Article September 22, 1980 Issue

100 percent natural

BAYARD C. AUCHINCLOSS

The label reads "100 percent natural." It could be skin cream, medicine, or condensed fruit juice, but the inference is that the product might be beneficial or healing through its "naturalness."

Sounds good, and the product may seem to bring that temporary relief we hear so much about, if it's believed in enough. But healing? Real healing is entirely different, if we are to accept the remarkable record of Christ Jesus. His healings needed no material aids; they were divinely natural and simple. People suddenly found themselves well because Jesus saw and knew that they were already naturally perfect, not as material, fleshly beings but as real, spiritual ideas of God.

Jesus saw creation as God made it. He put aside the material view and sought inspiration directly from God, his Father. Jesus recognized imperfection as unreal. He saw beyond withered hands, blindness, deafness, insanity, and sin—that is, he saw through the material picture to the true image: man's wholeness and normality. To him, spiritual perfection was 100 percent natural in man. As Mrs. Eddy explains, "Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal; holiness, life, and health as the better representatives of God than sin, disease, and death."^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 200;}