Article September 27, 1958 Issue

"PRESENCE OF HEALTH"

FLORENCE FRASER LUDGATE

How do we regard health? As a comfortable arrangement of matter? A delicately balanced physical condition which age, accident, or sinister invasion of disease can disorganize, injure, or deform? Or do we understand health as the permanent condition of spiritual reality, the normal, constant, and characteristic state of all God's creation, dependent upon and inseparable from Him? Our honest answer to these questions is highly important to our well-being.

The Psalmist refers to God as "the health of my countenance" (Ps. 42:11). In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 120), "Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind; nor can the material senses bear reliable testimony on the subject of health."

If God, the ever-present, be indeed the health of our countenance, health cannot be absent. It cannot be lessened, worn out, impaired, or lost. It is as present as the divine Mind is present. Where God, Mind, is, there health is. God's entire reflection is both healthy and holy. One need not wait on matter, then, to reveal or produce health. True health is a spiritual quality, existing independently of that which is called matter, yet humanly objectified in complete normalcy and well-being.

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