Editorial June 12, 1978 Issue

Beyond belief into divine law

Nathan A. Talbot

Most health care systems gain a following because physical health improves, at least to some degree, when people adhere to the procedures. Without that apparent improvement, material medicine, acupuncture, hypnotism, or any other limited system would diminish. People will support what they believe helps them. More accurately stated, what people believe helps them becomes a kind of temporary support to them.

An important question needs to be asked about the long-term effect of systems of health care. When there is improvement, has genuine health replaced illness, or has a body with fewer surface symptoms replaced a body that once had more obvious symptoms? Speaking of hypnotism, for instance, Mrs. Eddy warns: "The hypnotizer employs one error to destroy another. If he heals sickness through a belief, and a belief originally caused the sickness, it is a case of the greater error overcoming the lesser. This greater error thereafter occupies the ground, leaving the case worse than before it was grasped by the stronger error."^{Science and Health, p. 104;}

Christian Science alone places healing on a scientific spiritual basis. It takes healing entirely out of the realm of belief and plants it firmly within the realm of God's law. Mortal experience is filled with so-called laws—theories based on the observation of recurring behavior. One kind of law, for example, might attribute illness to heredity. Another so-called law would demand that the symptoms disappear or be lessened when certain medical treatment is given. But neither the illness nor materially based treatment has true law underlying it. Human belief underlies both. "There is a law of God applicable to healing, and it is a spiritual law instead of material,"^{ibid., p. 463;} writes Mrs. Eddy.