Article April 11, 1914 Issue

In a recent issue from "The Easy Chair," you discuss, not...

Duncan Sinclair

Paisley and Renfrewshire (Scotland) Gazette

In a recent issue from "The Easy Chair," you discuss, not without a distinct sense of humor, various cures for colds. We notice that you quote part of a testimony from The Christian Science Journal of January, where a Christian Scientist, in his own way, recounts his healing from "a very severe cold." Such testimony particularly interesting, chiefly because it was the result of the application of spiritual law operating through his consciousness; and also because illustrative of a thought-modus which Christian Scientists are able to put into practice in proportion to their understanding of spiritual causation. This method of healing, which was discovered by Mrs. Eddy in 1866 and is fully explained by her in the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," is entirely scientific, being based on definite knowledge of spiritual law, and it can be learned by any one who is prepared to follow the commands of the Master.

What we would especially like to refer to now, are these two sentences from your reflections: "Christian Scientists have a simple method of curing colds and other maladies. They merely affirm that they are not suffering from the special disease which deluded people believe them to possess." With the first of these sentences we entirely agree. There is no method of healing at all comparable with Christian Science in the matter of simplicity. It can be used by children when they learn it. They can apply the Principle that heals, just as they may work out a problem in arithmetic when they know the rules underlying the problem, but not until then. With regard to the second sentence, a Christian Scientist would never think of expressing it that way. Let me quote what Mrs. Eddy says quite pertinently on page 460 of Science and Health, "Sickness is neither imaginary nor unreal,—that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction." She adds, "It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being."

The mere denial of suffering will never heal suffering. The patient's thought has to be directed away from the false material sense of things, which is at the root of all the world's misery, to the spiritual understanding of reality as it pertains to God and himself. He has to learn about the perfection of spiritual being, about the omnipresent harmony which this being manifests, and that the inharmony which he may believe is afflicting him, under the name of whatsoever disease known to man, is not of God, has no mandate from the Divine Being, and is supported by no law of God's appointing.

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