Article November 28, 1914 Issue

My attention has been called to your kindly notice about...

John W. Doorly

Bradford (England) Daily Telegraph

My attention has been called to your kindly notice about Christian Science and faith-healing in a recent issue. In the public mind there is a very strong belief that Christian Science and what is popularly called faith-healing are analogous, and as Christian Science is very far removed from what is generally supposed to be faith-healing, I should like to explain the difference.

Christian Science teaches that there is but one cause, infinite good; that all real being is the effect of this one and only cause, and must forever be infinitely good, like its cause. It also teaches that mortality which sins, gets sick, and dies, is the false sense of this true being or effect. Now true being, or spiritual being, is God's law, or will; that is, it is the manifestation or expression of perfect Mind, of power, and of Life. When, therefore, a man gains an understanding of true being, he is putting himself at-one with that perfect Mind, and is expressing God's infinite law, which is also the expression of infinite power; just as when a man recognizes that two and two equal four, he is governed by the mathematical law, which is power to save him from the false sense that two and two equal five. This recognition of true being, or God's will, is what our Saviour so aptly described when he said, "Ye shall know the truth [that which really exists, or God's will], and the truth shall make you free [from that which seems to be, but is not]."

Faith-healing, more often than not, assumes that sin, disease, and death are God's will, and hopes through a blind appeal to God, who sends these conditions to change the very conditions which it believes that infinite wisdom has caused or permitted. If infinite wisdom, however, caused these conditions, then they are good, and we cannot have too much of them; in fact we are bound to have them, as it is impossible for us to tell infinite wisdom what is best for us, or to change God, who is "the same yesterday, and today, and forever." Such teaching Christian Science absolutely refutes. A man may have faith in mathematics, but that will not do him much good unless he can understand and demonstrate its basic law; and so Christian Scientists are learning to understand God's immutable, spiritual law, and before this understanding the discords of the carnal mind, or the false sense of being, are disappearing. Mrs. Eddy has blessed humanity abundantly by revealing the fact that evil in all its phases is not a divine reality, and in the true sense is not real at all, but is just a mistake which has power only to him who believes in it, but is powerless to the man who is putting on the Christ-mind or knowing the truth, and this accords absolutely with our Saviour's teachings when he said: "Ye are of your father the devil ... He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

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