The command to heal the sick as well as to preach the...

Frederick Dixon—Plymouth, Eng.

Western Mercury

The command to heal the sick as well as to preach the gospel was given with the utmost distinctness by Christ Jesus, and is recorded directly in three of the Gospels, while in not one of these Gospels is there the slightest excuse for the attempt to confine the command to any particular time or persons.

Jesus said of the man sick of the palsy: "Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Rise up, and walk?" Obviously a man only escapes the effects of sin and sickness in proportion as he expels from his own consciousness the belief in the power of evil, and so gains the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. "The way," writes Mrs. Eddy, on page 327 of Science and Health, "to escape the misery of sin is to cease sinning. There is no other way." This way will not, however, be made easier; it will, on the contrary, be made positively impossible if we start with the assumption that evil has power and is real. That only is real which is God-made. To dispute this is to impale yourself on one or the other horn of the dilemma that God created evil, or that there is another creator besides God.

All there is to say about evil was summed up by Christ Jesus when he described it as a lie, and the only power a lie can ever seem to possess is the temporary sense of power bestowed on it as long as the deception lasts. The human consciousness is trained and educated into a belief in evil, in sorrow and sickness and sin, and exactly in proportion as the truth dawns upon it that God, that good is infinite, the lie that evil is real or has power begins to fade away, and there comes the freedom from any belief in the power or reality of evil comprised in the declaration of Jesus that "the kingdom of God is within you."

Our critic will find it a good deal easier to assume that Christ is a person than to explain what he means by the personality of Christ. If he means that the Trinity consists of three infinite beings shaped like men, he is assuming something for which he has no authority in the Bible. The Christian Science view of personality is stated with perfect clearness by Mrs. Eddy on page 19 of "No and Yes": "God is infinite. He is neither a limited mind nor a limited body. God is Love; and Love is Principle, not person. What the person of the infinite is, we know not; but we are gratefully and lovingly conscious of the father-liness of this Supreme Being." There is nothing in this which is not in perfect harmony with the Bible.

Finally, may I say that the pouring out of Bible texts into a letter is simply waste of time. Cut out of their contexts, they can be made to seem to confirm as many dogmas as there are people to father them. Christ Jesus declared quite clearly that. Christian would be known by their fruits, and he defined a Christian with equal clearness as one who was able to do the works which he had done. Precisely in proportion as a man proves his ability to do those works does he, judged by this test, prove his Christianity.

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