Article January 12, 1924 Issue

The True Healing

CLARENCE W. CHADWICK

"Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved," discriminates between spiritual and material healing. From God alone comes the true healing and the true salvation. The signs of the times would indicate a growing appreciation of this fact on the part of countless thousands. What is not of God fails to satisfy the higher human cravings. No quality of evil was ever known to accomplish good for any one. The cry of the Spirit is to come up higher; to find God and be really healed. Seeking relief from aches and pains is commendable at all times; but unless the relief obtained is accompanied by moral and spiritual reformation, complete healing has not been realized.

One of the most helpful experiences that ever comes to a mortal is his failure to find healing through matter. Then it is that he realizes the need of taking a forward step. Every effort that tends to increase one's faith and confidence in material things only operates to keep one away from the truth. Every admission of good supposed to be received from the use of drugs is one step farther into darkness; while every failure to receive help from matter is an advance towards the light. While this statement may not appeal to the zealous materialist, it is nevertheless true. It is wholehearted seeking that ascertains God's ways and means of blessing His children; and such seeking is not in evidence so long as one's faith is divided between drugs and Christ. Christian Science makes this plain to humanity; and for this reason it is phenomenally successful to-day in its mission of Christ-healing, while all systems founded on a divided faith, a so-called faith in two powers working in opposition to each other, spell only failure and disappointment. When one takes a dose of medicine, he virtually declares: There is something in me that does not believe in God or in His Christ, and to which the goodness of God can make no appeal. Whatever the apparent result of taking this medicine, the whole experience, from beginning to end, belongs to the realm of mortal consciousness, in which God plays no part.

The word "quackery" is sometimes used in connection with Christian Science practitioners by those ignorant of the modus of true healing. But what of the doctor who leaves the bedside of a patient, confident that this patient is hopelessly ill and equally confident that a nonintelligent drug is the highest gift within the province of men to bestow upon the sick? The only way to heal any one is to tell him something that he does not already know about health, and incidentally, something that he does not know about disease. If he is sick and believes it, can he expect very much comfort from a physician who believes that disease is as real and tangible as health? Is the Christian Science practitioner practicing contrary to the Master's teaching when he really does something for the patient by proving to him that disease is mental, and that it can therefore be healed by right mental activity? Because he knows that "sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened," as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 417), and that when awakened, the mental picture of health and strength will have supplanted that of disease and helplessness in the consciousness of the patient, and because he is mentally and spiritually equipped to arouse his patient to a higher plane of thinking, oftentimes instantaneously, must he be considered irregular?

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