Article December 28, 1912 Issue

A recent issue contains a paragraph entitled "Mental Healing,"...

E. M. Ramsay in

Dundee (Scotland) Advertiser

A recent issue contains a paragraph entitled "Mental Healing," in which psychotherapy and Christian Science are spoken of as nearly related to one another. As a fact, they are as far apart as any two systems can be. Psychotherapy believes in the reality of matter, believes disease to be primarily a condition of matter, and proceeds to cure the ill man by persuading him that he is well. This position seems to us eminently unsatisfactory and unscientific. Now your correspondent also believes that organic disease originates in a poisonous material germ, and he is convinced that this cannot be removed by purely mental means, though he recognizes that there are cases where the mental condition of the patient must be taken into account. He sees the evil effects produced on the sick by foreboding thoughts, by the dread of developments, and he is aware that the more a man knows about disease the harder it is for him to get free from it. Yet the investigation of material causes and conditions he considers essential to the eradication of disease. How is he to escape from this dilemma?

The position of Christian Science is entirely different. It holds that the essential nature of man is spiritual, not material; that disease always originates in an unhealthy mental condition, and it applies itself scientifically to uncover the mistaken thoughts which caused the disease, and to heal them. It deals with the mental condition of the patient first and last, because it maintains that the disease is wholly of mental procurement. How then does it proceed? How does it propose to get rid of unhealthy thoughts? It maintains that the cause of all sin, all disease, and all mistakes, originates in the false sense of God, and separation from Him. The Bible defines God as good, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, as infinite, ever present, and eternal. If this definition be accepted as correct, it will at once be seen that the sense of separation from God is a false sense, since it is selfevident that we cannot be separated from the infinite and ever present. Thus the primary cause of the disease is an unreality, a false sense, and the only scientific way in which a false sense can be got rid of is by the substitution of the true sense, the sense of man's unity with God. This can be accomplished only by the method which our Saviour taught, by a scientific understanding of his teachings, by Christian Science.

As the sense of unity with good takes possession of a man, it separates him from his belief in evil as a pleasure, power, or necessity; as the sense of unity with Life and Love grows on him, it separates him from the fear of disease and death, and so restores him to health. In every part of the world today so-called organic and incurable diseases are being healed by this power of Truth, but these facts are only apparent to those who approach them in an unbiased and scientific spirit. The impossible never happens. If disease is cured by Christian Science, then disease is of mental origin, however surprising this may appear to be.

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