Article March 11, 1911 Issue

Christian Science healing is effected through an understanding...

Frederick Dixon

South London Observer and Camberwell Times

Christian Science healing is effected through an understanding of spiritual law. This understanding of spiritual law is that knowledge of Truth, the grasp of which Christ Jesus declared would make the world free. "Jesus of Nazareth," Mrs. Eddy has written on page 313 of Science and Health, "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." It was because Jesus had grasped the fact of spiritual causation that he was able to demonstrate his knowledge in the miracles, for the Greek words translated miracle never have meant anything supernatural, but simply something wonderful, or something in the nature of proof.

Jesus asked whether it was easier to say a man's sins were forgiven, or to say, Arise and walk. It is perfectly manifest that by no possible process of suggestion could a man's sins be forgiven him, therefore it is perfectly certain that by no possible process of suggestion could any form of sickness, resulting from sin, be overcome. Only in proportion as the sin which was the cause of the sickness was overcome would the effect, or physical manifestation, disappear. Now the only way in which sin can be destroyed in the human consciousness is by repentance, and the Greek word translated repentance means a change of mind. As, therefore, a man gains the necessary change of mind, he puts off the carnal mind with its passions, and gains the Mind of Christ. In the exact proportion, consequently, in which he gains the Mind of Christ, he gains that scientific understanding of absolute Truth, or, as the epistles put it, of God, which constitutes the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. Thus, in the proportion he repents, in the true sense of repentance, he gains the knowledge of Truth, which frees him by destroying the cause that was producing the bad effect.

Turning to an entirely different phase of phenomena, we find in stated in the Bible that Jesus walked on the water, stilled the tempest, and raised the dead. It is obvious that none of these things could be accomplished by mental suggestion. No amount of mental suggestion would overcome the physical law of gravity, if that were an absolute law; no amount of mental suggestion would induce the winds and waves to moderate; no amount of mental suggestion would call back a dead man to life. The inference is inevitable, either that the Bible is an untrue record, or that these wonderful proofs, to use the word miracle in its proper sense, were the result of some scientific knowledge which the rest of the world had failed to assimilate. It is the teaching of Christian Science that, in the exact proportion in which a man gains the Mind of Christ, gains, that is to say, a scientific understanding of divine Principle, he discovers the spiritual or absolute law, and so is able to disregard the purely relative sense of physical law. Something of this nature was in the mind, no doubt, of the greatest of the medieval thinkers, when he declared that theology, or the word of God, was the only absolute science, and that all physical sciences were merely relative. This knowledge of spiritual law constitutes the absolute truth which one of the greatest of English scholars and churchmen has shown is separated in the fourth Gospel from the mere relative sense of truth by the use of the definite article in the Greek text.

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