Editorial November 21, 1977 Issue

For Successful Healing

Geoffrey J. Barratt

Successful spiritual healing needs strict adherence to its rules explained by Mary Baker Eddy in her writings. Departure from the rules of Christian Science she describes as quackery.

We need to know, for instance, that only one force—God's will—is actually at work on the real self of one who seems to mortal sense to be sick. To prove this, it is essential to identify the patient rightly—as the now-perfect spiritual creation of God, divine Principle. Having done so, we can deal with any claim that some power other than the one Principle can govern the individual. That supposed force may wear the mask of a local belief in epidemic, a medical diagnosis of irreversible decline of an organ—or a reluctance on the part of the patient to stand unreservedly for the presence and allness of Principle.

"Mental quackery," Mrs. Eddy says, "rests on the same platform as all other quackery. The chief plank in this platform is the doctrine that Science has two principles in partnership, one good and the other evil,—one spiritual, the other material,—and that these two may be simultaneously at work on the sick." ^{Science and Health with key to the Scriptures, p. 458;} But only one type of factor is really at work—the spiritual.