"At a time of contagious disease, Christian Scientists endeavor...

The Christian Science Monitor

"At a time of contagious disease, Christian Scientists endeavor to rise in consciousness to the true sense of the omnipotence of Life, Truth, and Love, and this great fact in Christian Science realized will stop a contagion." In such words does Mrs. Eddy, on page 116 of her book "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," describe a duty and privilege which is open to every one and at all times.

Jesus the Christ healed the sick. His followers, he said, should do the same. It mattered not to him whether the disease was acute or chronic, whether it was a woman sick of a fever or a man who for thirty-eight years had been stretched helpless on his bed. He fed the five thousand in a desert place with a few barley loaves and fishes. He walked on the water, he stopped a storm at sea, he raised the dead, and he left behind him the emphatic statement that those who believed on him should do the works that he did and even greater works. As a final instruction to his disciples he declared, without a single reservation or qualification, "And these signs shall follow them that believe; ... they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

Now the place into which the world is being driven at the present hour is getting steadily narrower. The appeal to matter is everywhere failing more and more to secure response. A new trouble arises and the world marshals its old remedies and sends them forth, and then waits like the priests of Baal, and like the priests of Baal waits in vain, for "there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded." And even if the world, blinded by its speculative theories, and failing still to learn the lesson which will soon be perceived even by the human intelligence, succeeds in effecting, by the exercise of a material effort, apparent release, it is only to find itself in another and still narrower place where there is no way to turn either to the right hand or to the left. Then the world, in a panic, begins to hit out wildly at its troubles. It clutches at any and every straw that is cast upon the troubled waters, and resorts to expedients of which, in calmer moments, it would be ashamed.

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