Article February 13, 1915 Issue

In his address on "Mental State Affects Health" the...

Thomas F. Watson

Palo Alto (Cal.) Times

In his address on "Mental State Affects Health" the Rev. Mr.—shows the evil effects of fear, anger, and worry on the human mind and body, and the good effects produced by the Christian graces of "faith, love, and gladness," of which he says that "faith is the mightiest and divinest of all." But this writer errs in enumerating Christian Science among the faith-cures of today, and when he states that "Christian Science and the efficacy of hypnotism are all simply different illustrations of the basic principles of the healing power of suggestion," he makes a serious mistake. Christian Science is not "faith-cure" in the ordinary acceptation of the word, for Christian Science healing requires more than faith, namely spiritual understanding.

As Mrs. Eddy says on the first page of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love." Therefore nothing could be farther from the practice of Christian Science than hypnotism and mesmerism. The hypnotist or mesmerist seeks to control the patient's thought and to make him think he is not sick, though in fact he believes him to be so, thereby working on a dishonest basis. Even though he should apparently succeed for a time, he is robbing the patient of his individual power of thought, from which a relapse would bring confusion and prove the last state of that man to be "worse than the first."

The Christian Scientist, understanding even in a measure that God is Spirit, and all that He made is spiritual and is "very good," proceeds to lift his thought to the consciousness of the allness of God, good, which excludes all belief in evil, manifested either as sin or sickness, and this spiritual consciousness brings the light which destroys all darkness. As Mrs. Eddy says, "Light emits light without effort" (Science and Health, p. 262). The Christian Science practitioner thereby imparts enough of God's love to the patient to lift him above the desire to sin or the fear of sickness. In other words, he lifts his own thought to the consciousness of God, or the "kingdom of heaven," and takes his patient with him.

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