Religion: The Healer

Six thousand people jammed London’s Albert Hall, and most of them looked miserable. There were children on crutches and men and women with twisted limbs. Decrepit oldsters were there, and so were hysterics, neurotics and last-ditch incurables willing to try anything.

To an organ accompaniment they sang the hymn Oh Worship the King. Then Harry Edwards went to work on them. Cheer seemed to radiate like a nimbus from his well-pomaded white head. One by one, members of the unhappy audience limped, stumbled or were carried up to him on the stage; for each he had soothing words and deft touches of his famed hands. For Spirit Healer Harry Edwards, who gets three times as much mail a day as Prime Minister Churchill does in a normal week, is England’s fastest-growing health fad. He is also a symptom of the condition of religion in England: churches are empty while weird spiritual fads are growing fast.

Buses to the Sanctuary. A printer by trade, Edwards ran for Parliament in 1935 as a Liberal, was defeated, then took up spiritualism. He still recalls the time he stepped off a bus in front of an onrushing truck, only to be swept on the sidewalk safe and sound by what he knows were forces from the other world.

Seven years ago, he bought a mansion about 30 miles southwest of London, called Burrows Lea, which is known to his followers as “The Sanctuary.” Here he grants audience to the ailing on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays: They drive up from all over, in Austins. Rolls-Royces, and by the special bus that he sends to the railroad station to meet the train from London. They wait for their appointments amid sweet-smelling flowers and chirping parakeets, then are welcomed by the eager healer himself in a large, paneled room with a white crucifix on a table.

Edwards and his two assistants, an ex-butcher named George Burton and his wife Olive, are dressed in medical-looking white. Silently they wait, heads bowed, for two minutes’ meditation; then the patient is placed in a straight-backed chair facing Harry Edwards.

Attunement by Mail. The first patient one afternoon recently said: “I seem to have lost power in my arms and legs.” Edwards’ large, supple hands began to massage and manipulate the limbs gently and surely. “You feel better now, don’t you?” he asked. “Yes.”‘ she answered faintly. “Yes—much better.”

Olive Burton then placed her hands on the woman’s forehead, George Burton stood behind, firmly gripping her shoulders, Edwards took her hands. All three closed their eyes. This was the crucial moment—what Edwards calls “attunement.” “We get in tune with the spirit people. They receive information that we can give them, and they direct the healing.” When it was over. Healer Edwards advised the woman’s husband: “No reason why she shouldn’t get better. Keep in touch with me. Look after her.” No fee is asked, but at the door is a plate for contributions.

In this way, Edwards can handle some two dozen people in one afternoon, but he is even more efficient by mail. Each morning an average 2,500 letters arrive, to be opened and acknowledged by a staff of 40 healthful helpers. By the mysterious process of attunement, healing begins at the moment when Edwards or one of his assistants reads the letter. “In absent healing, we touch most of those people when they are asleep,” Edwards explains. “We help children who are too young to have faith.”

Edwards’ following is growing fast, and imitators are setting up shop all over Britain. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York found it necessary to appoint a 23-member committee “to consider the theological, medical, psychological and pastoral aspects of Divine healing.” Seventeen members of the committee watched Edwards’ demonstration in Albert Hall.

Edwards himself says cockily that he hopes church leaders will be “enlightened enough to reintroduce healing into the church as it was in the early centuries.”