Healing

Except for the fact that it supplies in its commandments a code for clean living that has been paraphrased by many health departments, the Christian Church, founded upon a rock not to be shaken by the windy babbling of false prophets, has had little to do with the shifting frontiers, the deciduous dogmas, of modern medicine. Thinking always of the cures performed by a man of Galilee, it has held apart from the contentions of surgeons and physicians, to interest itself rather in the works of those faith healers who work without stethescopes or education, trying to restore the sick by a touch, telling the crippled to take up their beds and walk.

Nevertheless, faith healing has become so much the mode in Britain that last week the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed the Bishop of Southwark to preside over a council of six celebrated doctors and six clergymen to advise the Church "on all matters related to spiritual healing and healing missions." In this step some people thought they perceived a formal recognition of spiritual healing. Medicos, clerics, were asked for their opinions.

Said the Rev. Dr. Harold Anson, member of the Bishop of Oxford's committee: "The duty of the permanent committee will be to advise the Church upon questions in which it should cooperate with the medical profession in regard to healing, and also upon those questions where morals and physical health are very closely related--for instance, birth control.

"They will also advise regarding the spiritual care of the insane and criminal. It will have the effect in the future, we hope, of helping all those trying to heal the sick through spiritual means to a higher level of thought and practice."

Said the British Medical Association: "Our position is that, while not in the least desiring to hamper the Bishop of Southwark and those who will meet with him, we think the time has not yet arrived when we can speak authoritatively on behalf of the profession generally on the question of spiritual healing.

"There is, we feel, too much difference of opinion among doctors in regard to the subject at present for us to do so."