Article September 24, 1949 Issue

SPIRITUAL UNDERSTANDING REVERSES SENSE TESTIMONY

HARRIETTE MELDRIM LAKE

In the eleventh chapter of John's Gospel is the account of Lazarus of Bethany, who was taken sick and succumbed to the sickness and died. When Jesus arrived, he refused to accept the evidence before him, but commanded that the stone be rolled away from the mouth of the cave in which Lazarus was buried. Then the Master prayed, and his prayer was not a petition to God to restore the life of Lazarus, but rather a prayer of thanksgiving to God. After this "he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth." And when Lazarus appeared, Jesus said to those who stood by, "Loose him, and let him go."

Jesus knew that it was not a law of God which had condemned Lazarus to death, and his realization of the allness of Life, God, and of man's oneness with it, as well as the utter impotence of any supposed mind apart from God, freed Lazarus from the bonds of mortality. Mary Baker Eddy explains Jesus' method of healing in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." She says (p. 75), "Jesus restored Lazarus by the understanding that Lazarus had never died, not by an admission that his body had died and then lived again." And she continues, "Had Jesus believed that Lazarus had lived or died in his body, the Master would have stood on the same plane of belief as those who buried the body, and he could not have resuscitated it."

Thus Christian Scientists today are demonstrating the truth of harmonious being by realizing the falsity of the testimony of the material senses in all the varied forms in which this testimony is presented. To the extent that they know, as Jesus knew, that man is perfect now, because his heavenly Father is perfect, will they be able to follow in the Master's footsteps and do his works.

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