New Thought : Part 6

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 14 of 19)

It would seem to an impartial observer that Christian Science asks of its disciples an intensity of positive effort which New Thought does not demand. Dresser, for example, believes all suffering to be the result of struggle. Directly we cease to struggle we cease to suffer, provided, of course, that our cessation is in the direction of relaxation and a trust in a higher power. In some regions, however, Christian Science and New Thought as therapeutic agents work along the same line, but where Christian Science denies New Thought ignores. Here New Thought makes more use of psychological laws; it follows James generally in its psychology, as it follows Emerson in its thought of the over-soul, though in this region Emerson's detached serenity of faith is given body in an insistence upon the divine immanence for which New Thought is in debt to the suggestions and analogies of modern science.

New Thought makes much of the shifting of attention and its disciplines are rather the disciplines of the mystic than the disciplines of the Christian Scientist. It seeks in substance to ascertain the laws of mind in action and then, through the utilization of this knowledge, to secure health, happiness and prosperity. It makes much, of course, of the centrality of mind both in well-being and pain. It hardly goes so far as to say that pain is an error in belief, but it does say that pain is a matter of consciousness and that as we are masters of consciousness we are masters of pain. It believes in thought transference and absent treatment, but it is perhaps more conservative in the cases which it is willing to undertake than Christian Science and recognizes the limitations of the healer.

The Key-Words of New Thought

Its key-words are Harmony, Realization, Affirmation and Poise. Just here New Thought is a strangely interwoven web. It makes much of "vibration" and "friction." It is evidently under the spell of the wave theory of light and heat. It is most dependable in its analysis and application of laws of mental action, most undependable in trying to account for the relation of mind to body and in its explanation of the physical phenomena of disease. Fatigue, for example, "is evidently due to the calling of power into a new direction. It [evidently the power] comes into contact with dense matter, with an uncultivated portion of the being, physical as well as mental, and meeting with resistance friction of some sort is the natural result." One has only to compare a statement like that with Cannon's careful study of bodily changes under emotional states, to see the difference between speculation controlled by analogy and the illuminating experimental methods of modern science.

When Dresser adds that "we should eliminate disease not by fighting it, not by studying its causes, or doctoring its physical effects, but by seeing the wisdom of the better way," he is on dangerous ground, for if we are not to study the causes of disease but to take as our guide the serene generalizations of a speculative mind we are shutting in our faces one of the doors by which we enter into that knowledge of the mind of God, of which New Thought makes so much. How should we know the mind of God except as we ask endless patient and careful questions of every revelation of the divine method, whether in sickness or health?

New Thought, however, takes a far more constructive view of suffering than Christian Science. For New Thought suffering is at least disciplinary and instructive: it compels reflection: it brings us to a knowledge of the law. It is certainly, therefore, just and it may be kind. Indeed, New Thought occasionally goes so far as to say that suffering is also a revelation of love and must be so accepted and entertained. Its general conclusions in this region are far more safe than its insistence upon vibration and friction and its spacious technicalities.

When Dresser says that there is a difference "between ignoring a trouble, between neglecting to take proper care of ourselves and that wise direction of thought which in no way hinders while it most surely helps to remedy our ills," he is on perfectly safe ground. When he adds that there is a strong reason for believing that "there is a simple, natural way out of every trouble, that kind nature, which is another name for an omniscient God, is ever ready to do her utmost for us" he is speaking with a wise and direct helpfulness, though here as generally New Thought errs on the side of too great a simplification.

There is a way out of every trouble but it is not always simple, it is often laborious and challenging. We have accomplished marvels in the matter of tropical sanitation but the way out has been anything but simple. It has involved experimentations which cost the lives of physicians who offered themselves for humanity as nobly as any soldier on any battlefield; it involved the sweat of hard driven labor digging drainage ditches, the rebuilding of the foundations of cities and a thousand cares and safeguards. If New Thought wishes to dismiss such a process as this with the single adjective "simple" it may do as it pleases, but this is not simplicity as the dictionary defines it.

Its Field of Real Usefulness

All that way of thinking of which New Thought is just one aspect is fatally open to criticism just here. It ignores the immense travail of humanity in its laborious pilgrimage toward better things and it is far too ready to proclaim short-cuts to great goals when there never have been and never will be any short-cuts in life. None the less, trust and quietness of mind and soul and utter openness to healing, saving forces are immense healing agents and in its emphasis thereupon New Thought has recalled us to that which in the very intensity of life's battles we are in the way of forgetting. And beyond doubt, in that obscure range of diseases which are due to the want of balanced life - to worry, fear, self-absorption and over-strain - the methods of New Thought have a distinct value.

In general, as one follows the history and literature of New Thought one finds that, though it began with a group more interested in healing than anything else, healing has come to play a progressively less important part in the development of the movement and the larger part of its literature deals with what one might call perhaps the laws of mental and spiritual hygiene. The principles implicit in New Thought as a healing cult carry of their own weight into other regions. It is important enough to get well - that goes without saying - but it is more important to keep well. Good health on the whole is a kind of by-product.

We suffer as distinctly from spiritual and mental maladjustments as from physical. We suffer also from the sense of inadequacy, the sense, that is, of a burdening disproportion between our own powers and the challenge of life. New Thought has addressed itself increasingly to such states and problems as this. Here it ceases to be a cult or a method of healing and has become a most considerable influence and here also it in general takes the direction of and is identified with what is truest in the Christian religion, what is sanest and most clear visioned in present-day thinking. The typical books just here are Trine's "In Tune with the Infinite" and a similar literature.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company