Editorial May 29, 1902 Issue

Historical Evidences of Healing

Editor

In The Christian Science Journal for February, 1894, we published extracts from standard historical works relative to healing disease through prayer by the early Christians. We have also published in the Journal, as well as the Sentinel, extracts from the writings of the early Christian Fathers, Clement, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius. These extracts show that the sick were healed and the dead raised by the early Christians, and corroborate the statement of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that the healing taught by Jesus and his disciples continued until the third century of the Christian era. The writings of these early Fathers are as well authenticated, historically speaking, as are other standard historical works, and indeed, in the theological world their authenticity is unquestioned.

These writings constitute a library of themselves and, as published by the Christian Literature Company of New York, constitute eight volumes. The title-page of each volume is as follows: "The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Translations of The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. The Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D., Editors. American reprint of the Edinburgh Edition. Revised and chronologically arranged, with brief prefaces and occasional notes, by A. Cleveland Coxe, D.D" These writings are accepted as an essential part of the history of early Christianity by such well-known historians as Gibbon, the author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and Rawlinson, author of "The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scriptures," as well as other historians. From Gibbon we quote the following:—

"The supernatural gifts, which even in this life were ascribed to the Christians above the rest of mankind, must have conduced to their own comfort, and very frequently to the conviction of infidels. . . . The divine inspiration ... is described as a favor very liberally bestowed on all ranks of the faithful, on women as on elders, on boys as well as upon bishops. . . . The expulsion of the daemons from the bodies of those unhappy persons whom they were permitted to torment, was considered as a signal though ordinary triumph of religion, and is repeatedly alleged by the ancient apologists, as the most convincing evidence of the truth of Christianity. . . . But the miraculous cure of diseases of the most inverterate or even preternatural kind, can no longer occasion any surprise, when we recollect, that in the days of Irenaeus, about the end of the second century, the resurrection of the dead was very far from being esteemed an uncommon event; that the miracle was frequently performed on necessary occasions, by great fasting and the joint supplication of the church of the place, and that the persons thus restored had lived afterwards among them many years. At such a period, when faith could boast of so many wonderful victories over death, it seems difficult to account for the scepticism of those philosophers, who still rejected and derided the doctrine of the resurrection" (pp. 401, 402, Vol. I.).

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