Editorial September 11, 1978 Issue

Keeping the initiative in treatment

Geoffrey J. Barratt

The great initiator, the only cause of all that really is, is God, eternal good. This is the basis on which sound, healing Christian Science treatment rests. The logical consequence of this truth is that disease and suffering, opposites of good, can take no initiative. They are illusions, not facts of being, and cannot dictate terms to—or impose conditions on—the real man, God's pure idea.

That God is the initiator of all being can't help making us treat disease confidently, to the degree we understand this fact. When we expose illnesses as causeless and unreal, as effectless and untrue, we have taken away their deceptive mask and any initiative they may have claimed to have. When we're healing ourselves or another through Christian Science prayer, we can and should refuse to dance to the jangle of mortal sense, claiming that man is physical, subject to illness and vulnerable to death. In the measure that treatment is founded in God, it—not the trouble—holds the initiative and calls the tune.

"The central fact of the Bible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power,"
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 131; writes Mary Baker Eddy. And the peak Bible illustration of this centrality is the towering healing work and life of Christ Jesus. He knew God as his Father, or infinite cause. He consistently spoke to disease with unwavering authority. His treatment of disease was immediate and spontaneous. His spiritual, scientific standpoint enabled him to see through the claims that suffering has being or existence. He accepted God as the Supreme Being, and he recognized that man partakes of God's being, evidencing only good.