Editorial February 6, 1915 Issue

Patching versus Purification

John B. Willis

Strange as it may appear, the method or modus of spiritual healing seems altogether puzzling to many Christian people. Yet it can but be understood by every one who accepts the Master's teaching as to the nature of substance, and who apprehends the fact that Spirit and matter are opposites; that their relation, like that of truth and error or light and darkness, is one of mutual exclusiveness, so that they cannot exist together. There can be no possible affiliation, interblend, or touch between opposites, since when one is present the other is necessarily absent. To say that the knowledge of a given fact is not able to dispel ignorance of that fact, would be to talk manifest foolishness; and yet to one acquainted with the teaching of Christian Science this statement is just as rational as is the declaration that spiritual apprehension cannot heal the sick.

Christian Science teaches that the only proof of progress is found in the purification of human sense, the transformation of the mind; and the great difficulty in the way of the acceptance, of this teaching is this, that mortal sense lives in the flesh, and thus thinks of healing as a remedial process by which broken-down or decaying materiality can be patched up and made to resume its functions. That material means seem essential to one having this point of view, is not surprising, and unconscious consent to this prevailing belief is an enemy against which every Christian Scientist needs to be on guard. Even when spiritual means have been substituted for material in our thought an practice, the patching-up sense of the healing process may remain to hinder, if it does not thwart, the realization of that mental emancipation and sequent elimination of human ills which constitutes the true healing.

In large part Christian philanthropy has been thought of only as a process of repair, and this explains why it fails to meet the need, though it may bring much relief and hence be altogether commendable. Today physical healing is also thought of as a patching up of materiality, but St. Paul recognizes the scientific fact of all true healing when he declares that it is a putting off of the old man, not merely an improvement of human conditions. So too St. Peter identifies true believers as those who have purified their souls (human sense) by obeying the truth. This is the nature of the healing for which Christian Science stands and which it is effecting.

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