characterize this faith, than he means to say that the gift of Tongues was always that 'of men and of angels'. Faith is the receptive organ of the human spirit; it is to the spirit what eyes and ears, and other organs of sense, are to the body; it sees, hears, tastes, and touches the invisible things. All religious people have this in some degree—no one can be entirely without it; but the charism of faith is to possess the receptive power in a special degree.
We next come to the Normal Psychic Gifts.
Gifts of Healing were extremely common, not only in S. Paul's time, but, as is illustrated in Justin Martyr's list, in the next century also, and indeed throughout Christian history, down to our own day, as I have shown elsewhere. It is the power of curing diseases of the body through the spiritual agency of the mind. Common as it is, we may class it among the psychic gifts, using the word 'psychic' in its modern signification, 'pertaining to the class of extraordinary and obscure phenomena not ordinarily treated of by psychologists.'
The next, Powers, 'works of powers,'[1] has been obscured by the persistent determination of translators, and of commentators and theologians also, to use the question-begging word 'miracles' instead of the simple terms used in the New Testament—'powers', or 'signs', or 'works', or 'mighty works', or 'wonders'. Even the Revised Version
- ↑ ἐνεργήματα δυνάμεων.
