Everyone who has worked in a garden, or on a farm, knows how futile it is to cut off the top of a weed, and fail to cut its root. The hidden root remains to sprout again. The one sure way to be rid of the weed is to destroy its root.

So it is with sickness and disease. It need lessen in no way one's respect for the honest and sincere efforts of those engaged in material methods of healing to point out that such systems have failed to discover the root cause of ill-health. Their efforts are sincerely directed to free men from discords, the primary cause of which they do not know.

Christian Science counsels its adherents to hold an attitude of genuine good will toward the medical profession. Mary Baker Eddy held honest medical practitioners in the highest personal regard. She realized that they are sincerely devoting their lives to help heal the ills of men. That faith in them as individuals, or faith in their methods, oftentimes produces a measure of relief for the individual, can be readily admitted. But the important fact remains that the system they employ deals only with material effects, called diseases, never with the primary cause of those effects. Humanity's need, if it is ever to have lasting freedom from recurring ill-health, is a healing system that cuts the root cause of all disease. Until the root is uncovered and destroyed, it remains to propagate and perpetuate its offshoots of affliction.

Christian Science uncovers the root of all disease, and shows how to destroy it. The root is the evil, carnal, mortal mind. Says Mrs. Eddy, "The basic error is mortal mind" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 405). Here is the negative opposite of the true Mind that is the Life, the substance, and the God of man. There is nothing in positive Mind to make or impose disease. Disease is inherent only in the negative, unintelligent sense of mind. The fear, hate, deceit, greed, and sin of this mindless mind become externalized in the physical effect called disease.

Most physicians recognize that a patient's thinking has much to do with his bodily condition. The "rest cure" is often prescribed to permit a disturbed mentality to relax and quiet down, with the hope that the body will respond. Dr. George W. Crile, when head of the Cleveland Clinic, said, "Man cannot fear, he cannot hate, he cannot worry intellectually—he fears with all his organs." Dr. Crile saw that the material body is one with material thought, and expresses the thought that constitutes it. But in the attempt to improve sickly human thought, medical practice falls short. Possibly a sea voyage, exercise, medicine, a diverting avocation is prescribed. One material effect or condition is used to displace a less agreeable one. But the patient's acceptance of and subservience to the human mortal mind, the root of all disease, is left untouched. The mortal is left still fearing and believing more in the power of ungodly matter and material forces than he trusts his God, the intelligent, responsible cause of his being.

Suppose a case of measles. A physician, believing that man is born of and lives in matter and can be afflicted by material forces with disease, looks to the body to tell him what is the condition of the patient. Matter, he believes, has made, embodied, and afflicted the patient. Some other form of matter he hopes may remove or lessen the affliction. The inconsistency of believing that matter can both afflict and cure man is not recognized.

The Christian Scientist looks not to matter to inform him of the patient's true condition. He turns away from matter and material effects to Mind, the intelligent cause of man. He obeys the Scripture, "Ask me...concerning my sons." He reasons from God, Spirit, Mind, the only positive cause. Because God is intelligent, harmonious, and good, and man— according to the Scriptures, including Jesus' teachings—is God's son, image and likeness, he deduces and affirms that measles, like all sickness, cannot be in God or in His man, but is a falsity of ignorant, material belief, which the true ideas of existence displace and dissolve.

Thus in Christian Science practice the true idea of God and man, cause and effect, is arrayed against the mistaken material concept of man as a mortal attacked by afflictive forces and trying, without God's help, to find his freedom therefrom. As the spiritual truth is realized, the material lie called measles yields, and a healthy body results. Why should men believe ignorant matter can resist the curative forces of intelligence, Mind?

Jesus healed easily and quickly all kinds of disease, yet he made nothing of material symptoms. He carried no medicine kit. He wrote no material prescriptions. He knew the impossibility of putting medicine on thought. What did he do? He rebuked sickness as a lie. He commended the patient's faith in God. Often he told him to rise and express normal activity. His emphasis was never on disease, but always on man's God-given dominion over it. His method was understanding reliance on spiritual power, Mind-power, never on material methods. He came to show us the true way, the Father's way, the only way to destroy disease at its root. He forecast its uprooting when he said, "Every plant which my Father hath not planted shall be rooted up." It is this uprooting that Christian Science is here to do and is doing. The God-revealed way to perpetual health is its gift to mankind.

Paul Stark Seeley