Article March 12, 1910 Issue

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE THE SCRIPTURAL HEALING

MYRA EMMONS.

In the seventeenth chapter of the first book of Kings is related the healing, by the prophet Elijah, of the son of the widow of Zarephath. Studying this story in the light of Christian Science, its spiritual signification is found to be much greater than the mere words at first seem to indicate, for the spiritual understanding of the text confirms fully the fact that the healing which is today being wrought through Christian Science is identical with that which was performed by Jesus and occasionally by the prophets, when they, as Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health (p. 333), "caught glorious glimpses of the Messiah, or Christ, which baptized these seers in the divine nature, the essence of Love."

The account says that Elijah said to the widow, "Give me thy son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft, where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed." The words, "And he took him out of her bosom," clearly indicate that Elijah perceived, through spiritual consciousness, the separation between the spiritual concept of man, in the image and likeness of God, perfect and immortal, and the false belief of a mortal origin; and that he in thought separated the child's spiritual identity from the material sense of the mother. He recognized the divine fatherhood and motherhood of God, instead of a material sense of parentage. Mrs. Eddy says, "Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine" (Ibid., p. 14), and this separation Elijah made in understanding.

Elijah then took the child up; that is, realized the exalted identity of the spiritual idea; and the loft where Elijah abode, to which he carried the child, was synonymous with that upper chamber where Jesus took his disciples when he broke for them the bread of life. We next read that "The Lord heard the voice of Elijah," and that the child was awakened from the dream of death. When Elijah delivered the child to his mother, as the Bible expresses the action, the healing was made manifest in the flesh. The fact of the indestructibility of Life and of man as the idea of Life, was made fully apparent, even to the so-called material senses. Job says, "Though ... worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." Well might this mother say to Elijah, "Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth."

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