Article December 13, 1919 Issue

"Exalted to safety"

ANNE CLEVELAND CHENEY

Notwithstanding the fact that he to whom all Christendom looks for example and doctrine went about constantly healing the sick and even raised the dead, the criticism is sometimes brought against Christian Science that it makes the body of undue importance, in that people turn to this system of healing for physical relief, and at their Wednesday evening meetings repeatedly give thanks for having been freed from bodily suffering. If, however,—as is happening all over the world,—these same critics earnestly seek to know more of what has proved such a blessing to many of their friends and neighbors, and themselves attend one of these meetings of praise and thanksgiving, they are impressed by the fact that those who have been relieved of disease give more fervent thanks for the spiritual awakening by which the relief was accomplished, than for the freedom from physical ills, even when those ills have been the grimmest and most relentless known to the medical profession. With that simplicity and lack of self-consciousness which comes from the deep experiences of life, in almost the same phraseology one witness after another is heard to declare that above all he is thankful for the spiritual uplift, for the clearer understanding of God, which has come to him through Christian Science.

When Job was suffering utter anguish of mind and body, it will be remembered that Eliphaz the Temanite, advising, said: "I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause;" and he spoke of the marvelous things without number which God performs in order "to set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety." These words express most beautifully that sense of spiritual uplift spoken of again and again in those Wednesday evening meetings of thanksgiving which now encircle the globe. It is not so much the sense of safety from some dread foe to peace and joy and useful activity, but it is the knowledge of having been "exalted to safety," of having come higher up, nearer to God, because of this healing; it is the blessed realization that the kingdom of heaven has been brought closer to human experience.

On page 442 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," against a marginal topic, "Christ the great physician," Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has written: "When Christ changes a belief of sin or of sickness into a better belief, then belief melts into spiritual understanding, and sin, disease, and death disappear." It is this ineffable experience of seeing an old, wretched belief change to a better belief and later melt into spiritual understanding—it is this, transcending all else, which calls forth such gratitude as no material respite could ever awaken or approach. To know that relief has been won by merely exchanging one material belief for another, merely shifting reliance from one broken reed of earthly help to another, has been proved to be but scant cause of true gratitude to most of those who have sought help in Christian Science. They, too, have found that to God, not man, they must commit their cause; to Spirit and not to matter; to divine Science and not to any humanly evolved, so-called science; and having found God, having glimpsed the beautiful, harmonious working of spiritual law through the Christ Science, they have seen that which was unreal melt away before the brightness, the perfection of reality—God's true and only creation. This, then, is the cause of gratitude realized and expressed in Christian Science. In nothing did Mrs. Eddy prove her clear spiritual understanding and inspired leadership more than in providing these opportunities to voice gratitude for the Christ-healing,—the healing which, by displacing the sense of a diseased or helpless body and replacing it with a clearer concept of man in God's image, proves its Principle to be divine and, therefore, that it is to be glorified frankly, freely, reverently, constantly.

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