Editorial May 31, 1941 Issue

Decisiveness in Treatment

Alfred Pittman

In one of the great passages in which she sets forth scientifically the healing method practiced by Christ Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy quotes these words of the Master's: "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him." Then she interprets the statement in its relation to the treatment of disease. She writes (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 390): "Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin." And she continues on the next page, "Blot out the images of mortal thought and its beliefs in sickness and sin."

"Blot out the images of mortal thought." That, Mrs. Eddy shows, is the essential healing work of Christian Science. There is no real disease. In actual being—the allness of God, Spirit—sickness is impossible, and man as the perfect expression of God cannot know such a condition. As it appears to human sense, therefore, sickness is a false mental picture, or illusion, which seems real to anyone only as that one accepts it as real. The scientific healing of disease is thus the rejection and obliteration of the illusion. As the falsity is understood and proved to be no part of consciousness, the body, which is but an objective aspect of human thought, responds, and health is restored.

The healing, as Christian Scientists well understand, is not accomplished by an intellectual process, or by any human means. "I can of mine own self do nothing," Jesus declared; but he also said, "The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." The illusion of disease disappears only as true intelligence appears, and this intelligence is ever the divine Mind, or Love. Therefore, the Christian Scientist, when called upon to heal disease, recognizes that his essential task is, not to struggle with it, as with something real, but to rise to an altitude of intelligence and love at which disease is seen to be nothing. He strives to prove more fully that he has no Mind but God. As this Mind's view of reality appears for him progressively, he sees all he needs to see concerning the character of the disease, and is enabled to reverse with full conviction all its false suggestions. In this manner are "the images of mortal thought" blotted out.

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