Article October 16, 1920 Issue

Heal the Sick

JOHN L. CARTER

It is the business of the Christian Scientist to heal the sick, and no other attitude is permissible. In the case of a stubborn show of resistance to healing, the would-be healer should be on guard against the temptation to upbraid the patient, against making the imputation that the lack of healing lies not at his own door and is therefore obviously the fault of the patient. Another facet of the same lie is the unctuous statement that the limited measure of the patient's healing is the measure of the patient's present understanding. The truth of the matter is that the profession of practitioner of Christian Science is legitimate and necessary, and its purpose and only reason for existing is the complete healing of sin and sickness, in spite of all that sin and sickness can attempt to interpose. To condemn a man to a degree of healing of the measure of his present understanding is to argue that the profession of practitioner of Christian Science is limited if not superfluous.

In such a case as the above the practitioner is giving into the hands of his patient the power to limit healing and the power to permit healing, and the practitioner obtains precisely the result that such an attitude expects. His healing is not true healing, but a sort of healing, in exact ratio to his belief in his patient's willingness to be healed. Partial healing is not wholeness, and self-justification and the condemnation of the patient ought not to be given by the healer one moment's thought. In blaming his patient for his own failure to heal, the practitioner is recognizing another mind besides God, and he is believing that that second mind is, upon occasion—and indeed whenever it likes to be—more powerful than God. Obviously such a practitioner would be a danger to the community, if only because he would bind heavy burdens—such as hopelessness and despair and those accursed beliefs, predestination to evil and the persistence of original sin—upon those whose only real desire is to part with confusion and be whole.

In spite of anxiety the practitioner may rest assured that the only way to treat sin, or any other form of ignorance or mental laziness, is as being wholly unreal, undesirable, unattractive, and unworthy of any man's interest. Certainly a patient is not healed—that is, relieved of the fear and folly of a material, mistaken sense of things—except by being convinced of the truth of the spiritual sense of things, in which man is no more a mass of suffering and enjoying flesh than is the wind which "bloweth where it listeth," and which Christ Jesus used as a symbol of the man that is born of the Spirit, a symbol that gives no loophole and no satisfaction to material sense.

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