Article May 11, 1912 Issue

If drugs are sent by God, why did not Jesus use them?

William J. Bonnin

Rochdale (Eng.) Times

If drugs are sent by God, why did not Jesus use them? Or did he not heal in the way God intends disease to be healed? Dr. Mason Good has declared that the effects of medicine on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain, except, indeed, that it has already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine all combined. The fact that the use of drugs by the medical profession is so steadily decreasing is evidence that the belief of there being any actual inherent virtue in the drug itself is evaporating, and that there is an increasing recognition that the only curative influence lies in the common belief in its power to heal. Christian Science shows that just as the human, mortal mind may delude itself into a belief of sickness, so it may delude itself into a belief that salvation from sickness is to be found in matter; but this will not lead any one to a better knowledge of God. The study of Christian Science, on the other hand, reveals sickness as a falsity of sense, negative in nature, and that the only scientific healing is a casting out of such a false belief by a knowledge of the truth about our being, the truth that Christ Jesus came to reveal.

A negation of existence is perhaps the best or nearest way to describe evil. It is positive in appearance, but negative in reality. Like darkness, it is nothing seeming to be something. The way in Christian Science to heal or destroy it is to introduce the corrective at the operative point, as it were, at the point where this "seeming" occurs. "If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know," wrote Paul; and just as we are able to know as we "ought to know," so are we able to comprehend the truth that shall make us free. Now it will be obvious that such an understanding of the truth and reality of things spiritual, and the consequent unreality of things material, must come by a gradual transformation, a gradual putting on of "the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him." The material beliefs that present themselves as most readily disbelieved in and seen as falsities, are those that are seen to be to the human sense abnormal, useless, and evil. And so Christian Science has begun at the point of least resistance, as it were, and Christian Scientists do not waste time in endeavoring to go without food, or trying conclusions with brick walls, but direct their energies to attacking and destroying evil wherever they can see that good will ensue from such a destruction.

To any one with vision beyond the mere "letter that killeth," the question whether any one believes or not in the Christology of the apostles' creed involves the question, What is that Christology? What, for instance, is sonship of omnipresent Mind, Spirit, which we call God? And what is "coming down from heaven" if the kingdom of heaven is at hand and within us? These and the many kindred questions that are involved are the real points that have to be decided. And so the demand for a plain yes or no to a set of words is a mere rattling of the dry bones of dogma. I will not commit the impertinence of asking the gentleman to which of the innumerable Christologies he subscribes, but it would have been rather more reasonable for him to have indicated which particular one he conceives the apostles' creed to be the expression of. Of course Christian Scientists believe that Christ is the Son of God. They do not believe the human Jesus to have been divine, but they do know that the Mind that was in him was divine and constituted his divinity, and they do know that it is the reflection of the one divine Mind which constitutes sonship of God.

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