Article September 17, 1949 Issue

HEALING THROUGH REGENERATION

NEIL MARTIN

In adult class in psychology in the extension division of a large university, the instructor asserted that Christian Science is healing ninety per cent of the diseases of the human system. A Christian Scientist among his students attempted to correct his estimate by noting on her examination paper that to assume that Christian Science operates only ninety per cent of the time would impose a limitation upon God's omnipotence. The teacher defended his theory, however, insisting that Christian Science is successful because it is a psychology which appeals to a certain mentality, and that while it can therefore correct the functional and emotional maladjustments which compose most human illness, it cannot, however, be expected to heal organic disease.

Although grateful for the growing recognition that Christian Science heals, students of this Science will detect in this instructor's appraisal of it a common misconception of the nature of Christian Science healing, They know, and are proving, that it is not psychological in the generally accepted sense of a science that deals with the aspects of the human mind. They know that it is not the uncovering and analysis of errors in human consciousness and their correction with other human traits. They know that it is not faith cure, as such. Nor is it a system of suggestive therapeutics, mesmeric in effect. It is healing through spiritual regeneration, the revelation in individualized consciousness of the truth of man's unity with and inseparability from the Mind which is God.

Christian Science heals through the understanding of God and of man's unity with Him. It heals through the acknowledgment that God is the one perfect Mind, or cause and that all that exists is the effect of that cause. "The Christian Scientist, understanding scientifically that all is Mind, commences with mental causation, the truth of being, to destroy the error," Mary Baker Eddy explains in the textbook of Christian Science, "Science and Health with Key to the "Scriptures" (p. 423). And she adds, "This corrective is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system."

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