Article October 31, 1914 Issue

In a recent issue, under the heading of "The Church and Faith-healing,"...

Frederick Dixon—Coventry, England

Midland Daily Telegraph

In a recent issue, under the heading of "The Church and Faith-healing," there is a reference to Christian Science to which I am going to ask you to let me take exception. It is the statement that "Christian Scientists have found their system of treatment by prayer and suggestion only applicable to a certain class of disease." Now, first of all, Christian Science actually eschews suggestion. Suggestion, it points out, is the claim that one human mind can act and control another human mind. If this were the case, it would make the stronger mind able to dictate either what it chooses to call good or evil to the weaker human mind. This, indeed, is the claim made for suggestion.

Fortunately, however, when faced by Christian Science, mental suggestion always breaks down, and the fact is demonstrated that there is no actual power in it. As a matter of fact, suggestion is just what has been known throughout the dark ages of the world's history as magic or necromancy, or any mental dealing of that nature. In the time of Jesus it was called exorcism, and when the Pharisees wished to dispose of Jesus' healing they tried to describe it as exorcism, or as they put it, casting out devils by Beelzebub. In his reply, Jesus once and for all crushed the claim of mental suggestion to be regarded as Christian. A house, he declared, divided against itself could not stand. At the same time, he declared that if he cast out devils through the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God was come among men.

The kingdom of God never came to any human being by suggestion from a mind believing in good and evil. It comes exactly in the proportion in which the carnal mind gives place to the Mind of Christ, and that is precisely how Christian Science healing is effected. In other words, it is effected by a clear understanding of spiritual law, which in driving out every belief of evil in the human mind, naturally substitutes a harmonious for an inharmonious condition in the human body, which is itself only the subjective condition of the human mind. It is obvious, then, that such healing is not confined to one or another kind of disease. Christian Science healing has been found efficacious not only in nervous and functional, but in organic diseases. It has been said again and again that Christian Science will not heal a broken limb. Yet only a month or two ago, after two doctors had spent weeks in trying to cause a broken limb to set, without the slightest result, the setting was accomplished by Christian Science. The doctors declared that the only way to save the use of the limb, after the failure to make it set in the ordinary way, was to wire the bones. The patient's family objected, and Christian Science treatment was substituted for the wire. The limb healed rapidly and completely, and the result is a piece of perfect setting brought about after the impossibility of mending except by wiring was supposed to have been proved by the use of the X-rays.

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