Dr.
BENJAMIN RUSH
1745
? - 1813
SIGNER OF
The
Declaration of Independence
A
Medical Doctor & Professor of Chemistry Etc.,
A
LECTURE ON
SPIRITUAL
HEALING [ Etc.,]
THROUGH
THE TRANCE MEDIUMSHIP OF
CORA
L.V. RICHMOND
AT
PARKER MEMORIAL HALL, BOSTON
SUNDAY
AFTERNOON FEBRUARY 15th, 1880
BELOW
AS REPORTED & PUBLISHED IN THE BANNER OF LIGHT
FRONT
PAGE -- MAIN FEATURE -- FEBRUARY 28, 1880
INVOCATION
Infinite Creator and Preserver,
thou who art the balm for every iII, the healer of all who are sick, we
turn to thee as the source of final ministration, through whose laws and
beneficent mercies all forms of life have being and preservation, from
whom life and death alike emanate. The changeful forms of outward
being, even that which men call infirmity, is but another change toward
that ultimate of life that is wholly thine. Thou art perfection;
all things else must be imperfect. Thou art infinite: all things
else must be finite; and as the finite cannot compass the infinite, so
man's imperfection cannot measure thy perfection. But whatever there be
in life emanates from thee, and the potencies of outward being flow toward
thee and from thee. Man praises thee for that knowledge attained through
suffering, for victory born of experience, for that enlightenment which
is the result of the varied pathways that he must tread converging toward
ultimate truth; for the spirit that finally controls, matter; for the thought
that usurps the place of physical force; for the volition that at last
crowns all human life with supreme power over the elements beneath man.
Oh, may thy children turn to thee
as to the source of knowledge, remembering that however perfect the book
of nature, there is one more perfect, the book of intuition, traced within
the soul; that enlightenment born of its living, clear fountains; that
power crystallized within the spirit, emanating from thee. As reason
is but the handmaid of the spirit so may we turn from reason to inspiration
for guidance; from the outward to the inward life; from the external to
the spirit; from the thought which is visible and manifest to that which
is real and invisible; for as every force of life is in reality imperceptible,
and only the workings of the force made manifest, so the perfect powers
of the spirit must forever be invisible, yet performing forever in light
and in life their wondrous workings. Oh God! be, thou the eternal presence,
and as Christ revealed through powers of the spirit the wonders of the
gifts that may belong to each, so let thy children covet earnestly the
best gifts, seeking for those for which they are best adapted, and seeking
for light and guidance to perform all the needed duties of life.
We turn to thee as the fountain in
the wilderness, as the oasis in the vast desert of material life; as the
light in the midst of space, set apart and burning forever for the guidance
of thy children. So turn we to thee, praising thee for every avenue of
human knowledge, but chiefly for that primal source, born of intuition
and worship, the crowning glory of the human spirit.
Amen.
THE LECTURE.
To another is the gift of healing,
by the same spirit. As Christians, one would think. that there were
little need for a word to be spoken on behalf of a method that forms one
of the predicates of the Christian world; but as Christians legislate adversely
to their religion, and disapprove in their actions that which they approve
in their theology, it behooves these not claiming special sanctity, those
who have no interest in the usual tenets of the Church, but on behalf of
a deeper philosophy and a higher human helpfulness, to claim for spiritual
healing what the Christian denies for it. Today, the healers of the sick
in the sense that Christ healed, are found among those usually ignored
by schools of Materia Medica. When medicine became a science, it
ceased largely to be a religion, and with that cessation of its essential
spiritual quality, it ceased to be healing.
The school of Esculapius might have
been founded in innate discovery of primal antidotes to disease; but the
school of modern medicine is so complicated a system of contradictions,
that one requires the utmost faith to accept of any system of practice.
Surgery, indeed, is a school by itself; yet we are very much mistaken if
even surgery has not its spiritual antithesis which will ultimately supplant
it, as the higher healing will supplant the lower methods of human discovery.
Two forces or methods are required
in the treatment of disease: first, an antidote to actual poison, either
introduced into the system by contagious disease, or generated by some
lack of healthfulness in the system; second, an adjustment of the system
where there is no poison, organic or otherwise. The antidotes to poisons
are specifics easily discoverable by those who follow the natural instead
of professional methods of healing, and are quite as frequently found among
the unskilled and untutored Indian of North America as among the highest
graduates of medical schools, and quite as frequently known to those who
practice healing among the magi and sorcerers of the East, as among those
who have made the study of medicine their life long pursuit, while the
adjudication of the human system, when there is no actual poison, or epidemic,
or malarious disease present, is more frequently performed by the actual
presence of the physician than by any remedy that he administers or causes
to be administered. From one hundred years of experience in both worlds,
I may safely state that the human system is healed by the mind in ninety
nine out of every hundred cases; that the power or influence of the physician,
nurse or attendant over the mind of the patient, is the restoring power;
that the remedial agent employed affects the disease in exact proportion
as the mind of the patient or the attendant is in accord with it; and that
where there is actual dynamical result it is produced more frequently and
freely by the mental conformity of the patient and the mental administration
of those who attend. Direct and distinct poisons will produce direct
and distinct results, as will antidotes, as will physical accidents, so
called, or any other violent shock up on the usual recurrent vibrations
of the system; but if there is an equally violent remedy at hand, whether
it be in the mind or in the physical body, it is usually efficacious; and
the promise that those who have faith shall take poison and not be injured,
that they shall touch fire and not be burned, is no more a physical impossibility
than that the human mind has been known, in the presence of fear, to cause
the body, bed-ridden for years, to leap from the bed and fly to the streets
for safety; to cause a person wounded upon the battle field to be unconscious
of his wound, and carry forward the fight for many hours; to cause a person
afflicted with a deadly malady to throw off that affliction and entirely
recover from it under the stimulus of sudden joy, or to cause a person
to die of fear of a malady which he never had, and with which he had never
come in contact.
Human diseases, when organic, are
seldom suddenly fatal; but the mind nurses them on to fatality through
a period of twenty five or fifty years, which, at longest, constitutes
a very fair average of human life. Those who inherit diseases rarely die
of them suddenly, but by premonitory symptoms, carefully instilled in the
mind at an early age by an ever watchful mother or attendant, the disease
is confirmed in the mind of the young. It is carried forward to later years,
and still is confirmed in the mind, and every symptom of cough or other
attendant circumstance is set down to the hereditary taint, until finally
it is developed into actual disease, and in good old age the prophecy is
fulfilled that they will follow in the wake of their ancestors. Sometimes
a disease of this kind crops out suddenly, unexpectedly, in the flower
of life, carrying off persons who are not supposed to be predisposed to
the disease, proving the contrariety of human expectations, that baffles
even medical skill and watchfulness, and showing that disease, for the
most part, is not inherited; that the thought of it is inherited, and that
the presumption of disease is more frequently in the mind than in the actual
physical organism.
The diathesis of every human being
is more or less affected by either the scrofulitic, pulmonary, or other
affections incident upon a life that is over civilized. The diseases of
the red man are mostly the result of accident, or epidemic in their character;
there are no constitutional diseases among them; [1880] there are no inherited
diseases, because nature with her laboratory of remedies; her pharmacy
is always at hand, and the intuition of the red man knows how to apply
it.
For epidemics that are the result
of privation, injustice, or something of that kind, nature has not provided
any immediate remedy; therefore, the Indians suffer most in such cases;
but for the ordinary diseases afflicting civilized nations, the aborigines
have no conception, and have therefore no remedies at hand.
In our advancement and civilization, we have undertaken
to improve upon nature, to supplement the action of nature by artificial
methods, that, carried to the extreme today, produce a system of practice
that, if finally and fully insisted upon, would make of all human beings
drunkards or debauchers, would make of all human beings imbeciles or lunatics,
for the reason that the application of anesthetics to a race so highly
sensitive and over strung as the modern race of civilized beings, is indeed
an excess of medication that produces today the most startling results.
With all the advancement toward the higher improvement of humanity in other
directions, it is a most startling fact, that medicine and theology have
advanced the least. Those who treat the bodies, and those who treat the
souls, remain adverse not only to the first principles of healing, but
adverse to any encroachments upon their domain. Every advancement
in the practice of medicine has been fought for; every liberal view concerning
the domain of nature and its application to human requirements has met
with the same opposition, and today you are confronted again with the same
kind of demagogism from those who, believing themselves In the possession
of all truth, and all ultimate science, should be put to the test by never
losing a patient, and never having a remedy fail. When Materia Medica
can do this, then they may claim exemptions from listening to the claims
of any other kind of practice. When the schools of modern science
can determine exactly the qualities and properties of any given remedy
and its application to the human system with unfailing accuracy, and prove
that in every instance there is capability of adjusting it to the needs
of the human body, then, and only then, may they cry, "There shall
be no change!"
Today you are on the verge of changes, and
these changes require careful, earnest, and adequate consideration. That
irresponsible persons shall be entrusted with the important office of perhaps
deciding the life of a human being, seems, at first, a most startling proposition.
But who are irresponsible persons? The qualification to perform
a certain thing must not only be bestowed by human, but by divine law.
The mother inherits and possesses the right to care for her child; it is
only in case of extremist neglect and abuse that that right is taken from
her. Healers should be God made as well as man made. The gift of healing
is like the gift of poetry, or teaching, or art. We may have schools and
methods, but healing itself is a domination, is a possession of the
mind, is something bestowed by nature, and reaches the various ramifications
of the human body. The spirit is there and asserts its preeminence. If
man were but an epitome of chemical compounds, schools of science might
be established to determine to an accurate certainty what would sustain
life, and best remove disease; but as man is not only an epitome of chemical
compounds, but an ultimate expression of something beyond chemistry, beyond
anatomy, beyond physiology, beyond any constitution of structure that anthropology
has determined, then we must decide upon the capacity of healing according
to man's condition as a spiritual being. I know that the mind of the patient
determines the success of the physician; I know that in most diseases that
afflict humanity there is a lack of nervous and spiritual adjustment; I
know that in most epidemics, nine hundred and ninety nine persons out [of]
a thousand die of fright, instead of disease; I know that whomsoever would
have the power to inspire confidence in an epidemic district would instantly
check the spread of the disease, which would only extend to those infected
or possessing the negative condition of system that would predispose to
infection; I know that the power of the mind over the human body is at
times most absolute, and that the power of another mind can so establish
a positiveness as to overcome the effects of poison, the effects of fear,
the effects of cold, the effects of any element supposed to be destructive
of life, and that death itself is arrested and set at naught frequently
by the volition that comes in contact with it, readjusting the particles
to the exact polarity of life.
Knowing this, then, today, I speak
on behalf of the sublime, the divine gift of healing. While man was in
the physical state, merely violent remedies, physical applications were
necessary. The age of iron required the heroic treatment of allopathy.
There was a time when the human body would only yield, perhaps, to the
most violent and grosser remedies of nature; but even then we find magic
in the Healer of Nazareth; even then we find spells in the oracles, and
potencies in healing springs and sanctified places, proving that notwithstanding
the age of iron, the age of gold can permeate and flow through this. Today
[1880]
you are bordering upon the silver age; the golden age has not yet appeared.
The laws of Materia Medica are changing, and more subtle and occult
methods of practice are approved. Homeopathy is the spirit of allopathy;is
the risen spirit, maybe, but potent, because lacking in the grosser methods
of more material compounds. The vast herbarium of Nature produces in various
forms of distillation the exact requisites for the physical body. If there
were no nerves, accompanied by brain or mental power, we could find you
these remedies for every ill; they would always be at hand; you would always
know what to do; but the antidote for one is the poison for another. The
reason is the difference in the structure of the nerves and spiritual fabric,
and this difference must be ascertained, carefully measured, and so adjudicated
by the true physician that the proper remedy shall be discovered.
Even if the symptoms are the same, the disease is entirely different. The
simulations of certain diseases in the human system that deceive the physician,
growing out of certain nervous states, are often most baffling; but these
have their sources in spiritual and mental states, that only the true discerner,
the true physician, can ascertain. I have been called to the bedside
of an exceedingly nervous, sensitive and suffering patient, and if I
had had no other discernment or experience than that which usually accompanies
a student of medicine,I would have commenced giving the usual application
for nervous typhoid fever. I discovered there was no such disease; the
symptoms were there, but the the causes were quite different. There
was trouble; the mind was affected; the disease was secondary; the symptoms
were simulated and the real healing had to be mental.
Change of air is efficacious; change
of scene sometimes works wonders; but the proper word spoken at the right
time and in the right place is frequently more potential, and the very
presence of a calm mind, one that has confidence in the ultimate healing
power of the universe, is in itself a potion of strength, a real remedial
agent. As the earth and the air contain all that is essential for
man's sustenance, perpetuation and health, the earth and air and the spirit
contain all that is essential for his spiritual and physical well being.
To adjudicate this properly, we must mention the spirit first as the healing
potency; sunlight and air as the next; remedial agents as the last and
lowest in the scale of healing.
First, spirit, because without mind
and actual contact or rapport there is no real healing or restoration.
The magical healer, he who had the gift of the spirit in the Christian
dispensation, excepting in rare cases, depended wholly upon the volition
or will power, namely the spirit flowing from him to the person afflicted.
In some instances the earth or clay was made use of as a means of conveying
the magnetic force; in others, water or a garment was used as the instrumentality
in establishing the proper rapport between the healer and the patient.
Faith, he said, was essential to you. I consider faith essential in all
things; it means receptivity and a condition that enables the person to
receive the bestowment that is given; the faith of the king that his child
would be saved; the faith of the woman to whom it was forbidden that Christ
should heal her, yet she was restored by her earnest desire; the faith
of the widow; the faith of all who received the ministration and were pronounced
whole was the atmosphere upon which the spiritual healing could be conveyed.
If you have not faith in your physician or your healer, do not employ him;
that is the one essential requisite. There must be also the gift; but many
persons possess the gift of healing who are not called physicians, and
as there has been established upon earth, in no school of theology and
in no school of Materia Medica, a system of spiritual healing, the
spiritual world has established it outside of schools of theology and medicine,
and the earth has been benefited by the same, though unsanctioned by priest,
prelate or doctor. The practitioners in the world today covet earnestly
the entire practice of the human family, but magnetic healing at the present
hour usurps a large proportion of this practice. It does so advisedly;
it does so conscientiously; it does so with the consent of intelligent
human beings; and so long as those are intelligent and aware of what they
are doing who employ physicians of this kind, it seems to me unreasonable
that any other human beings, claiming to be equally intelligent, should
deprive them of these means of restoration. You might as well legislate
against mountain air, or sea air, or sea bathing, or any of the other requisites
that various human beings consider essential to their own recovery, or
legislate against any sort of food, or any sort of amusement, or any sort
of recreation, or any sort of reading. The principle is precisely the same.
That which I find good for me may not be good for you. 'You are not compelled
to employ it, and in this country, where the utmost freedom of the individual
is carefully preserved, it is strange if, having found the secret of recovery,
you shall not be able to exercise it. But the secret lies deeper
than this. It is the old time cry against innovation; it is the old time
Car of Juggernaut, rolling over in another way and sacrificing its victims.
It is the same sort of feeling, altered to the time and place and occasion
of the nineteenth century and a free republic. The feeling is precisely
the same as would have crucified the very founders of medicine themselves,
had it been in contradiction to the established law and custom of the land.
And who have been more persecuted than these persecutors of today?
We stand, therefore, in the midst
of this subject under the calm and deliberate conclusion that those who
attempt to destroy the spirit are fighting against what they know not of.
Magnetic healing is not born of clay; it is not an epitomization of dust;
it is not the result of the chemical crucible; it is not furnished
in the schools of the world; but it has its origin in a higher source,
namely, the spirit of man, embodied and disembodied, working its way, as
of old in the form of miracles, wonders and of the spirit, so called, but
in the form of a power that at this moment has more adherents than any
other one system of practice, and at the end of the day
is more capable of relieving and removing the ills of the world than any
other system.
I say to those who have the gift
of healing, whether commissioned by any school
of man or
not, you cannot fail to exercise
it. I say to those who have the power of the spirit to remove disease it
cannot be stilled; prison walls would not hold it; it cannot be suppressed
by any fine or formula of court; juries cannot banish it; it cannot be
subjected by any judgments of human courts of justice. Remember,
it is a divine gift; it is a human gift. It flows to you from the innermost
fountains of the Spirit; it is the natural method, if human beings are
suffering, and instead of suppressing this gift by any law or legislation,
in twenty five years it will supplant the present forms of treatment entirely;
in fifty years there will scarcely be any other method of healing in the
world. In a hundred years there will be no schools of Materia Medica,
for the occupation will be gone, and you will be instructed from this source
concerning human anthropology in the higher and larger sense.
To those who do not end with protoplasm,
but begin there, and pass into the spirit in its various stages, as the
source of all life and healing from the crown of the head to the sole of
the foot, man is an epitome of spiritual forces, and to understand this
is to understand the law of being. Fear, terror, abject servitude
to any physical law, binds you to disease. Happiness, joyousness, spiritual
hope, aspiration, these are healing remedies.
We shall have infirmaries, not based,
as now, upon systems of treatment that frequently subject the patient to
more torture than remedy, and leave the system shattered for life; but
infirmaries where every attribute of the mind and spirit flow harmoniously
together; where music, sunshine, flowers, children and ministering angels
perform the work of healing, instead of surgical cages and bottles of medicine
and drugs; where no nurse, with soft tread and careful whisper, administers
by the time and hour the dust that is prescribed; but where the hours go
by unconsciously to the patient, where recovery is as a winged angel brooding
above you; where the physician is not revealed, and sometimes is not even
known; where the attendants are your friends; where the voices flow to
you from those chosen to minister unto you; where accidents can be averted;
where broken limbs can be adjusted without the use of artificial anesthetics;
where mesmeric sleep will take the place of drugs; where magnetic power
will take the place of surgery; where every form of human suffering will
be controlled by the voice and volition of the mind; and where the healing
power of the spirit will be at all times ready to respond to your demand.
To those who are at this day ostracized, persecuted, condemned, I say,
have courage, for the spirit world is stronger than the mortal, as the
soul is greater than the body; the healer is more magical than all the
diseases of the earth.
Christ the teacher and Christ the
healer are born into the world in the name of Truth and of true healing.
Religion for the mind and body will go hand in hand. We shall have medicine
for the soul, and therefore the body will recover.
Below This Article The Banner of Light
Editor Placed The Following:
Apropos of spiritual
healing, I am desired to mention a case which has recently occurred in
Brooklyn, New York, most wonderful in its evidence of the power of spiritual
healing Dr. Laramie, not a physician, but born in New England and reared
to a humble occupation, went to Brooklyn to attend to some business. After
he had been there a time, he was told from the spirit that he must practice
healing. He did this without any charge, also in obedience
to the mandate of the spirit. He was called to attend a child in
a poor family who was blind as the effect of scarlet fever. The eyes seemed
totally destroyed, and the physicians declared that the substance of the
eye itself was escaping; that blindness forever would be inevitable. He
told those in attendance, after practicing upon the child magnetically,
that in two weeks from that hour the child will see. They took little notice,
scarcely comprehending the meaning of the words said. The aged grandmother
noticed the hour of the day, and in precisely two weeks by the clock the
little child's eye sight was restored.
Another case in the same
family, even more remarkable, can be well authenticated. A. daughter twenty
four years of age had never walked, and had never spoken; in other respects
possessing the intelligence of an ordinary mind. She made her mother know
by signs that the angels had told her in her dreams that Dr. Laramie could
restore her. They asked him to attend upon her. Her limbs were reduced
to the size of a wrist; there was no flesh upon them; she had never moved
them; she had no capacity of speech. In one month's time she could walk
across the room; her limbs had increased one inch in size, and she could
speak quite distinctly a lengthy sentence; while under the influence of
spirit power she could speak for twenty minutes. The case is still improving;
the limbs have grown one half, and her spirit guides proclaim that she
will stand in public and address an audience.
These facts can be confirmed or authenticated
by any wishing to know.
