Article May 3, 1999 Issue

The key that unlocks and locks

Science and Health brings healing.

By David W. Barton

Recently, I woke in the middle of the night and was coughing quite a bit. As is my usual response in such circumstances, I prayed to be healed. This time as I prayed, my thought centered on what a key does.

Many truths from a book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, came to mind. These truths, or ideas, explain God's goodness, and the unreality of disease, helping us to manifest divine goodness in our lives, in our thoughts and deeds.

Some of those ideas, I could see, are presented as keys that unlock the spiritual meaning of Christ Jesus' message of health and wholeness in the Bible. But, I thought, a key also locks up and protects or saves. And when used to describe an idea, key means a main point or fundamental facts. "Peter the rock," as J. B. Phillips calls him, was given the keys of the kingdom of heaven when he identified Jesus as "Christ, the Son of the living God." Then Jesus told him, "It is on this rock that I am going to found my Church" (see Matt. 16:13–19, The New Testament in Modern English).

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