The Best Panaceas for Heartaches

摘要

Standing before a crowd of listeners in 1914, the fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday took a few moments to ridicule what he considered to be sciences pretensions of being a new salvation. "People are dissatisfied with Philosophy and Science and New Thought as panaceas for heart-aches!" he cried: It does not amount to anything, when you have a dead child in your house, to come with these new-fangled theories .... Let your scientific consolation enter a room where the mother has lost her child. Try your doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Tell her that her child died because it was not worth as much as the other one! ... And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm and fortuitous concourse of atoms, if she is not crazed by it, I will go to her and after one-half hour of prayer and the reading of the Scripture promises, the tears will be wiped away and the house from cellar to garret will be filled with calmness like a California sunset!