Article April 29, 1916 Issue

Health and Holiness

PRISCILLA C. GOODWYN

One day, while standing in the waiting-room of a railway station, I heard some one behind me say to another who was leaving her, "Well, keep your health." It was to me a new form of good-by, arresting my attention and calling for thought. The words "keep your health" led back to the old days when health and holiness, or wholeness, were synonymous terms, and it seemed an appropriate and beautiful last word before parting, though differing little in essential meaning from the ordinary "farewell," "good-by," and "adieu" in general use. These latter have become, in the main, mere mechanical expressions, with little thought back of them. The popular "Well, by-by; be good and you'll be happy," has the vigor of good cheer in it. It is as though one said, "I give to you, as we part, my best thought for your happiness: be good."

We can indeed rejoice that humanity everywhere uses in some form the same words as a parting benediction, "Keep your health," — your holiness, which is the only true health. The speaker's words may have been uttered in a merely perfunctory way, conveying only a material thought of health, but they were words "fitly spoken," and in their higher meaning held in themselves a blessing and a promise for those ready to receive them.

In Christian Science we learn that health is a quality of Mind; that matter can take no cognizance of either health or disease, and that what the so-called personal senses avow, has no basis in Truth. On page 374 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says that disease originates "in human belief before it is consciously apparent on the body, which is in fact the objective state of mortal mind, though it is called matter," and she directs thought to the eternality of health as one of God's gifts to man, a fixed quality of Mind. The realization of health and holiness is therefore man's normal condition, for man in Science is "the offspring of God," and we read in Science and Health (p. 475) that man "has not a single quality underived from Deity."

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