Article April 3, 1920 Issue

"Spiritual history"

DOROTHY ROBERTS

On page 204 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy writes, "All forms of error support the false conclusions that there is more than one Life; that material history is as real and living as spiritual history."

The testimonies of healing given in our Wednesday evening meetings and published in our periodicals should be "spiritual history," records of the power of God to heal, protect, and comfort. Throughout the Bible we are repeatedly told to "magnify the Lord" and a dictionary gives as one definition of the word, magnify: "To cause to seem greater or more important." It is indeed the function of a Christian Science testimony to make Principle seem greater and more important than before to the thought of the listener or reader. Error, the reverse of truth, would therefore attempt to magnify itself if possible, to cause itself to seem greater or more important than the truth,—in other words to argue that "material history is as real and living as spiritual history." Clad in the sheep's clothing of gratitude, or, perhaps, of a zealous desire to show the great changes Christian Science has wrought, this wolf endeavors to enlarge upon the dream of pain or suffering which may have preceded one's experience in Christian Science. As a result some eager, unwary listener or reader is impressed only with a vivid and disturbing image of disease or pain, instead of a joyous sense of God's importance and power.

The Biblical narrative of the healing of the Shunammite's child is a true testimony, as described by Mrs. Eddy in The Mother Church Manual (Art. VIII, Sect. 24), where she says: "More than a mere rehearsal of blessings, it scales the pinnacle of praise and illustrates the demonstration of Christ, 'who healeth all thy diseases.' " No one after reading that story could be left with a sense of the child's suffering and death; on the contrary he could not but be filled with the confident trust expressed in that mother's words, "It is well."

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