The statement recently made by an eminent Episcopalian clergyman, that "if the Church of Christ, Catholic, had done its duty, the Church of Christ, Scientist, had not been," would appear to be a severe arraignment of the Church of Christ, Catholic. It might even be construed to imply a serious, if not inexcusable, dereliction on the part of the Church Catholic. Yet we do not take this view of it. We make no such charge. No church can do its whole duty until it has a clear conception of what its duty is. We verily believe that the Church of Christ, Catholic, has not heretofore clearly understood that its duty was to teach the healing of sickness as well as the healing of sin through divine or spiritual means. It has believed that its mission was to save the soul, and leave the saving of the body to the learning and skill of the human physician through such means as, in his wisdom, he thought best to employ, and that the physician's use of material remedies was divinely sanctioned.
The church, indeed, had reasoned itself into the conscientious belief that the healing which Jesus did, and taught his disciples to do, was a gift specially imparted to their age, to impress it with the evidence of a divine immanence, and that thereafter this delegation of power was divinely withdrawn. This has been the teaching of the Church Protestant ever since the Reformation. The claim to so-called supernatural healing on the part of the Church of Rome was made a special ground of the Protest of Luther and his coadjutors, and the Protestant clergy strongly advocated the drug method of healing.
We say, then, we do not charge upon the Church of Christ, Catholic, a wilful failure of duty in the past, for had it possessed a better understanding of its duty in reference to healing sickness through prayer, it no doubt would have lived up to that understanding.
