Article January 12, 1918 Issue

Just Recompense

WILLIAM R. RATHVON

Jesus' miracles were also lessons. They were educative as well as physically beneficial. They are for all time and every nation. The healing of the ten lepers, like the parable of the ten talents, conveys lessons needed by the men and women of to-day as well as by the wayfarer on the dusty roads of Samaria or Judea twenty centuries ago. On page 591 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy defines a miracle as "that which is divinely natural, but must be learned humanly." In his miracles Jesus incorporated many lessons which had to be learned humanly,—lessons in faith, in courage, in justice, in service, in timeliness, in self-control and self-denial, in order, in thoroughness, in unselfishness, in cooperation, in gratitude and love. These lessons teach things that practitioner and patient alike need to know and need to remember. They point to qualities the business man needs to cultivate. They offer solutions to many of the problems which appear in the daily work of every student of Christian Science.

Take for example the question of just recompense for benefits received. Jesus' miracles always benefited some one, and his beneficiaries were expected to make just recompense either in service, sacrifice, or honest endeavor. He discerned what was needful for them to do and told them plainly just what was their part in making the demonstration complete. Never was it to be a one-sided affair. Something for nothing is the creed of greed but not of justice. That which costs little is valued little. Many things of great value cannot be appraised in dollars and cents, and a Christian Science treatment is one of these; hence it should never be looked upon by patient or practitioner as a trifling affair. It should always have too much of God, good, reflected in it to be lightly regarded.

Those whom the Master helped were expected to cooperate with him in the way he indicated. He exacted from them something they could do. In some cases it was easy to do, in others it was the thing difficult, as, for instance, when he admonished the young man healed of blindness to return home and say nothing to anyone about his healing, as we read in the eighth chapter of Mark. To have given a sum of money would have been much easier for one who was bubbling over with joy, and with eagerness to shout his story from the housetops; but silence was his part in the transaction, a part he could perform, and which no one could perform for him. It is easily conceivable that in this instance the great Practitioner saw that the patient's overactive tongue needed to be controlled, his tales of symptoms and ailments needed to remain untold, and perhaps his inclination to boast needed to be checked, so he was given the prescription, "Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town."

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