Article May 19, 1923 Issue

Christian Science is distinctly not a method of healing...

Henry Deutsch, Committee on Publication for the State of Minnesota,—St. Cloud

Journal-Press

Christian Science is distinctly not a method of healing by suggestion. In its every aspect it is the antithesis of the suggestive method. Christian Science acknowledges only the one Mind, the divine Mind. It insists upon faith in God being raised to knowledge or spiritual understanding of Him instead of mere blind faith or belief, and makes its appeal at all times to divine reason. It cannot be used for evil purposes. Again, instead of the student of Christian Science being lulled into stupefying inactivity of body and mind, he is required to be constantly alert, watchful, and active in meeting the questions which present themselves to his thought. Furthermore, the practice of repeated suggestions and the use of formulas are wholly foreign to and forbidden in the practice of Christian Science. The suggestive method works entirely from a purely material, physiological standpoint. On the other hand, Christian Science is a regenerative and reformative religion; and the healing effects are the result of spiritualization of thought, and not an appeal to the material senses or the physical functions.

Treatment in Christian Science purely and solely calls into operation divine law through the realization by the practitioner of the allness, omnipresence, and love of a perfect God, and of man as His perfect image and likeness. From this must follow the understanding that everything opposed to or unlike God, or claiming power apart from God, has, in reality, no existence or entity. The patient is healed, not because he has been made to believe that certain statements impressed upon his consciousness are true, but because, through prayer, his problem has been brought within the operation of God's law, and thus necessarily reaches a perfect solution. As Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (Pref., p. xi), "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation."

There is nothing supernatural about Christian Science. Christian Science practice is the operation of spiritual law; therefore, to understand it we must study it from a spiritual standpoint. Furthermore, Christian Science is a religious system, and in order to be apprehended and appreciated it must be approached from the religious side of man's nature and thought. As Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 145), "Indeed, its ethical and physical effects are indissolubly connected."

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