In reply to the article entitled "Apostolic Gift Found...

H. Cornell Wilson

New York Sun

In reply to the article entitled "Apostolic Gift Found Dormant, not Withdrawn," in a recent issue, permit us to call attention to the fact that both theology and medicine had been in vogue for many centuries when Jesus of Nazareth appeared on the scene, healing by spiritual means alone all manner of sin, sickness, and deformity. He even raised the dead. Doubtless most of those healed and saved had in times past resorted to material methods of some kind in the hope of finding relief, and theology and medicine in Jesus' day were doubtless put to the same shifts to explain his healing work as they are today to explain Christian Science healing to their adherents.

Jesus did not employ medicine. Despite this, however, it is not recorded that he failed to heal in a single instance. If medicine had been the way to effect this result, he certainly would have employed it. But if by spiritual means he healed cases which otherwise could not be healed, he must have had the more effective remedy. He made it known that "no man can serve two masters: . . . Ye cannot serve God and mammon." How preposterous it would be, therefore, to proceed from a material basis, with all the limitations this implies, to aid a spiritual system founded upon the scientifically Christian basis of Jesus' teachings!

If spiritual healing is, as the joint committee concludes, the same as mental suggestion and other so-called human mind methods, the report resolves itself into a veritable declaration that Jesus employed mesmerism or hypnotism, thereby renewing the charge of the Pharisees that he healed through "Beelzebub the prince of the devils." Now, since the human mind causes sin and sickness, it cannot heal them, for Satan will not cast out Satan, even as Jesus said. Jesus distinctly declared that of his own self he could do nothing, that it was the divine and not the human will that did the works credited to him in the New Testament.

The doubt expressed by the committee as to whether moral excellence in healers or the healed was essential to success, again brings into question Jesus' method. The Master asked, "For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?" implying that his system healed both sin and disease by the same process. One cannot be helped physically by Christian Science without at the same time being improved morally. The lives of those who become Christian Scientists undergo an improvement which witnesses to this fact.

If the joint committee takes the stand that God is able to heal functional but not organic diseases, it virtually admits that God is all-powerful on some occasions but powerless on others. The Scriptures declare that God is omnipotent, and "the same yesterday, and today, and forever." Therefore, with God one disease may be as readily healed as another. To admit otherwise, would be to declare that Jesus could walk on one kind of water but not on another; that he could heal one kind of leprosy but not another; that he could raise a person who died in one way but not one who died in another. Such logic has not a foot on which to stand.

The fact is, popular systems of theology and medicine find themselves facing a dilemma. Either they must deny the authenticity of Scriptural records of healing and Jesus' iterated and reiterated injunction to his followers that healing the sick would be one of the necessary and inevitable signs of discipleship throughout all ages, or they must accept these records as authentic, and thereby admit that Christian Science, discovered and founded by Mrs. Eddy, and recorded by her in the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," is fulfilling prophecy, and that Christian healing has, through Mrs. Eddy's discovery, been successfully practised for nearly fifty years. While hesitating about which horn of the dilemma to grasp, however, theology and medicine are being put to ludicrous shifts in order to explain to questioners the healing effects of Christian Science.

"Must Christian Science come through the Christian churches as some persons insist?" asks Mrs. Eddy on page 131 of the text-book. She answers: "This Science has come already, after the manner of God's appointing, but the churches seem not ready to receive it, according to the Scriptural saying, 'He came unto his own, and his own received him not.' . . . As aforetime, the spirit of the Christ, which taketh away the ceremonies and doctrines of men, is not accepted until the hearts of men are made ready for it."

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