Article August 13, 1932 Issue

Healing the Sick

IVA B. LINEBARGER

Much of our Master's ministry consisted in healing the sick. How this was accomplished was conjectural in the minds of religionists until his spiritual method was revealed through the discovery of Christian Science. In one paragraph in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," its author, Mary Baker Eddy, epitomizes his method of healing the sick thus (pp. 476, 477): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."

Who or what was "the sick"? A thorough study of this statement reveals the fact that the man whom Jesus beheld, the perfect likeness of God, was not sick; hence needed no healing. Then, the sickness must have been in the "sinning mortal man" that mortals believed they saw. But is man the spiritual and perfect likeness of God and also a sinning and sick mortal? Such has been the false religious teaching with many; but upon further study of the passage referred to we learn that Jesus beheld the perfect, spiritual man not as a counterpart of a mortal man, but right in the place where a sinning mortal man seemed to be. He saw not a dual personality, both material and spiritual, mortal and immortal, but one kind of man only, the spiritual likeness of God. To him mortal man did not exist, except as a false concept in the minds of mortals, ignorant of the truth of being.

Is it not plain, then, that there is in reality no sick man to be healed, but only an erroneous belief of man to be corrected? Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 377): "The author never knew a patient who did not recover when the belief of the disease had gone. Remove the leading error or governing fear of this lower so-called mind, and you remove the cause of all disease as well as the morbid or excited action of any organ. You also remove in this way what are termed organic diseases as readily as functional difficulties."

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The Open Door
August 13, 1932
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