THE MEDICAL SYSTEM OF THE PECULIAR PEOPLE.

MR. Mr. GILBERT, the man who approaches nearer to the style of Defoe than any writer of modern fiction, has described in the new number of Good Words a visit to a German congrega- tion of " Peculiar People," of anything but uncultivated mind, residing at present with a German pastor, Blumhardt, at Boll Bad, somewhere between Ulm and Stuttgardt. Mr. Gilbert found the patients of Pastor Blumhardt, if patients they can be called who depend almost exclusively on prayer for restoration to health,—a highly cultivated and in some respects literary class of people, num- bering upwards of a hundred and twenty, and by no means of the class to whom the parents of the child (Lois Wagstaffe) who died recently from inflammation of the lungs in the Borough belonged. That child was, as our readers may remember, the child of a very respectable dock labourer, who with his wife evidently made a very good impression on the Judge before whom they were tried for manslaughter, Mr. Justice Willes, and was expressly declared by the Judge, in spite of his folly in objecting to medical advice, to be entirely free from " culpable negligence." But the sick who apply for help to the prayers of Pastor Blumhardt at Boll Bad do not appear to be in any respect wanting in intellectual culture. And the little hospital for sick people at Miinnedorf, on the banks of Zurich, set on foot on the same principles by Dorothea Triidel, and since her death carried on by her successor, Mr. Samuel Zeller, to which Mr. Gilbert also paid a hasty visit, appears to be both superintended and frequented, for the most part, by persons of respectable, though not high, education. The reality of some of the prayer-cures effected in this latter establish- ment has been tested, it is said, by the severe test of a trial before three Courts in the Canton of Zurich,—the doctors of Zurich having applied to have Dorothea Triidel's establishment shut up, as being, in effect, an illicit hospital, managed by persons without medical knowledge or diplomas. Mr. Gilbert does not, in his paper in Good Words, give us any cases of sickness treated by prayer which came under his own eye ; but he seems to have inquired as to the trial in which the hospital system of Dorothea Triidel was in question, and to attest the truth of the statement made in a little book now before us, called Dorothea Triidel, or the Prayerof Faith,* that the Zurich doctors did get a decree for the breaking-up of her hospital, which was confirmed in the first Court of appeal, and set aside by the Supreme Court,—her own counsel taking the following ground :- " The pleading of her learned counsel was certainly a unique com- bination of the wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the dove. Though fully convinced in his own mind of the truth of her theory, he based his defence solely upon a point of law. He admitted that neither Dorothea Triidel nor any other individual was justified in practising medicine in the Canton of Zurich without being duly authorized, but he submitted that the conduct of his client did not in any manner come within the meaning of the law. She had not prac- tised medicine—on the contrary, she openly avowed that she had but little faith in it. He defied his opponents to point to a single case in which she had made use of medicine. He maintained, more- over, that whilb setting a far greater value on the effect of prayer and faith in the Lord, she did not deny the occasional benefit of medical treatment ; but in all such cases, she had never been guilty of prac- tising herself; but had always called in a physician."

Of this trial the little work to which we have referred says :-

"' During the course of the trial, authenticated cures were brought forward, it is said, to the number of some hundreds. There was one of a stiff knee, that had been treated in vain by the best physicians in France, Germany, and Switzerland; one of an elderly man who could not walk, and had also been given up by his physicians, but who soon dispensed with his crutches; a man came with a burned foot, and the surgeons said it was a case of "either amputation or death," and he also was cured ; one of the leading physicians of Wiirtemberg testifi,s to the cure of a hopeless patient of his own; another remained six weeks, and says he saw all kinds of sicknesses healed. Cancer and fever have been treated with success; epilepsy and insanity more fre- quently than any other form of disease."

It is certainly a great pity that the author of Dorothea Triad, or the Prayer of Faith, has not given us certified extracts from the cross-examinations of some of the more important witnesses in • Morgan and Chase, Ludgate Hill..

these remarkable cases. No evidence is so good as the evidence of a controverted witness in a Court of justice, and we take it

that Dr. Tyndall's ironical demand made the other day in the Fortnightly Review of statistical evidence to prove that prayer has any influence whatever on the recovery from sickness, might, in

some degree, be answered, if the evidence of regular physicians who had themselves failed in curing what they thought an incur- able disease, and taken before a court of justice, could be brought to prove that Dorothea Triidel's prayers had succeeded where their own remedies had long been tried in vain. If the following, for instance, were one of the cases established by evidence in the Court of justice, Dr. Tyndall himself would not perhaps have been convinced, but would at least have been willing to admit that he had met with evidence which it was the duty even of a man of science to consider :-

" On one occasion a young artisan arrived, in whom cancer had made such progress as to render any approach to him almost unbearable. At the Bible lessons this once frivolous man, now an earnest inquirer, learned where the improvement must begin ; and from the day that he confessed his sins against God and man, the disease abated. Some time afterwards he acknowledged one sin he had hitherto concealed, and then he speedily recovered his bodily health, and returned to his home cured in spirit also."

A remark of Mr. Justice Willes, that even the " Peculiar People " would not, he supposed, have left a broken leg to set• itself without medical aid, brings out the essence of the diffi- culty which many very religious people would have in accept- ing such asserted cures as these, accomplished without medicine, as in any way due to the prayers which preceded them. It would be said, " Do you regard these cures as strictly miraculous or not ? If truly miraculous,' why do you admit that surgical cases need surgical treatment,—as certainly Pastor Blumhardt and, we believe, also Dorcthea Triidel, seems to have admitted freely ? Even the

Peculiar People of Essex don't seem to assert that prayer would cure a broken joint without human intervention to set it properly.. Yet pure miracle could as easily rectify a mechanical injury as an

organic one, and if the process of your cure be not miraculous, it can scarcely be due to the special intervention of God, but must be owing either to mesmeric influence, or to the influence named by Mr. Gilbert as at least a restorative,—the influence of the mental• repose and quietude gained by faith and prayer." But we do not•

think that,—supposing the alleged cures of cases given up by the regular practitioners fairly proved,—there would be any occasion or any reason to substitute either mesmeric influence or the rather scanty and purely human influence of quietness of heart for the belief which not only the " Peculiar People," but most people who believe in God, seem to entertain, that prayer has a real place in the Divine system, and is intended, within certain limits, to

exert a definite effect of its own on the course of His Providence.

The Peculiar People are " peculiar" only, as far as we see, in their distrust of medicine, not in their trust in prayer. There is obviously no kind of sense in neglecting the appropriate physical means of recovery from disease, any more than in neglecting the appropriate physical means of keeping health. The " Peculiar- People " would be the first to cry out on any one who should abstain from food in the faith that God would feed him directly. Yet there

is absolutely no difference between neglecting food which tends to.

prevent your being ill, and neglecting medicine which tends to counteract the illness when it comes. The " Peculiar People " would probably call it " tempting God" to pray for food without taking the means to obtain it, when they had the ordinary means at their command. If so, it is equally tempting God to refuse quinine (say) in ague, which quinine will almost always cure. The more sensible among the " Peculiar People" do not wholly deny the value of medicine. ' Pastor Blumhardt, for instance,. admitted to Mr. Gilbert that he had a limited, though very limited, faith in it. We have seen that Dorothea Triidel had the same limited faith in it. Small faith may be reasonable, for few medicines are in any sense specifics, and the highest medical art• now usually dispenses with medicine, instead of dispensing it_ But so far as medical skill can really go, there is as little piety in ignoring it as in ignoring the warmth, clothing, and food which are the ordinary conditions of well-being. Still, the argument derived from the surgical exigencies of a broken leg does not seem in the least conclusive against the influence of prayer on many cases of ordinary disease. Dr. Tyndall would probably say that the only reason men do not hope that prayer will set a broken leg, and do. hope that prayer may influence the issues of life and death at the

crisis (say) of a fever or of a disordered brain, is that we know thoroughly the very simple mechanical antecedent which is a condition sine qua non of recovery in the one case, and are exceed-

ingly ignorant as to the physical conditions of recovery in. the

other case. In other words, be would say that we find room for faith only where we have no knowledge, and find none where our knowledge is complete. But that is not accurate. The only difference between the two cases is, that where we know that the necessary condition of recovery involves direct human agency the prayer of faith should be directed to procuring that agency, if it were not procurable without prayer. These " Peculiar People" in Mannedorf or Lake Zurich never hesitated to pray for food in times when they had exhausted the means of procur- ing it by their own exertions, and they maintained that these prayers, like their others, were frequently and under very remark- able circumstances granted. In like manner, if a surgeon had not been within reach by ordinary means, they would have prayed God to send one, and would have expected that in most cases He would have answered that prayer like any other. Nor do we see anything superstitious in this,—always supposing, of course, that every prayer is made under full reserve of God's better and higher will. Perhaps the only case in which we can clearly conceive how the Divine Spirit answers prayer is where the answer comes through its influence over the free-will of other men, which we know to be removed out of the iron chain of necessary causation, and open to the breathing of the Spirit which " bloweth where it listeth." It is easier to conceive how God would regulate the motions of a surgeon so as to send him to a spot where he is wanted, than how He can influence more directly the issues of physical life and death, in accordance with prayer, without breaking the great invariable sequence of His own order. There is no want of faith in saying that God will never set a broken limb without the intervention of some secondary agent, because we know, or believe we know, enough of His laws to have mastered the certainty that this is part of His law. If the alternative lies between death and the setting of a broken limb or the extraction of a deeply implanted bullet without human agency, we should be justified in believing that God has decreed the death of the patient, for we know that the other alternative will not happen without an infringement of His laws. But we cannot know this except in the case of very simple and invariable conditions. God has retained at least as many avenues by which He can answer freely the voluntary prayers of men, as there are free human wills under His influence. It is exceedingly probable that many of the conditions of physical health and disease may depend simply and directly on the relations between the minds of the creatures and the spirit of the Creator. The relation between the will or mind and the nervous condition of the brain,—one of the most powerful of all the physical agencies affecting health and disease,—is obvious ; and even if there be no other points of ingress left into the (possibly otherwise) invariable order of the physical world than the free wills of spiritual beings, we can scarcely assign any limits to the scope which this alone would leave for the answer to prayer, even as regards the physical condition of man. The superstition of the " Peculiar People " seems to us entirely confined to an absurd distrust, in the case of illness, of physical agencies, which they never dream of distrusting in the case of health. They have some notion that illness and death are more than anything else in human life specially under the care of Pro- vidence, and that the adoption of human remedies is a sign of distrust rather than of trust. It is like the old superstition that God is specially present in the tempest or the lightning, rather than in ordinary sun and rain. If Dorothea Triidel had prayed for God's blessings on all the best efforts of medical skill, instead of for His blessing without them, we can well imagine that she would have had far more success than even that which she had. But we do not see the least a priori reason to doubt that her prayers, and those of her patients, had a real and frequent efficiency. At least, that God does answer prayers for spiritual help, we almost all of us believe. And we see little or no visible limit to the possible influence of spiritual over natural causes,— though when once any absolute divine law of invariable cause and effect is established, we have no right to pray for its infraction, which is really praying for a reversal of God's will.