Article May 18, 1912 Issue

HEALING BY PRECEPT

CASSIUS M. LOOMIS.

Every worker in the field of Christian Science has doubtless found it difficult to impress upon others the important teaching that it is spiritual being and not the material body with which we are to reckon. A smile of tolerant unbelief often overspreads the face of him who is new in metaphysical studies, as he listens to your words upon this subject with a sort of Pickwickian indifference. Trained to think of himself and others as material, living as he has been in a sphere filled with seeming limitations, and wedded to the concept of form and outline so that he tests all questions of existence by the five physical senses, his consideration of spiritual things must of needs wait for a time. But the untiring practitioner—the apostle of Christianly endeavor—does not give up. Growth in the consciousness of his patient will overcome even this seeming lack. His unfoldment may be slow, but it is interesting. One by one the earth clods drop out of his thought, and the five senses seem less and less to be depended upon. In time his habits of seeking sensuous pleasures are given up, for he finds them to be only fleeting and oftentimes degrading. Then, and not until then, will the spiritual concept of man's being begin to pervade his understanding, and his rebirth into a broader and holier field of action be assured.

In the work of healing there is perhaps nothing more necessary to be clearly understood than the fact that the spiritual is the real and eternally harmonious, and that the material is but a fading shadow in the dream which we attempt to measure by years. The little child pauses in her romping for a moment when you speak to her, then bounds away to continue her play. Supple in limb is she, but she has no consciousness of body. As for health, her thoughts are as far from the subject as may be. She has no theories to exploit, no fears to suppress; she simply lives the child-life without stress or disturbances, then lies down to sleep care-free as to what the morrow has in store for her. Heaven without a thought of body is a child's inheritance, and what says our Master? "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." This kingdom of God is to be received today—now; it is to be received by the Christian Scientist as if a legion of learned men had never theorized about it. How interesting, that a little child should have been our Saviour's favorite illustration of the faith absolute!

St. Paul's declaration, "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord," is singularly corroborative of our Leader's words in Science and Health (p. 324): "The body will reflect what governs it, whether it be Truth or error, understanding or belief, Spirit or matter;" and in the presence of these two statements the student of Christian Science must in time look away from the physical or mortal mind concept to such an extent that the body, if recognized at all, shall be that which is clothed in the white raiment of love and purity, and subject only to heaven's legacy of harmonious action and existence.

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HEALING BY PRECEPT

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