Article January 27, 1906 Issue

The physical healing in Christian Science is the result of...

David B. Ogden

Oregon State Journal

The physical healing in Christian Science is the result of some degree of spiritual regeneration in the individual, or an awakening to that natural, God-given consciousness which has been obscured by erroneous suggestion and false belief. No one can be healed in Christian Science without receiving some spiritual betterment, and this transforming process is not the result of human will power nor personal control, but is due rather to the understanding, in a degree, of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, the one divine Mind, and the consequent powerlessness and unlawfulness of all forms of evil. In the application of Christian Science there is positively no mental attempt to personally influence the individual through suggestive argument or domination of will.

The same relationship exists between an appealing sufferer and the Christian Science practitioner as is common between the tangled and disturbed accountant, who has struggled long and unavailingly with his trial balance, and the expert adjuster of accounts. The former is confused and distressed because of his ignorance, while the latter, with calmness and precision, is enabled to remove the difficulty and distress by reason of his better understanding and practical application of the unchanging mathematical law governing the situation. It is not mental control nor suggestive argument which can deliver the entangled accountant, but rather a knowing of the truth about mathematical facts; and in like manner, in Christian Science practice, the conscious knowing of the infinite truth about God and man, whether silently or audibly affirmed, will in the measure that it is realized displace and destroy discordant physical and mental distress.

Suggestive therapeutics and hypnotic control may affect the mortal mind and body as does morphine, and the last state of the dependant thereon be sadly worse than the first; while, contrariwise, through Christian Science a sufferer who is relieved physically has also gained a freedom from material hypnotic influence in some form of disease of sin. Christian Science lifts men away from the desire to control, or to be controlled, by the so-called human will, and gives them a confident assurance and present satisfaction in that earnest prayer of the Master: "Not my will, but thine, be done."

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