Article May 13, 1911 Issue

In the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,"...

Frederick Dixon

East Berks (Workingham, Eng.) Gazette

In the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," on page xi, Mrs. Eddy writes of the healing works of Christian Science as "the sign of Immanuel, or 'God with us,'—a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself;" while on page 150 she says, "Now as then, signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world," and this argument is repeated from one end of the book to the other. Christian Science healing certainly makes men healthier, but it does this in the only way possible in christian healing, by making them better at the same time.

Any one who objects to the place occupied by physical healing in Christian Science will invitably be driven to take exception to the teaching of the New Testament. The Gospels are filled with stories of physical healing, and it was on these acts of physical healing that Jesus relied when the disciples of John were sent to demand of him whether he was the Christ. He came preaching the gospel of repentance, with its ringing declaration, "Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," and when the deadened spiritual sense of the people failed to understand that this repentance meant the changing of their whole outlook from a material to a spiritual standpoint, he healed the sick, telling those who were present if they could not believe for the words' sake, they must believe for the very works' sake. This was the way in which, according to your correspondent, he "for ever dignified pain and sorrow." Pain and sorrow are things to be borne with dignity while they endure in the consciousness, but Jesus showed the world not how to submit to them but how to overcome them as a prelude to the overcoming of death itself, "the last enemy that shall be destroyed."

Christ Jesus never taught men to submit to sorrow and sickness any more than to submit to sin. As that great scholar Matthew Arnold has truly pointed out, Jesus saw the intimate connection between sin and sickness, and for this reason his pathology was spiritual. He said, "Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Now the Greek word translated repent means simply a change of mind. When, therefore, a man changes his mind from the belief that pain and disease are physical to the understanding that they are mental, he learns in what the cause of pain and disease, equally with the cause of sin, lies. When, in addition to this, he changes his mind from a belief that the image and likeness of God is a sick and sinning human being, to the understanding that the image and likeness of God is spiritual and perfect, he begins to acquire an understanding of his true selfhood, and in learning how to banish the belief in the power and reality of evil from his mind, finds that the kingdom of God is indeed at hand, for "the kingdom of god is within you."

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

In the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,"...

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access