Article July 30, 1910 Issue

You write that the followers of every religion have...

Frederick Dixon—Newport, Eng.

South Wales Argus

You write that the followers of every religion have assumed their own miracles to be real and superhuman, and those of other religions to have been ingenious tricks. This, as a general rule, may be the case, but it in no way affects the argument of Christian Science, which insists that the power to perform miracles, which you quite fairly define as the occurrence of generally unfamiliar and unexpected phenomena, is dependent entirely on the knowledge of the means by which these phenomena are produced. An understanding of the absolute is surely the most scientific knowledge a man can possess, and it must be demonstrable in proportion to its completeness. The worker by mental suggestion may induce the subject to believe that pain and disease, being mental, can be overcome by some hypnotic process, but this simply results in the fact that if, as Mrs. Eddy writes on page 104 of Science and Health, it is possible to heal "sickness through a belief, and a belief originally caused the sickness, it is a case of the greater error overcoming the lesser. This greater error thereafter occupies the ground, leaving the case worse than before it was grasped by the stronger error." The cause has not been affected in any way, and the result is liable to reassert itself at any moment.

Now divine healing is scientific. It is effected through the operation of the laws governed by divine Principle, and the knowledge of these laws is gained precisely in the ratio in which a knowledge of the absolute is acquired, a knowledge, that is to say, of the truth which Jesus said would make the world free. In this way, the Aaron's rod of divine healing swallows the magician's rod of mental suggestion, for mental suggestion, based on the mistaken belief that there is power in good and power in evil, is absolutely incapable of producing either a permanent effect or an effect which can be described as beneficial. It is, of course, simply the human misconception of power, alluded to in the allegory, in Genesis, as the fruit of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil," the eating of which was bound to result in death. Jesus, centuries later, put the same idea in different words, when he declared, "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." In saying this, he drew a final distinction between any healing which may seem to result from mental suggestion, and the healing which results from an understanding of divine law, which not only destroys sickness and pain, but which brings, in addition to health, "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding."

The miracles of Christian Science, then, are not supernatural, but are simply the divinely natural results of a knowledge of the truth which makes men free. Science and Health is the Christian Scientist's commentary on the Bible, and through the study of that commentary he may learn, not only how to gain this knowledge, but how to demonstrate it, and so to understand and avail himself of the promise, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also."

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