Article January 27, 1923 Issue

Christian Science practice does not include diagnosis of...

Elmer McBurney, Committee on Publication for Northern California,—Berkeley

Gazette

Christian Science practice does not include diagnosis of disease, because it does not recognize disease as a reality. On page 472 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy tells us: "All reality is in God and His creation, harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good, and He makes all that is made." Jesus said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." We have no record that he ever diagnosed disease, or used any other than spiritual means in healing both the sick and the sinning. Christian Scientists should be numbered among the cleanest people on earth, because clean thinking results in clean living. Cleanliness and sanitation are concomitant to Christian Science, embodying, as it does, all that is pure and Godlike.

Christian Science practitioners, imbued with divine Love, do not tell the sick that their "sufferings are mere illusions of the mind and that there is nothing the matter with them except belief." Such a practice would be contrary to the teachings of Science and Health, as set forth on page 367: "The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love." Christian Science teaches absolute reliance on the one supreme and infinite God. And is not this reliance justified, as being obedience to the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"? Christian Science has nothing in common with Coueism, or any system based on autosuggestion or mental manipulation. The understanding of God, good, as infinite and therefore ever present, eliminates all evil. And it is the demonstration of this great truth, and not suggestion, which accomplishes the healing. Christian Science does not deny the fundamentals of Christianity; to use Mrs. Eddy's own words (Science and Health, p. 269), "I therefore plant myself unreservedly on the teachings of Jesus, of his apostles, of the prophets, and on the testimony of the Science of Mind."

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