Article March 12, 1910 Issue

WHAT CONSTITUTES HEALING

CLARENCE W. CHADWICK.

Healing and reformation go hand in hand in Christian Science. Where one is found, the other is sure to be. They can never be separated without losing sight of God as divine Principle. What is called health without morality is simply a blind belief without understanding. The healing of physical conditions necessarily involves the correction of the moral fault that is often responsible for the physical disorder.

Jesus' teachings clearly reveal the mental cause of so-called physical conditions, and the mental remedy for such conditions; but until Christian Science was given to the world, even the professed believers in Jesus' doctrine were trying in every way possible to reverse the law of cause and effect and to make mind subordinate to matter. As a result of over forty years of application of the Principle of Christian Science, the world is rapidly awakening to the simple but profound truth that thought is first in everything, and that mental causation is therefore the one important question for consideration. Much valuable time has been spent in the vain endeavor to build up a philosophy of life upon the changing foundation of material effects. Materia medica has witnessed the ravaging effects of wrong thinking upon the human body, and instead of working upon the mental and moral plane to correct the difficulty, has unwittingly admitted the superiority of matter over mind. With the moral sense uncorrected, human belief has thus been left to subsist upon its own subjective conditions of thought without the health-giving inspiration of enlightened understanding. The clay has been given power over the potter, and matter and health regarded as inseparable. In short, the thought of matter has been first and the thought of Spirit regarded as of secondary importance. This has left the true understanding of health to be revealed to the world through Christian Science.

In Christian Science the order of thinking is reversed and cause and effect are vested in Spirit or Mind. Health is found in Mind and not in matter. Intelligence assumes its natural place as causation and power, while non-intelligent matter is proven to be but a subjective state of human consciousness. The barriers of sense are thus torn down and thought is set free to grasp the hitherto unknown realities of Spirit. Christian healing becomes a tangible and practical reality, an every-day essential in the life of the progressive Christian worker. It means to him the overcoming of all that is unlike good. It is vastly more than the experience of temporary surcease from aches and pains,—it is the correction and subjugation of that which caused the so-called physical suffering. It is primarily the forsaking and overcoming of sin. It is the conquest over every degrading and obnoxious habit or practice, a radical forsaking of all that pertains to the so-called animal nature of mortals. The Christian Scientist knows that Truth and its idea cannot be separated in the right metaphysical practice.

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