Article June 20, 1914 Issue

A correspondent who writes on the subject of "Healing by...

Frederick Dixon—Aldershot, England

Camberley News

A correspondent who writes on the subject of "Healing by Suggestion," puts one phase of such healing quite succinctly. He is, of course, entitled to explain his point of view, and I should not dream of intervening again in the discussion were it not that in advising your readers, as he does most generously, to "proceed logically, as Christian Scientists are trying to do," he gives the unwary unwittingly to think that the manipulation of thoughts, in the manner explained by him, is Christian Science. In these circumstances I am sure that you will permit me to point out that the attempt to neutralize or exterminate one thought by another thought is a process of mental suggestion, and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian Science. You do not, for instance, attempt to displace a thought of sorrow with a thought of joy; that, to the Christian Scientist, is simply substituting one human belief for another, and is, in addition, mere jargon. What you really do is to deny the actual power and reality of evil through a metaphysical realization of the omnipresence and omnipotence of God, good, which is quite another thing. You do not, in a word, give a person a thought of joy, but, in the words of Mrs. Eddy on page 261 of Science and Health, you "hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true."

In the exact proportion in which a man succeeds in this attempt to lay hold of the Christ, he will gain the Mind of Christ. This does not consist in merely holding thoughts of good; it consists of what the epistles term, in a consistently mistranslated phrase, a scientific knowledge of God. It is not enough, therefore, in order to demonstrate Christian Science, to hold fast to a human concept of "the enduring, the good, and the true;" it is necessary to gain and maintain a metaphysical understanding of what these terms mean. A man, for example, who imagined law to be a lawyer's code, capable of being broken at will, instead of that in which no variation ever has or can take place, would be hopelessly hampered in any attempt to demonstrate the hypotheses of natural science. In the same way, a man might hold any thought he chose about "the enduring," might adhere to every premise of the theory of the conservation of energy, and yet, if he did not grasp the metaphysical explanation of substance, remain incapable of understanding how Jesus walked on the water or fed the multitude, or why he declared the mountain could be removed or the sycamine tree rooted up.

The fact is that giving people thoughts with which to eradicate other thoughts is bound to end in the establishment of formulas; in other words, in the attempt to heal by substituting paragraphs for prescriptions. Jesus did not heal the withered hand by anything so hopelessly limited as holding a right thought about a hand. He healed it by the same metaphysical process by which he raised Lazarus, and by which he overcame sin. He healed it, that is to say, by his scientific realization of the reality of Spirit, and the inevitable corollary of the utter unreality of matter.

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