The Real Source of Help in Healing

Christian Scientists welcome the manifestly increasing recognition among physicians of the importance of thought in relation to disease. In a recent newspaper one physician writes, "The public has come to know that the mind is a potent factor in creating both mental and physical disease." Another the health officer of a large American city, says in a pamphlet:

The health of the world, individual and community, would be far better, if it were not for so much petty meanness.... Smallpox, yellow fever, or cholera, singly or all together, have never created such havoc or wrought such damage as unkindness. ... Public health departments might with propriety and decorum enter this new and slightly worked field of "Do unto others."

A third physician is quoted as saying before the medical society of another great city:

There are mental elements involved in such ailments as gastric ulcers, asthma, heart trouble, syphilis, and tuberculosis, that are no less important than those in frank psychoses. ... We see then that Christian Science, for example, has a far greater scientific justification than is generally granted.

It is natural, and of course in accord with the ethical and technical traditions of the medical profession, that many physicians, having observed in some measure how certain types of thought contribute to disease, should endeavor by all possible means to correct and prevent such thought on the part of their patients; and the results, in the ordinary practice of medicine, unquestionably point to the soundness of such endeavor. It is well known, for instance, that many "family" physicians, not only recently but for a long time past, have worked skillfully in this way. By their confidence they have quieted their patients' fears, by their kindness helped their patients to be more kind, by some bright new unselfish interest aided them in forgetting themselves. And the patients' physical condition has consequently improved.

Christian Science raises no question as to the possibility of such results, but rather explains them. It shows that disease is not only something that can be aggravated or produced by wrong thought, but that it is wrong thought externalized on the body. As Mary Baker Eddy, the beloved Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 411 ): "Disease is an image of thought externalized. The mental state is called a materia! state. Whatever is cherished in mortal mind as the physical condition is imaged forth on the body." It follows that improvement in thought, that is spirit utilization of thought, as the practice of Christian Science continually proves, is the scientific means of improving the body.

The great contribution of Christian Science to the healing art, however, is not only that it clearly sets forth this fact, and encourages all its students to make use of it, but that it shows how the needed improvement of thought is to be attained—attained adequately under all conditions. This, of course, is the help that has been most needed. How many people, including physicians, have seen in some instance that the demand was for a change of thought—release from fear, mental weariness, depression, or something of that kind —and have not seen how the change could be accomplished! The difficulty has been that they have not learned to look outside the human mind for help; they have accepted its limitations as inevitable, and consequently have been somewhat in the position of thirsty men with nothing outside themselves to look to for refreshment. But Christian Science, as multitudes of its students gratefully testify, supplies the needed spring. Christ Jesus clearly referred to this source outside the human sense of self and beyond the ordinary human ways and means when he said, "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."

The spring which supplies the needful refreshment under all conditions, Christian Science shows, is the divine Mind, or God, who is ever present and ever fully available. As the individual awakens through Science from the belief that he is limited and material, and recognizes his true selfhood as one with this Mind, forever expressing its inspiration, intelligence, love, and harmony, the clouds of wrong thinking melt away, and he experiences the help he needs. Instead of being left to straighten out his thinking in the face of evil conditions, he perceives that in absolute reality there are no evil conditions, because of the allness of God, good. Not hate but love, he sees, is natural for him, not meagerness but greatness of thought, not lack in any respect, but the profoundly satisfying affluence of Soul.

Different as these spiritual facts are from those commonly accepted by mankind, including the medical profession, they are nevertheless proving to be of the greatest practical value in healing the sick. For people of most widely varying backgrounds and training continually find that they can grasp these facts, and accept them with deep conviction. And proportionally as they have done this they have been truly helped.