Editorial January 2, 1909 Issue

THE MEANS OF CURE

John B. Willis

The hopelessness with which so many disease are invested by materia medica, the irresistible appeal of the idealism of Christ Jesus, and the unnumbered and unquestionable healings witnessed to in Christian Science,—all these are to-day impelling the suffering to seek for something better than pills and potions, and in response to their half-articulate longing, human sense has hastened to proffer so many mental panaceas that a great body of well-meaning people are utterly confused. This is no less true of clergymen than of others, and it all witnesses to how far the belief in the reality of matter and of evil has divorced Christian thought from a clear sense of the nature of Christ Jesus' healing work.

Belief in the reality of matter logically leads to the acceptance of material law as of God, and some of those who are dominated by it are trying to heal the sick not through the apprehension of spiritual truth, but through the command of those so-called psychic forces which have been so far affiliated with evil-doing as to have long since been pronounced an abomination by the moral sense of mankind. The enchantments of the Witch of Endor and the sorceries of Bar-Jesus certainly find their kin and counterparts in the mesmerism and hypnotism which have proved so serviceable to evil in our day, and it is coming to be seen by an ever-increasing number that these subtleties of mortal mentality merit classification as "enemies of all righteousness" no less than did those of former times. Nevertheless it is to these that many Christian people are honestly looking as channels for the divine manifestation in the healing of sickness and sin!

To Christian Scientists the incongruity of this fact is equaled only by its pathos, and while they respect the freedom of all men to work out their salvation according to their own sense of right, they rejoice that they have been taught to look to God alone for succor from sickness and sin. They hold unequivocally to the proposition that the law which Jesus utilized in his gracious works is divine; that it is communicable to man, and that such an apprehension of it was reached by the disciples that they were able to heal the sick as Christ Jesus healed them, i.e., by using the same Principle and the same rule in its application. Accepting our Lord's unequivocal statement that his works were done by "the Father," Christian Scientists understand that it was the activity of Spirit which wrought the good, and hence that the effective force was wholly spiritual. That this force could ever lend itself to iniquity is to them simply unthinkable. It is as impossible as that light should serve darkness, and since modern mesmeric methods are notoriously subservient to the ends of the evil-minded, Christian Scientists conclude that they were not used by the great Wayshower, and could not have been commended by him. There is no escaping the conviction that an asserted force which subserves evil purposes is not spiritual, and hence not of God, though its use may be associated with ever so much wholesome, common-sense teaching. As Mrs. Eddy has written, if it seems "to alleviate or to cure disease, this appearance is deceptive, since error cannot remove the effects of error." "On the other hand, Mind-science ... is of God and demonstrates the divine Principle, working out the purposes of good only" (Science and Health, pp. 101, 103).

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