CHRISTIAN SCIENCE TREATMENT IS PRAYER
Any attempt to explain the nature of a Christian Science treatment would be presumptuous unless its clear purpose were to direct attention to the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. Particularly helpful in this connection is the section in the textbook captioned "Mental Treatment Illustrated" (pp. 410-442 ). Here those who would follow St. Paul's counsel to put off the old man (of error) and to put on the new man (of God), find the rules for scientific metaphysical treatment which ensure that result.
Every experienced Christian Scientist will have found, through demonstration, his or her own most successful use of the rules laid down. But none will have found success who have ignored the rules or have sought to reinterpret them. Since the discovery of Christian Science by Mrs. Eddy less than a century ago, multitudes of men and women have learned through turning to Christian Science in trial and triumph just how effective is a right comprehension of its Principle and practice. And they have been rewarded by their confidence in Mrs. Eddy's words (Science and Health, p. 1 ), "The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love."
Treatment in Christian Science is indeed prayer; and healing results from its revelatory teachings in regard to the true character of prayer. An important aspect of prayer in Science is the affirmation of the perfection of God and His creation—of man's inseparability from Life itself. To pray affirmatively is unceasingly to identify oneself as the individual spiritual idea of God, expressing the Divine Being. Affirmative prayer is based on the understanding that there is one all-embracing Mind, and that man reflects the unerring intelligence which is the primal quality of that Mind. Affirmative prayer includes a willingness to subjugate self-love to the beneficent influence of the Love that is God. It is a self-immolating desire to reflect more of God as Soul, and hence to express the Soul-derived qualities of perception, grace, and gratitude.
Such prayer, the Scientist finds, is rewarded in ways immediately perceivable in the human experience. For to pray scientifically is to see practical results. Scientific prayer regenerates character and redeems men from their false sense of sorrow, limitation, and sensuality. And it restores the normal action of the human mind and body.
The Christian Scientist should begin every treatment, as Mrs. Eddy directs, by allaying the fear of patients—fear engendered by the commonly accepted beliefs that evil is as real as good, that there are many sources of intelligence and hence many minds, and that what is known as matter is something in itself rather than just a name for a false concept of substance. The Scientist allays such fear by acknowledging the allness of God and the oneness of His creation. He affirms the indivisibility of God, the supreme cause, and the perfection of His universe, including man. He knows that there is a kinship between all ideas having their source in the one Mind; that since these ideas are good he cannot be separated from anything that is good. He clings to the fact that his individual consciousness, in its purity, is the reflection of the divine consciousness, Mind, Spirit. And in the proportion that he maintains his ground he finds himself naturally manifesting the spiritually mental qualities of health, soundness, integrity, rewarding activity, vigor, abundance.
The Christian Scientist does not, however, pray for himself alone. He knows that what is divinely true of himself is also divinely true of his neighbor, as Christ Jesus indicated in the second of his great commandments: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. 22:39 ). Obeying this commandment, the Master healed the sick and redeemed the sinner. Mrs. Eddy writes in the textbook (Science and Health, 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."
Jesus loved himself as the very image and likeness of the Father, and he loved his neighbor by attributing to him the same status. He recognized his own gifts and qualities, as well as his neighbor's, as God's expression of Himself through man. Jesus is our Exemplar. The Scientist has the ability to heal himself and others in the degree that he can behold, as Jesus did, "the perfect man" of God's creating, the man without whom God would be unexpressed.
The Scientist, in the course of his treatment, does not ignore the pretension of error to be as real as good. If men seem troubled, ill, in pain, what specifically is error saying? What specifically is the truth needed to destroy the error? As we glimpse our own or another's perfection as the child of God, error is uncovered for destruction. We then replace the false belief with its corrective counterfact.
Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, p. 428 ), "To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear,—this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true." Is this not a flawless statement of the goal which the practitioner seeks to achieve? And does it not broadly present the method of achieving it?
The Christian Scientist, understanding the integrated relationship of Mind's ideas, strives to be obedient to the Golden Rule. He knows that in each instance he must consider the comfort of the one who asks for support and healing. With compassion he seeks to lift the patient's thought from the false conviction of pain. He must not burden the sufferer with arguments that he is not presently prepared to receive. He knows that the Christ, Truth, is revealing itself directly to the patient and that he is there to bear witness to the truth —not to act as a mediator.
If the evidence of error seems very real, the Scientist clings the more firmly to the fact that there is really no disease to heal, only a point of view to change. Each step of the way the troubled one must be supported with the assurance that the Christ, the idea of God, is ever present, speaking to the receptive human consciousness. As this consciousness is illumined by the Christ, it becomes aware of man's perfection—of his oneness, or unity, with God. "False trusts" are obliterated and "material evidences" are changed. The beliefs of sickness, loneliness, lack of good, disappear like the phantoms they are. This is healing—the certain effect of correctly and confidently applying the rules given for treatment in the Christian Science textbook.
