or a contemptuous spirit, it will be misconstrued; and it will be in regretted contradiction of my purpose if I let slip a single careless word that shall wound the reverence of even the most sensitive soul.

II

THE NEW THOUGHT: ITS ORIGIN AND

CLAIMS

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(With incidental reference to Christian Science" and kindred cults.)

It is not an uncommon thing in our day to see good men and women who have lost their physical or their spiritual bearings feeling about for some trustworthy guide, reaching out for anything that may prove to be for the good of their body or their soul. Consequently it would be both unwarranted and unkind to speak slightingly or contemptuously of a movement which has ministered in just such helpful ways to unnumbered thousands of diseased and dis-eased people.

Wherever you find a religion acting beneficently upon the conduct of its adherents, there you may be satisfied some truth is to be found. Similarly, wherever you find a large number of adherents to a given belief, there also, you may be assured, something good and true obtains.

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And so I would deal temperately and dis-passionately with this Movement, treating it neither with flippancy nor ridicule, regarding it neither as a delusion nor as a fraud, recognizing its actual cures as readily as those wrought at the shrine of Ste. Anne, in Beaupré, and often by a like cause. That thousands of cripples come with crutches and depart without them is not to be denied, though the abandoned crutches be no evidence that a bone of St. Anne made lame people walk. Rather do these crutches show how many people there were who had them longer than they needed them and that they discovered there how much less dependent on them they were than they supposed. At the shrine they got just the bit of confidence and trust they needed, persuading them they could walk without crutches. A stirring impulse, a confidence that St. Anne will not let them fall, gave them courage and will to discard the crutches and walk without them. The cure was not a miracle, but a discovery; an exhibition, not of what St. Anne does, but of what they who go there do. As the local priest, in charge, said "it is their faith."

Say what we will in criticism of the New

Thought movement, we have to admit that a very large number of people, possibly a million, are influenced by it. They constitute a psychic type to be studied with respect, since for them the movement continues to fulfill a helpful mission, physically, morally, spiritually.

Glance with me, for a moment, at some of its more important achievements on each of these three planes.

Thousands of people there are who have suffered from one or another ailment, real or imaginary, and who, through the treatment peculiar to this movement, have become conscious of good health and freedom from pain. Explain it in any way you wish, enough has been done, on the physical plane, by the healing method peculiar to this movement to prohibit our branding it as a humbug or a fad. True, a large number of failures have been reported, but this only adds to the strength of the argument, because there must have been a goodly number of successes to offset the failures, otherwise the movement would have come to an inglorious finish long ago. In so far, then, as New Thought treatment has brought health to hosts of people who have failed to

secure it by any other means, we must acknowledge that the movement is an incalculable boon.

But healing the sick is not the whole of New Thought, any more than it is of Christian Science.1 On the contrary, the representatives of both these movements are quick and keen to insist that healing the sick is the smallest part, the least significant side of their cult. In confirmation of this conviction they point to thousands of homes in which the conversation never turns on bad weather or bad health; homes in which it is bad form to talk about bad weather or disagreeable sensations; homes from which all worry and dread, all morbidity and pessimism have been banished. Nay more, bad habits, unconquered by other means, have by this system been vanquished, sour dispositions have been sweetened and hot tempers cooled; snobbishness has been replaced by graciousness and where once men and women fed on the garbage of gossip they now feast upon the fruits of the spirit. For foolish, fashionable dissipations there has been substituted serious, sensible interest in things eminently worth while.

1 See "Rudimentary Divine Science," by Mrs. M. B. Eddy, p. 9.