Article December 23, 1922 Issue

To tell the suffering that their maladies are imaginary...

Agnata F. Butler, Committee on Publication for Cambridgeshire, England, in the

Cambridgeshire Times

To tell the suffering that their maladies are imaginary would not be likely to help them. To show them that their afflictions have a mental origin and can be removed by a process of mental enlightenment would have a very different effect. In ordinary medical practice cases of organic as well as of functional disease have been traced to a mental origin. The development of cancer has been attributed to worry, and insanity to fear; yet the physician would not regard the disease as imaginary, nor would a Christian Scientist dismiss such cases, or, indeed, any case of suffering, as imaginary and negligible; and this is what the letter I am answering perhaps unintentionally implies. On the contrary, the Christian Scientist would recommend the most radical treatment,—treatment that should remove both cause and effect of the disorder, through a scientific understanding of that divine and perfect Love which casts out fear and "healeth all thy diseases."

The only diagnosis thoroughly satisfactory to a patient is one leading to the treatment which heals him. Christian Scientists have no wish to assail a profession which labors for the alleviation of human suffering; which is conscious of its need of more certain knowledge in every direction; and which is continually changing its methods in conformity with enlarged experience. They only ask for justice.

With reference to the gift of healing, our critic would seem to assume that a gift is not a gift unless it is "inborn." If this were so, Paul, whom he quotes, would hardly have urged his converts to "covet earnestly the best gifts." Does not this very assumption make it clear that your correspondent is thinking of something totally different from that enlightened understanding and divine power which came to the early Christian believers, meeting their several and differing needs when they "received the Holy Ghost"?

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