The Emmanuel Movement and Hypnotism.
The Emmanuel Movement depends almost exclusively upon hypnotism for its power. Now, it has been demonstrated over and over again in the past hundred years or more that hypnotism has a very unwholesome influence upon the patient. In time he comes to feel that a spell has been cast over him. He believes that another mind and will have control of him. His own mind is weakened. More than one such victim has had his mind thereby dethroned and been taken to the madhouse. An exchange very significantly asks, “Does hypnotism in a church differ radically from hypnotism in a hospital? . . . Is a hypnotic séance begun with a hymn and a prayer and closed with the doxology less objectionable than a hypnotic séance of the common sort? . . . Is hypnotism less reprehensible and unwholesome because its horns and hoofs are concealed by an ecclesiastical halo? Finally, is the cause of religion to be in any way benefited through the substitution by its ministers of the deceptions and falsehoods of hypnotism and psychologic juggling for the simple faith of the Gospel? And has the hypnotist or the psychologist any better means of ‘suggestion’ than the divine, old-fashioned method which through all the centuries has worked and is still working wonders, when it is not relegated to the rear as out of date and unscientific—simple prayer? . . . It now looks as tho the Emmanuel Church Movement is a religio-scientific substitute for both scientific medicine and the good old-fashioned Bible religion, a new-thought religio-medico-sociological movement, a more or less orthodox rival of Christian Science, and with a foundation not much better.”