A kindly critic in a recent issue of your paper states of...

Josephinum Weekly

A kindly critic in a recent issue of your paper states of Christian Scientists, "Their main tenet consists in mental healing." As a matter of fact, the main purpose of Christian Science is to reinstate the teachings and practice of the great Master. On the second page of her book "Rudimental Divine Science," Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, states: "Healing physical sickness is the smallest part of Christian Science. It is only the bugle-call to thought and action, in the higher range of infinite goodness." As we put on more of the Mind of Christ in Christian Science, we gain to just that extent the power Jesus possessed to heal sickness and sin, in ourselves and others. Our ability to do these works is the only evidence we can have or give that we are becoming more Christlike.

Far from holding "that there is no reality in sickness and sin," Christian Scientists know that, to human or mortal belief, these conditions are very real, and that one must have a right understanding of the truth of being in order to heal them. God never made sickness or sin; therefore, they are no part of His creation, and are proved false as a result of gaining a higher understanding of God and of the fact that God really did make all that was ever made. To understand God aright includes being able to prove that He really is our health, even as the Bible teaches. As a man grows in goodness, he loses the desire to sin. To become spiritually minded is to give up wrong desires and wrong practices. Healing in Christian Science is made possible as the result of correct or Christianly scientific reasoning. Suggestion is never part of the treatment in Christian Science. One has to be strong in the strength which God supplies, to heal in Christian Science. He must be honest, sincere, true to himself and all others, or he cannot possibly expect to utilize the power and presence of God. To feel and know that God alone governs man, to acknowledge God in all his ways, is to be able to utilize the divine power, which can do all things for mankind in sickness as in health.

It may be stated that thousands of people, living to-day, would long since have passed from this life, but for the advent of Christian Science into their lives and experience. Many of these people were suffering from claims of sickness and sin, pronounced incurable by the best physicians. We are finding out what the real man is in Christian Science. We are proving the unreality of sin by overcoming it; and if death is to disappear with the disappearance of sin, we submit that every time sin is overcome, death is being mastered to just that extent. Hell has already been a very real condition here on earth to many who are now students of Christian Science; but heaven is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us; and thanks be to God, we are being enabled to gain glimpses of what Jesus meant when he said, "The kingdom of God [heaven] cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God [heaven] is within you."

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