Editorial March 3, 1928 Issue

Speedy Healing

Albert F. Gilmore

Students of the four Gospels can scarcely fail to recognize that with one or two exceptions the healings of sin and disease performed by Christ Jesus were immediate, instantaneous. Of the leper who approached him coming down from the mountain where he had delivered the most important sermon of all time, it is written that when Jesus touched him with his hand "immediately his leprosy was cleansed." Again, of the two blind men who begged mercy of the Master, it is recorded that when he touched their eyes, "immediately their eyes received sight." The mother of Simon's wife, ill of the fever, was immediately healed when Jesus "took her by the hand, and lifted her up."

These and other instantaneous healings performed by Christ Jesus raise an important query with all who are trying to follow in his footsteps by reproducing, so far as possible, his works. How can I improve my healing work, making it speedy, even instantaneous, definite and final? are the questions which every earnest practitioner of Christian Science is asking himself, and, without doubt, seriously. Perhaps in no passage from Mrs. Eddy's writings does this question find more complete answer than on page 16 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she writes, "Only as we rise above all material sensuousness and sin, can we reach the heaven-born aspiration and spiritual consciousness, which is indicated in the Lord's Prayer and which instantaneously heals the sick." What is this heaven-born aspiration which breathes through the Lord's Prayer? Is it not a full faith in God, a faith without reservation, a perfect assurance of the presence of divine Love as Father-Mother God, always at hand, ever present, always available to meet human need—and all-powerful?

With the Nazarene this assurance was nothing less than absolute, because through repeated demonstrations God had been proved to be the divine healer. Did not his supreme confidence spring from an intense desire to realize God as the only presence and power; to recognize man's at-one-ment with God so completely as to shut out all suggestions to the contrary, all the false testimony regarding man which material sense would offer: to be so like God as to enable him perfectly to realize man's true status as the son of God? There can be no doubt that realization of this fundamental truth in the present day as of old would endow us with the ability to heal instantly any type of sin, any form of disease which might present itself. While the standard, to be sure, is high, it is not impossible of attainment.

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