Article April 5, 1919 Issue

Your reference to Christian Science in connection with...

Peter V. Ross

Dos Palos (Cal.) Star

Your reference to Christian Science in connection with the influenza is very kindly indeed. Although Christian Scientists may not enjoy complete immunity from epidemics, they do escape to a far greater extent than they would without their understanding of Christian Science. Fear, as your excellent editorial points out, encourages disease far more than has generally been suspected; and it is true that suggestive therapeutics is being resorted to, more often than may be supposed, as a health system. Suggestion is essentially the same as hypnotism. It is employed to induce its victim to accept as true something which he and the suggester actually regard as untrue. In practical application it consists in bringing the will and mental forces of one person to bear upon and dominate the mentality of another person. No argument is needed to convince anyone that such a practice is pernicious.

But, some one will ask, do not Christian Scientists cure disease by suggesting to the patient that he is well? They certainly do not. They effect a cure by understanding that he is well and that disease is unreal; whereas the suggester assumes that disease is real, and then by force of human will tries to make the patient believe, what they both regard as untrue, that the patient is well. The first is a process of truth, the second of deception. But another may ask, If health is real and disease is unreal, then is it not legitimate to suggest health to a patient and mentally coerce him into believing it? No; for the suggester believes in the reality of disease, and both he and both victim suppose, when they argue for healing, that they are "putting over" something which is untrue. In fact they are invoking the human or carnal mind, which Jesus well styled a liar and the father of it.

The Christian Scientist, on the other hand, invokes the divine Mind, which knows and causes no sickness, and brings that Mind to bear upon the suffering consciousness of the patient so as to enlighten that consciousness and cause it to relinquish its false belief in sickness. Disease thereby loses its reality in the thought of the erstwhile sufferer and disappears as naturally and scientifically as any erroneous belief vanishes in the presence of the truth.

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