Article May 8, 1909 Issue

THE TRUE IDEA OF HEALTH

ALICE M. SWARTHOUT

Many who seek for healing in Christian Science are looking for this harmony to be manifested according to their present sense of what constitutes health. They little realize that the only way to health and harmony is in rising to that divine consciousness where one knows that harmony is already established through the word of God and not according to the way of mortal man's appointing. The externalization of the true health comes with the advancing steps of spiritual understanding, and cannot be found by watching the body to see whether or not it is manifesting certain organic or functional conditions which mortal mind declares necessary for health.

For many years mortal man's sense of health has been established through the testimony of the material senses. So fixed have our beliefs become in regard to this, that when the body does not manifest that which human sense says is health, we become fearful, and this very fear serves to intensify the inharmonious condition. It has come to be that we are quite as much the slaves of our beliefs about health as we are to our beliefs about disease. Jesus said, "Take no thought for your life," and Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health, p. 261), "Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality." Since we are to look away from the body, let us see how Jesus brought about the healing which he accomplished. We have no account that he made any study of disease or had any knowledge of the remedial agents used in that day, or that he ever made any concessions to the so-called laws of health. Before he began his healing ministry, he went into the wilderness, where he overcame the temptations of the devil (evil) and was enabled to return in the power of the Spirit into Galilee.

In the New Testament records which follow this return into Galilee we find that Jesus everywhere turned thought to Spirit, God. In the power of the Spirit he laid hands on the sick and they were healed, the lips of the dumb were opened, the lame walked, and the dead were raised. Christ Jesus came refuting the testimony of the material senses. He came in the power of spiritual sense, and Mrs. Eddy defines spiritual sense as "a conscious, constant capacity to understand God" (Science and Health, p. 209). On the other hand, she says, "Material sense can report only a mortal temporary sense of things" (Ibid., p. 298). It then follows that should the material senses declare the body to be healthy, this is merely a temporary sense of things, a mortal sense of health which, being based on material sense testimony, is subject to change at any time the individual's beliefs about himself become changed.

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