Editorial February 28, 1976 Issue

Consenting to Health

Peter J. Henniker-Heaton

Shortly after the building of the Extension of The Mother Church in 1906 a church member wrote to Mrs. Eddy: "One feature about the work interested me. I noticed that as soon as the workmen began to admit that the work could be done, everything seemed to move as by magic; the human mind was giving its consent. This taught me that I should be willing to let God work."^{Quoted in Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 61;}

Much the same occurs in Christian Science healing. There is nothing in God's law that requires healing to be delayed. There is no thought or attitude in divine Mind, God, that requires a process of time for recovery. The suggestion that healing must be postponed is a false claim put forward by mortal mind, a supposed mind working through the medium of matter and opposing itself to the one divine Mind, the only true Mind of man. As mortal mind and its suggestions are identified as without any real existence, human thought admits the possibility of present healing and consents to the eternal spiritual fact of health, sustained by divine Mind. Then healing is experienced.

In two striking passages in Science and Health Mrs. Eddy exposes the pretensions to power of any mind apart from the divine Mind. First she writes: "The human mind has no power to kill or to cure, and it has no control over God's man. The divine Mind that made man maintains His own image and likeness." Then she begins the next paragraph: "That mortal mind claims to govern every organ of the mortal body, we have overwhelming proof. But this so-called mind is a myth, and must by its own consent yield to Truth. It would wield the sceptre of a monarch, but it is powerless. The immortal divine Mind takes away all its supposed sovereignty, and saves mortal mind from itself."^{Science and Health, pp. 151-152;}