Article October 21, 1905 Issue

If we believe in the teachings of the Bible, we cannot...

R. Stanhope Easterday

Elkhart (Ind.) Truth

If we believe in the teachings of the Bible, we cannot divorce physical and moral healing, for the entire Bible, and especially the teachings of Jesus, lays great stress upon healing as well as upon reformation. If the sinner can look to God and receive help while the sick man cannot, it would certainly seem that the sinner, however guilty he may be, is better off than the sick man. To refuse to call upon God for healing is to infer that Deity either cannot or will not heed the plea of His creatures. To make the first inference would be blasphemy; to imply the second condition would be to impugn divine justice, if not to eliminate Deity's essential quality, love.

The only healing sanctioned by Christian Scientists is that which results from a transformation of the mind of the patient, lifting him into a realization of his God-given right to harmony and dominion over his own body, according to the admonition of St. Paul, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." Christian Scientists understand that the cause of sickness is ignorance or wilful sin, and therefore that a transformation of morals must result in physical healing. The admonition of Jesus to many whom he healed was, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." This treatment is therefore always safe and potent and as incapable of misuse as is the application of a mathematical law and rule; whereas the employment of the system of mental suggestion is wrong, inasmuch as it is practiced upon the basis of the despotic control of one individual over another, and so is neither safe nor potent. In Christian Science treatment, the patient is lifted to the point where he is able to grasp and appropriate to his own need a higher law of health and holiness, beyond and above himself or his practitioner, even to conscious communion with God, who is the source of all good. Without the operation of such a process of moral and spiritual uplifting there never was and never can be a case of genuine healing.

R. Stanhope Easterday.
Elkhart (Ind.) Truth.

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