceived that spirits and angels, 
divested of a material body, may be present, by their 
thoughts and affections, which constitute their essential 
life, and also by their sphere, to a great many persons 
and places at one and the same time, through some 
medium and spiritual law not now fully understood. 
When we learn, as we some time shall, the laws that 
govern the spiritual essence and the transmission of SOUL AKD BODY. 
123 
thought, this will not be viewed as an impossibility, 
nor even an improbability. 
" The saints on earth, and all the dead, 
But one communion make." 
This view makes that communion a living fact and 
practical reality, and not a mere dead article of a relig- 
ious creed. 
If it be true - and it is intuitively certain - as 
Paul declared before the high court of Areopagus, in 
the Athenian republic, that it is God who " givcth to 
all, life, and breath, and all things" (Acts xvii. 25), 
then the nearer we get to him the more we shall have 
of spiritual and physical life. All other things, though 
not to be lightly esteemed, or rejected, are of small 
value compared to this. All real prayer brings us into 
this vital relation to him. If it proceed from the in- 
most soul, which cries out after the living God, and is 
not a mere mechanical form, it is a drawing of nutri- 
ment from tire bosom of the infinite Love and every- 
where present Life. 
The only danger attending the invocation of the 
saints, or of spirits and angels, is that so vividly illus- 
trated in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. 
We know, from experience, that a small object held 
before our face, or a particle of dust in the eye, will 
not only obscure, but entirely hide from us the sun in 
the heavens. So there is danger that saints and angels, 
as being nearer to us, should attract too much atten- 
tion, to the neglect of prayer to God and to Christ. 
There is no doubt that in Italy, and other intensely 124 
SOUL AND BODY. 
Catholic countries, nine-tenths of all prayer is ad- 
dressed to the Virgin Mary, and goes no higher. 
Every city has its patron saint, who is the most 
prominent object of adoration. We see something 
analogous to this in our midst at the present day. But 
this is a perversion of what, in itself, may be proper 
and right. The abuse of anything is no valid objec- 
tion to its legitimate use. It is only among the igno- 
rant and spiritually unfolded that saints and angels 
can come into the place of God, and even this may 
have its use. The gods of Greece and Rome were only 
deified men, as Cicero expressly affirms, and yet their 
worship, in a barbarous age, may have been a ladder 
by means of which many mounted upward to the con- 
ception of the supreme God. Because a cloud some- 
times comes between us and the sun, and hides him 
temporarily from view, is no reason why clouds may 
not have their use in the economy of nature. 
Let it be remembered that in the realm of spirit, to 
which our inner being belongs, distance, is not that of 
space, as both time and space are purely subjective 
conditions, and not an objective measurement. God 
is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and in the 
spiritual world we live and move to-day as surely as 
we ever shall. Our supplicating thought addressed to 
the heavens, which are but the unfoldment and limita- 
tion of God, will cause a rebound in the bosom of the 
infinite life, and the returning wave will come back to 
us in a vitalizing, invigorating power. For the promise 
of Christ was based upon a deep perception of the laws 
of our spiritual nature, when he said, " Ask and it SOUL AND BODY. 
125 
shall be given; seek and ye shall find; knock and it 
shall be opened. For every one that asketh, receiveth , 
and he that seeketh, findeth ; and to him that knocketh, 
it shall be opened." (Matt. vii. 7, 8.) If we pray 
aright we shall realize the fulfilment of what God is 
represented as promising in the Scriptures: "Before 
they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speak- 
ing, I will hear." Prayer should never have been 
dropped out of the art of healing. Drugs are a poor 
substitute for it. It is as plainly enjoined upon those 
who accept Christianity, "Pray one for another that ye 
may be healed" as it is, "Thou shalt not steal." 
(James v. 16.) But it must be prayer in its all-com- 
prehensive sense that throws the arms of its desire 
around God, and the sum total of life in him. Time 
and space and all the limits of materiality vanish before 
the power of spirit. God is the "Father of spirits," 
and imparts to the human soul the properties of his 
own omnipresence. The divine element in human 
nature is the common life and unitive tie that pervades 
the whole, and all individuals are included in the one 
great unity of pure spirit, bound together in the same 
bundle of life, for God is all and in all. 126 
SOUL AND BODY. 
CHAPTER VI. 
THE IMPOSITION OF HANDS, OR THE MAGNETIC MOVE- 
MENT CURE AND THE RATIONALE OF ITS EFFICIENCY. 
" Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
Not light them for ourselves ; for if our virtues 
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
As if we had them not." 
Our highest spiritual states and experiences should 
have a solid basis in a sound physical condition, other- 
wise they may become a source of bodily weakness and 
disease. It matters not how high we mount in our up- 
ward flights into the spiritual realms, from the marsh 
upon the sea-shore to the summit of celestial moun- 
tains, yet we should not pull the ladder up after us, 
but leave it firmly fixed upon the solid ground. Other- 
wise the mysterious tie between soul and body will be 
loosened, if not entirely unbound and resolved. Every- 
thing that is to last long must have a firm foundation 
on which to rest. There have been many men in the 
world, of high spiritual experiences, who, having for- 
gotten this, have flashed up with a fitful light, like a 
signal gun at sea, and then gone out in darkness and 
gloom. Such were Cowper, Henry Kirk White and 
others. The soul cannot in this life sustain itself long 
in its loftiest flights, unless it is in union with a sound SOUL AND BODY. 
127 
physical organism. The wings that bear it upward 
must have muscle to sustain their prolonged action; 
otherwise we descend with dangerous and ever-increas- 
ing rapidity to the dust. All abnormal conditions that 
are not in harmony with mens sana in corpore sano, a 
sound mind in a sound body, are not desirable or to 
be sought. 
A prominent feature in the method of cure adopted 
by Christ, and practised by his early disciples, is the 
use of the hands in the treatment of disease. As one 
of the evidences and outward signs of a genuine faith, 
the Master declared that his followers should " la}' 
hands upon the sick and they should recover." (Mark 
xvi. 18.) The hands became the medium of connect- 
ing the spiritual and the natural in the cure of disease 
in the phrenopathic or mental cure system of Christi- 
anity. By their proper application the body was con- 
verted and Christianized, or brought into harmony with 
the redeemed spirit. In one place it is said of Christ, 
that owing to their unbelief he " only laid hands upon a 
few sick folk and healed them." (Mark vi. 5.) Two 
blind men were cured by touching their eyes. (Matt, 
ix. 27-29.) A man "full of leprosy," which in orien- 
tal countries is an incurable malady, was healed in the 
same way. (Luke v. 12, 13.) In the case of Peter's 
wife's mother," he took her by the hand and the fever 
left her." (Mark i. 30, 31.) Infants were brought 
unto him that he might touch them. (Luke xviii. 15.) 
In the island of Malta the father of Publius was healed 
by Paul by the imposition of his hands. (Acts xxviii. 
8.) 128 
SOUL AND BODY. 
This power was an essential element of Christianity, 
and was bequeathed by Jesus, the Christ, to his fol- 
lowers in all ages. The works that he did, they were 
to do, and even greater marvels of healing, because 
from his position in the spiritual world he could impart 
his influence to them with less obstruction. (Jno. xiv. 
12.) In the language of Dr. Wilkinson: "As we 
read the Gospels, we see how the Divine Man was also 
the Great Physician ; how he went about healing all 
manner of sickness and all manner of diseases among 
the people ; and how as many as touched the hem of 
his garments were made whole. He also commanded 
his followers to do the like, and founded cure as the 
grand evidence of the Christian religion. His proofs 
of his mission were sound bodies ; the deaf, hearing; 
the dumb, speaking; lepers, cleansed; the dead, 
raised ; those who before were blind, now they see. 
Where is the lineal priesthood of this great restoration ? 
Where are the claimants for this substantial apostolic 
successorship? Where are the layers-on of hands who 
give man to himself by casting out his devils, and in- 
crease the prime wrealth of the earth as the sign and 
seal of the advent of the kingdom of heaven ? Where 
is the clergy to whom sickness makes its last appeal for 
health, when doctors have pronounced the death words, 
No hope? We find them among the fishermen of the 
first century, but not among the prelates of the nine- 
teenth ; in mean-clad Peter and Paul, James and John, 
but not under the lawn of any right reverend bench. 
Our pontiffs say that the age of such miracles is past; 
but no New Testament ever told them so; if the age SOUL AND BODY. 
129 
of miracles is gone, it is because the age of Christianity 
is gone. The age of mathematics would be past if no 
man cultivated them. Christianity was the institution 
of miracle as in the order of nature. A duty is neg- 
lected here which is a main cause of irreligion and 
scepticism. Let this mode of healing be fairly exper- 
imented. It belongs to the priesthood. Let them 
turn out into the inclemencies of society, and try their 
adjurations against the storm of physical evil that 
exasperates the nations to their core. Let them put on 
the proofs of the apostolic power. Let their weak 
excuse, of the age of healing virtue being past, be ex- 
changed for a godly resolve to bring it back again. If 
they fail, it will be because they are not Christian, or 
else because Christianity cannot bide its own proofs. 
If they succeed, there will be no need of missionaries 
any more, but mankind will sit in a right mind under 
them, and bless their privilege, and their Master's 
name. The vis medicatrix Christi will be the physical 
demonstration of the life of a Christian church."-{The 
Human Body and its Connection rvith Man, pp. 378, 
379.) 
Whatever view we take of Christ, the method of 
cure adopted by him demands the profoundest consider- 
ation. If he was nothing but a man, its marvellous 
success in healing " all manner of sickness and dis- 
ease " wrould commend it to our study. And whatever 
else he was, he possessed a perfect human nature. As 
an eloquent advocate of his divinity has said: "He 
was more a man than any other person of whom we 
have any history; for nowhere else do we read of a 130 
SOUL AND BODY. 
humanity where the compass of its powers and attributes 
was so full and complete. Its sublimest heights of 
moral grandeur, and its most delicate shades of moral 
beauty, are all here." -(Heart of Christ, by Rev. E. II. 
Sears, p. 4G7.) 
If he was, in an eminent sense, an incarnation of the 
Deity, as I believe he was, then it is not credible that 
God, who made man, could suggest anything but the 
best method of curing the numerous maladies to which 
human nature is liable in the present disordered stage 
of its existence. 
It seems to be the peculiar mission of the new age, 
upon which the world is now entering, to reduce the 
spiritual phenomena of past centuries to scientific prin- 
ciples, so that a true science may become the basis of 
a saving faith. If this volume contributes, even in the 
least degree, to such a result, the labor of its composi- 
tion will be amply rewarded. It would seem reasonable 
to expect that eighteen centuries of history and experi- 
ence ought to add some improvement to the mode of 
past ages of healing disease by the use of the hands. 
A system of treatment, for the various and ever-varying 
forms of chronic disease, is rapidly coming into popular 
favor, which in Europe, where it is quite extensively 
used, and has the approval of the most intelligent 
physicians, goes under the name of the Massage, but 
which I prefer to denominate the Magnetic Movement 
Cure. Its efficiency, as a remedial agency, has been 
fully tested and firmly established. Where there is not 
sufficient faith to make the suffering invalid whole, 
this system, when judiciously employed, is always SOUL AND BODY. 
131 
salutary in its results, as it is based on scientific and 
physiological principles, which give to it its therapeutic 
effect. It is not recommended to take the place of the 
phrenopathic method, but as an auxiliary to it, and to 
meet those cases that cannot so well be reached by that 
mode of healing, not from any defect in the Christian 
system of cure, but from a want of receptivity in the 
patient. It was first brought prominently to the notice 
of physicians by Dr. Metzgar, of Bonn. It is based 
upon Dr. Marshall Hall's doctrine of efferent and affe- 
rent nerves, or what is now usually called the reflex 
action of the cerebro-spinal system. Through the influ- 
ence of the nervous system, there is kept up the most 
complete interrelation of part to part, organ to organ, 
and function to other functions. By means of this 
principle an effect produced in one part of the body is 
felt in some other part, oftentimes quite remote from 
the first. Dalton, in his valuable work on physiology, 
remarks: " The function of the nervous system may 
be defined in the simplest terms, as follows : It is 
intended to associate the different parts of the body in 
such a manner that stimulus applied to one organ may 
excite the activity of another."-(Dalton's Physiology, 
p. 367.) 
The idea of a reflex action of the nervous system is 
something more than a mere abstract theory, or a mere 
curious and interesting principle of physiology. It 
furnishes us with the means of producing precise and 
certain physiological and therapeutic results. By 
affecting one part, we with certainty affect other parts. 
A small particle of dust, lodged in the glottis, produces 132 
SOUL AND BODY. 
a spasmodic and involuntary contraction of the dia- 
phragm and abdominal muscles in coughing. The 
sensation is transmitted to the brain along an afferent 
or sensory nerve, and then it is, as it were, reflected 
through an efferent or rootory nerve to the muscular 
tissue concerned in the act of coughing. So, on the 
other hand, the treatment of those muscles is the best 
remedy for diseases of the throat. Tickling the inner 
surface of the nostrils causes the muscular movement 
or convulsive action, called sneezing. A feather, or 
the tip of the finger, placed in contact with the pharynx, 
by a similar reflex movement produces an inverted 
action of the muscular coating of the stomach in vomit- 
ing. By irritating the mammary glands, uterine con- 
tractions are the result, which may assist the menstrual 
function, and even be carried to the extent of produc- 
ing abortion. Respiration, and many of the most im- 
portant physiological functions, are movements of a 
purely reflex character. Light falling upon the retina 
produces a contraction of the pupil. The presence of 
food in the mouth increases the activity of the salivary 
glands and the flow of the gastric secretion ; while the 
food in the stomach causes the gall-cist to discharge its 
contents into the duodenum. The involuntary move- 
ments of chorea, and the violent muscular contractions 
in cramp, are of a reflex character. Under the guid- 
ance of intelligence, we are able to affect any organ in 
the body by the treatment of some other part which 
may be far removed from it. But in order to accom- 
plish this, we must understand the interrelation and SOUL AND BODY. 
133 
sympathetic connection of the different parts of the 
bodily structure. 
We must never lose sight of the truth that the mate- 
rial bod}' is only the form or outside boundary of the 
mind or spirit, and is that by which the spirit is fixed 
in time and space. Spirit is the creator of its own 
environment. The soul makes and governs the body, 
and not the body the soul. Everything in the body 
is a correspondence of something in the mind. The 
mental organism is composed of two distinct, though 
not separate departments, the affectional and intellectual 
natures, or, as in the terminology of Swedenborg, the 
love and the wisdom. These may be duly balanced, 
constituting mental harmony and health, or there may 
be a loss of this proper balance, one department being 
greatly predominant and in excess. 
In exact correspondence with this dual structure of 
the mind there are two kinds of cerebral and nervous 
substance ; the cineritious or grey, and the medullary 
or fibrous. The one is the organ of the intellectual, 
and the other of the affectional faculties and powers. 
There are also two classes of nerves, the sensory and 
motory, which are so correlated that the action of the 
one class excites the action of the other. The nerves of 
sensation, in certain unbalanced affectional states, 
often become morbidly acute from the accumulation of 
the nervous force in them, and then there will be a 
corresponding deficiency and weakness in the nerves 
of motion, and the muscular tissue to which they are 
distributed. This is the grand characteristic of ner- 
vous invalidism, as was shown in a previous volume. 134 
SOUL AND BODY. 
the electric force, and would if applied to anything - 
a table or chair. If the system needs the electric 
influence, it is best given where it is wanted, by the 
friction of the ends of the fingers, as in that way it is 
modified by the magnetic and vital force of the hand, 
and thus becomes defecated or vitalized electricity. 
While friction is electric, pressure is magnetic. This 
is an important distinction. The kneading, pressing 
and shampooing of the muscles, anciently called 
tripsis, but now known as the Massage treatment, is 
equivalent to .voluntary movements, but with the 
added advantage of being attended with no expendi- 
ture of the nervous force of the patient. There is also 
an actual communication of magnetic or psychic influ- 
ence from the physician, which adds to the vital stock 
of the patient. In many chronic invalids there is 
such a debilitation and exhaustion of the nervous 
energy that it is necessary for them to economize its 
expenditure, while the invigoration of the muscular 
system, which results from judicious exercise, is a 
medicine they most need, and the only remedy which 
can restore the lost harmony in the distribution of the 
nervous force. The magnetic movement cure gives all 
the benefit of the most vigorous muscular exercise, and 
is more than a substitute for it. 
It has been affirmed that there are only three funda- 
mental methods of cure by medication, or there are 
only three possible relations between the symptoms 
of disease and the specific effects of remedies. The 
Antipathic method, which dates back as far as Hippoc- 
rates, consists in the administration of medicines that SOUL AND BODY. 
135 
produce effects of an opposite nature to the symptoms 
of the disease, as where cathartics are given to relieve 
constipation, or astringents to check diarrhoea. 
The Homoeopathic method consists in administering 
medicines capable of producing effects similar to the 
disease we seek to remove. It adopts the Hippocratic 
doctrine, that disease is only the disturbance in the 
system occasioned by the effort of nature to restore the 
body to health, and that it is the function of the physi- 
cian to assist the reaction of the vital force against the 
morbid condition. 
The third method of cure is the Allopathic, which is 
based on the principle that there is a curative relation 
of certain diseases to others. It consists in the pro- 
duction of an artificial or secondary disease in order to 
relieve the primary one. Its central idea is that of 
counter-irritation. 
All these fundamental methods of cure have a rational 
foundation, and under the direction of medical science 
may be made to assist what we call nature in the 
removal of disease. A complete system should com- 
bine the advantages of each in one. This will be found 
some time to be true of the Magnetic Movement Cure. 
It can produce the effects of the antipathic or palliative 
method. It may be made to aid nature in the reaction 
of the vis vitce against the morbid condition, and to 
hurry on the natural crisis of the disease, according to 
the system of Hahnemann. It may have all the influ- 
ence of antagonism or counter-irritation, which is the 
corner-stone of Allopathy. Above all, it may contrib- 
ute the scientific, physiological basis for the action of 136 
SOUL AND BODY. 
the electric force, and would if applied to anything - 
a table or chair. If the system needs the electric 
influence, it is best given where it is wanted, by the 
friction of the ends of the fingers, as in that way it is 
modified by the magnetic and vital force of the hand, 
and thus becomes defecated or vitalized electricity. 
While friction is electric, pressure is magnetic. This 
is an important distinction. The kneading, pressing 
and shampooing of the muscles, anciently called 
tripsis, but now known as the Massage treatment, is 
equivalent to voluntary movements, but with the 
added advantage of being attended with no expendi- 
ture of the nervous force of the patient. There is also 
an actual communication of magnetic or psychic influ- 
ence from the physician, which adds to the vital stock 
of the patient. In many chronic invalids there is 
such a debilitation and exhaustion of the nervous 
energy that it is necessary for them to economize its 
expenditure, while the invigoration of the muscular 
system, which results from judicious exercise, is a 
medicine they most need, and the only remedy which 
can restore the lost harmony in the distribution of the 
nervous force. The magnetic movement cure gives all 
the benefit of the most vigorous muscular exercise, and 
is more than a substitute for it. 
It has been affirmed that there are only three funda- 
mental methods of cure by medication, or there arc 
only three possible relations between the symptoms 
of disease and the specific effects of remedies. The 
Antipathic method, which dates back as far as Hippoc- 
rates, consists in the administration of medicines that SOUL AND BODY. 
137 
produce effects of an opposite nature to the symptoms 
of the disease, as where cathartics are given to relieve 
constipation, or astringents to check diarrhoea. 
The Homoeopathic method consists in administering 
medicines capable of producing effects similar to the 
disease we seek to remove. It adopts the Hippocratic 
doctrine, that disease is only the disturbance in the 
system occasioned by the effort of nature to restore the 
body to health, and that it is the function of the physi- 
cian to assist the reaction of the vital force against the 
morbid condition. 
The third method of cure is the Allopathic, which is 
based on the principle that there is a curative relation 
of certain diseases to others. It consists in the pro- 
duction of an artificial or secondary disease in order to 
relieve the primary one. Its central idea is that of 
counter-irritation. 
All these fundamental methods of cure have a rational 
foundation, and under the direction of medical science 
may be made to assist what we call nature in the 
removal of disease. A complete system should com- 
bine the advantages of each in one. This will be found 
some time to be true of the Magnetic Movement Cure. 
It can produce the effects of the antipathic or palliative 
method. It may be made to aid nature in the reaction 
of the vis vitce against the morbid condition, and to 
hurry on the natural crisis of the disease, according to 
the system of Hahnemann. It may have all the influ- 
ence of antagonism or counter-irritation, which is the 
corner-stone of Allopathy. Above all, it may contrib- 
ute the scientific, physiological basis for the action of 138 
SOUL AND BODY. 
spiritual forces and remedies in the cure of disease 
We should ascertain in what direction the vital powers, 
in any given case, are making their effort to throw off 
the morbid condition, and then to reinforce their thera 
peutic endeavor. 
The Magnetic Movement Cure may be made to pro 
duce, in a purely physiological way, and without any 
unfavorable reactive results, all the effects of alterative 
medicines. The excreting organs are five in number, 
the skin, the kidneys, the liver, the lungs, and the 
large intestine. To excite these organs to increased 
action, and thus eliminate from the blood, the effete, 
worn-out and devitalized particles, is the design of 
alterative medicines. But this can be accomplished in 
a more natural and healthful manner. It is a well-rec- 
ognized principle of physiology, that muscular exercise 
induces and necessitates an increased respiration. The 
nervo-tonic stimulation of the muscles, in the way 
recommended above, effects the same change in the 
respiratory action. And the more we breathe, other 
things being equal, the stronger we are. But an in- 
creased respiration is always followed by an improved 
oxygenation of the blood. It is affirmed by Prof. 
Lehmann, in his " Physiological Chemistry," that there 
is no known disease that does not exhibit a defective 
oxygenation of the blood. Hence this treatment must 
remove one of the most important physical causes of 
disease, and this it does with more immediate efficiency 
and certainty than any known remedy. 
It is known that the movement of the muscles in 
active exercise and labor increases the action of the SOUL AND BODY. 
139 
perspiratory glands. But the proper treatment of 
the muscles, when the patient is entirely passive, 
is attended with the same physiological effect. I 
have often known patients to perspire profusely, yet 
naturally and healthfully, under it. To restore the 
skin to a healthy action' is a result of no small impor- 
tance in nearly every form of disease. It also, like 
voluntary exercise, stimulates the kidneys to increased 
action, and augments the amount of the urinary secre- 
tion. Uric acid is the result of an oxygenation of 
muscular tissue consequent upon its action. There is 
a compensating and sympathetic action between the 
kidneys and the skin, so that when the cutaneous per- 
spiration is abundant, the urine is less so. - (Dalton's 
Physiology, p. 71.) Of all the numerous forms of 
cutaneous disease, a large proportion of them orig- 
inate in a defective or disordered action of the kidneys. 
Some element, that should find an outlet from the system 
through the renal functions, is seeking to make its 
way through the skin. Such is the origin of most 
humors. Hence any treatment that will restore the 
kidneys to a healthy functional action will relieve 
most cutaneous diseases. On the other hand, any 
remedial agent that gives the skin a healthy action will 
go far towards curing every disease of the kidneys. 
The delicate and quick sympathy between the skin and 
the kidneys is perceived by us on any cold day. When 
the perspiration is suddenly checked by an exposure of 
the body to the cold air of winter, the urinary secre- 
tion is immediately increased. Dropsy is a disease 140 
SOUL AND BODY. 
that is caused by a defective action of both the skin 
and the kidneys. 
The liver is one of the most important of the excret- 
ing organs. Its sluggish functional action is the phys- 
ical cause or concomitant of many diseased conditions 
of the body. Inflammation, enlargement, and conges- 
tion of the liver, are the most common designations of 
its disordered state, and are only different names of the 
same thing. All congestions are a stasis, a standing 
still, a want of circulation in an organ or part. In the 
common disordered state of the liver, the bile, instead 
of flowing freely through the gall duct, accumulates in 
the organ. The hepatic veins are relaxed, and from a 
loss of contractility arc enlarged, and, consequently, 
the blood, with which it is liberally supplied, accumu- 
lates in it. This accumulation of blood and bile, and 
the stagnation in the circulation of these fluids, occa- 
sions its engorgement and enlargement. To restore 
the circulation is to cure the disease. It is to be 
treated in the same way that you would a sponge if it 
contained more water than you wished it to hold. You 
simply press it out. By an alternate pressure, first 
upon the right side, and then upon the left, and by the 
use of both hands at once, so as to produce a sort of 
wringing movement of the body in the region of the 
epigastrium, it forces the bile into the gall-duct, and 
increases the circulation in the hepatic veins. This is 
a treatment recommended by common sense, and is as 
efficacious as it is physiological. It has proved itself 
a specific for all diseases of the liver, and I have never 
met with a case that it would not relieve. SOUL AND BODY. 
141 
The excreting organs act in harmony, or there is in 
them a conatus, or natural tendency and endeavor, to 
a concomitant and harmonious activity. In conse- 
quence of this synchronous movement and reciprocal 
influence, the stimulation of one excites the functional 
action of all. I have often noticed that when the liver 
is subjected to the aSove-named treatment, it induces 
a gentle perspiration, and quickens the action of the 
kidneys, and effects a movement of the bowels with 
all the immediate efficiency of a dose of calomel or 
podophyllin. 
It seems to be a law, arising from the mutual influ- 
ence of the organs upon, each other, from the interrela- 
tion of their nerves, that the health of an organ is 
affected by its proximity and juxtaposition to a dis- 
eased one ; and it is equally true that to cause a healthy 
circulatory action in an organ near a diseased one goes 
far towards securing a more healthy condition of the 
latter. Thus, in disease of the lungs there is always a 
debilitated state of the large pectoralis muscle of the 
chest. So of the abdominal muscles, and the condi- 
tion of the bowels. In chronic diarrhoea these muscles 
are greatly relaxed, while in constipation and dys- 
pepsia they are often permanently retracted. To cor- 
rect this unnatural condition of the muscles is the best 
remedy for the disease. By a stimulating treatment 
of the glutei muscles of the hip it affects the action of 
the large intestine, and relieves constipation. It also 
allays any over-excitement or inflammation of the pel- 
vic organs, as those muscles have a definite sympathetic 
connection with them. The same is true of the uterus 142 
SOUL AND BODY. 
and the adductor muscle of the thigh, and the popliteus 
just above and back of the knee. The treatment of 
the gastrocnemii, and soleus, that constitute the calf 
of the leg, produces a similar effect upon the kidneys 
and pelvic viscera. The stimulation of the right 
trapezius affects the liver, and of the left, the spleen, 
two organs quite commonly deranged in chronic dis- 
ease. Kneading the muscles of the arms, by a reflex 
action of the spinal nerves, affects the lungs. The 
proper treatment of the abdominal muscles affects the 
diaphragm, whose contractions furnish the respiratory 
force. These muscles are five in number : the obliquus 
externus, the obliquus internus, the transver salts, the rec- 
tus, and the pyramidalis; and these together constitute 
the walls of the abdomen, and the natural support of 
all the interior viscera. They also aid in expelling the 
contents of the bowels and uterus, and assist in res- 
piration. They act as the antagonists of the dia- 
phragm, for when the latter contracts the former expand, 
and vice versa. There is, consequently, a close sym- 
pathetic relation between them ; and the improvement 
in the tone of the abdominal muscles, by a reflex ac- 
tion, is communicated to the diaphragm, and thus 
relieves all respiratory diseases and those of the vocal 
organs. The obliquus externus is one of the most im- 
portant of the group of abdominal muscles. It presses 
the diaphragm upward, and brings the thorax directly 
forward, and when the thorax is fixed it draws the pel- 
vis upward, and its healthy tone cannot fail to be a 
sovereign remedy for the prolapsed condition of the SOUL AND BODY. 
143 
pelvic organs so common in chronic diseases, especially 
those of females. 
The treatment recommended and described above, 
gives tone to the muscular and nervous system, restores 
harmony in the circulation of the blood and nervous 
force, and thus increases the reaction of the vis vitce 
against any local or general derangement of the system. 
The application of the hands, also, in friction over the 
body has a marked effect upon the internal organs. It 
has been proved that there is a reflex action of the 
nerves of sensation upon vaso-motor nerves, or blood- 
vessel nerves. The nerves of sensation terminate in 
the skin, and through these, by a reflex action, the con- 
dition of every organ in the body may be affected. M. 
Loven has shown that, by irritating the peripheric 
extremities of sensitive nerves, a reflex influence is 
produced on the vaso-motor nerves of an inhibitory or 
restraining character, effecting a perceptible diminution 
of the calibre of vessels, and, consequently, diminish- 
ing the flow of blood to the organs. Prof. Ileidenhain, 
of Breslau, proved, by many experiments, that irrita- 
tion of sensitive nerves-and this is always effected 
by friction or rubbing the skin - produces a rapid 
diminution of the temperature of the blood, and a less 
frequent pulse. This affords a ready means of dimin- 
ishing inflammations, and congestions, and all feverish 
conditions of the body, which lie at the root of all 
acute and most chronic diseases. 
According to Prof. Stilling " there is a constant re- 
flex influence maintained by a sensitive nerve upon the 
blood-vessel nerves." But this is felt more immediately 144 
SOUL AND BODY. 
upon the inhibitory nerve-fibres of Rcnak, whose office 
is to regulate the flow of blood to the organs. Schiff 
demonstrated the fact that if the skin be tickled or 
gently rubbed the capillaries of the part so excited 
dilate ; but if great force be used in rubbing, or if the 
extremities of the sensitive nerves are greatly irritated, 
the capillaries do not dilate but firmly contract. Thus 
the amount of force employefl regulates the flow of 
blood to the organs, and may be made to increase or 
diminish at will the vital action of the parts. - (JZer- 
yon's Rational Therapeutics, pp. 41-43.) 
It will be seen from the above that, by means of the 
hands alone, the most marked effects that were ever 
claimed to be produced by medicines may be caused in 
a purely physiological way. In all ages of the world 
the hands have been used to relieve pain and cure dis- 
ease, but without any scientific knowledge of the reason 
of their efficiency. The cures effected in this -way were 
deemed miraculous, whereas they were only miracles 
in the order of nature. 
It is a law of our nature, on the uniform operation 
of which we may rely, that the passive holding of the 
hands on any part of the body increases the vital action 
of the point of contact. This is immediately indicated 
by the heightened glow of the part, consequent upon a 
quickened vascular action, which seems to be caused by 
the magnetic stimulation of the tissue. The psychic in- 
fluence, which is in this way communicated, is more cer- 
tain in its effect than that of any known medicine, and is 
a remedy that is always within our reach. It finds its 
most useful application in the imposition of the hand SOUL AND BODY. 
145 
upon the brain, as in this way the mental manifestations 
and spiritual state may be modified by it. The top of 
the brain is the location of the spiritual and religious 
faculties, and has been expressively called, by Prof. 
Buchanan, "the kingdom of heaven in man." The 
placing of the hands here, as in the rites of confirmation 
and ordination, is no unmeaning ceremony. The 
religious faculties are the side of human nature that lie 
next to God and heaven. The imposition of the hands 
upon this part of the cerebral organism, which is so 
sensitive to influences from the spiritual world, must 
have a quickening effect upon the religious nature. In 
this way the Holy Spirit, which we have shown to be 
the inmost principle of life and health, was imparted 
in the primitive church. (Acts viii. 17 ; Acts ix. 17 ; 
Acts xix. G.) This may have been effected by the im- 
parting through the hands the spiritual states of the 
apostles to the subject, or they may have been made by 
it receptive of an influx from the spiritual world, - from 
God and the heavens. But, in either case what has 
been done, can be done now. As the learned Hooker 
has remarked : "God hath his influence into the very 
essence of all things." He who is in vital communica- 
tion with God can place others in the same conjunction 
with the Central Life, by becoming a conductor to them 
of the divine and celestial inflowing. 
It is well to terminate the treatment, recommended 
above, by placing the hands upon the part of the brain 
constituting the crown of the head, or what is called 
the " region of the higher energies," and also over the 
middle of the scapula, or shoulder blade, as this is the 146 
SOUL AND BODY. 
centre of muscular force in the body. It deepens the 
respiration, and has a marked effect upon the whole 
muscular system, and infuses an element of life and 
force into every part of the organic structure. 
The placing of the hands upon the forebrain quickens 
the action of all the intellectual powers, and their 
application to the back brain, just above the last cer- 
vical vertebra, accompanied with vigorous friction and 
kneading, stimulates all the involuntary vital functions. 
The treatment described and recommended above, 
under the general designation of the Magnetic Move- 
ment Cure, constitutes the physiological basis for the 
sanative remedial action of the phrenopathic method 
of healing. In this age of exact science, diseases 
cannot be cured by magic or miracle. All spiritual 
forces act in the cure of diseases of mind and body in 
harmony with the laws of our being. It should be the 
aim of the physician to bring the remedial agency 
which he employs within the compass of the laws of 
human nature, for these are the "power of God and 
the wisdom of God unto salvation." The treatment 
described in this chapter gives to the so-called mag- 
netic or psychic force an increased efficiency, and to 
its effects the quality of permanency. The phreno- 
pathic method of cure founded by Jesus, the Christ, 
eighteen centuries ago, and by him taught to his early 
disciples, will be revived in the new age upon which 
humanity is entering, and will receive an increased 
efficiency from the growing scientific culture of the 
world. Knowledge, and especially spiritual intelligence, 
is power; and that power applied to the relief of SOUL AND BODY. 
147 
mental unhappiness and physical suffering is the 
divinest exhibition of Christian beneficence. Whoever 
does this, whatever may be his creed, is a follower of 
Christ and a citizen of the kingdom of heaven.