Cause and Cure

John B. Willis

Christian people are frequently compelled to try to explain to themselves, if not to others, the reasons for the saddening delay in the healing of humanity's hurt. The centuries pass without any noticeable lessening of mortal ills; while the phases and aspects of evil are ever shifting, its blight remains. Some of the maladies which afflicted our fathers seem to have disappeared through faith-filled reliance on material remedies or the hygienic improvement of conditions, but for every ailment thus escaped from two new troubles have appeared; while, as the result of the more studied acquaintance with disease and its continuous exploitation in the interest of the trade in nostrums, the subjection of people in general to fear and their consequent dependence upon drugs and doctors, has vastly increased.

These facts are so unquestionable that today the saying of a celebrated physician, to the effect that it would be well if everything pertaining to materia medica were sunken in the sea, is quite as likely to awaken serious consideration as it is to beget a smile. Four thousand years of effort to banish physical disharmony has effected great changes in the catalogue of fashionable discomforts, but that it has decreased the number of diseases to which men are subject, or sensibly emancipated the race from the fear of them, even the most optimistic materialists would not claim.

Christian Science explains this fact in its recognition that men have been wrestling with phenomena when their attention should have been addressed to cause. It teaches that the only wise course to pursue in the effort to get rid of any ill, is to discover and dispose of the circumstance or thing which occasions it. There is nothing queer about this proposition, and yet many are exercised over its intimation that in the effort to heal the sick the medical profession has been indifferent to causation. They point by way of protest to the discovery that the mosquito is responsible for the spread of yellow fever, and to other achievements in the way of the determination and eradication of the sources of disease.

Among out and out materialists this protest has a reasonable basis. To the great majority who believe in the power of the poison which this winged innocent dispenses, it is of great significance that he should have been trapped, and the patient genius exercised in accomplishing this feat is to be duly credited. Unfortunately, however, the mosquito is not the only agency at hand to serve such ends, the number of germs, microbes, and the like, which according to educated belief are still free and intent on begetting sickness and suffering, is incalculable. Moreover, when one is informed that every time he eats, drinks, or breathes, he allows a horde of these enemies to enter his private domain, he begins to realize something of the tremendous handicap under which the materialist is trying to keep well.

Christian people, however, are not supposed to be materialists. They cannot forget that Christ Jesus identified sickness as attendant upon sin; that he healed it with the word of Truth; and that to its victim he said, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." Theoretically Christian people have always accepted this teaching that sin is the cause of all disharmony and disease; hence those of them who think logically must see that to treat sickness simply as a material phenomenon is to ignore the fundamental difficulty and therefore to fail to meet the human need. Further, they must come to see that the teaching of Christian Science, that "mortal mind, not matter [mosquitoes, etc.], contains and carries the infection;" "that the human mind alone suffers, is sick, and that the divine Mind alone heals" (Science and Health, pp. 153, 270), is the only tenable philosophy of cure, because it alone can effect the removal of cause. This gospel is very much more than a logical statement of the process of Christian healing. To unnumbered thousands it has become a demonstrated fact that the knowledge of God as apprehended in Christian Science can and will free men from every phase of sin and disease, and this has awakened a note of joy which is being "heard round the world."

John B. Willis.

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