"Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved," discriminates between spiritual and material healing. From God alone comes the true healing and the true salvation. The signs of the times would indicate a growing appreciation of this fact on the part of countless thousands. What is not of God fails to satisfy the higher human cravings. No quality of evil was ever known to accomplish good for any one. The cry of the Spirit is to come up higher; to find God and be really healed. Seeking relief from aches and pains is commendable at all times; but unless the relief obtained is accompanied by moral and spiritual reformation, complete healing has not been realized.

One of the most helpful experiences that ever comes to a mortal is his failure to find healing through matter. Then it is that he realizes the need of taking a forward step. Every effort that tends to increase one's faith and confidence in material things only operates to keep one away from the truth. Every admission of good supposed to be received from the use of drugs is one step farther into darkness; while every failure to receive help from matter is an advance towards the light. While this statement may not appeal to the zealous materialist, it is nevertheless true. It is wholehearted seeking that ascertains God's ways and means of blessing His children; and such seeking is not in evidence so long as one's faith is divided between drugs and Christ. Christian Science makes this plain to humanity; and for this reason it is phenomenally successful to-day in its mission of Christ-healing, while all systems founded on a divided faith, a so-called faith in two powers working in opposition to each other, spell only failure and disappointment. When one takes a dose of medicine, he virtually declares: There is something in me that does not believe in God or in His Christ, and to which the goodness of God can make no appeal. Whatever the apparent result of taking this medicine, the whole experience, from beginning to end, belongs to the realm of mortal consciousness, in which God plays no part.

The word "quackery" is sometimes used in connection with Christian Science practitioners by those ignorant of the modus of true healing. But what of the doctor who leaves the bedside of a patient, confident that this patient is hopelessly ill and equally confident that a nonintelligent drug is the highest gift within the province of men to bestow upon the sick? The only way to heal any one is to tell him something that he does not already know about health, and incidentally, something that he does not know about disease. If he is sick and believes it, can he expect very much comfort from a physician who believes that disease is as real and tangible as health? Is the Christian Science practitioner practicing contrary to the Master's teaching when he really does something for the patient by proving to him that disease is mental, and that it can therefore be healed by right mental activity? Because he knows that "sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened," as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 417), and that when awakened, the mental picture of health and strength will have supplanted that of disease and helplessness in the consciousness of the patient, and because he is mentally and spiritually equipped to arouse his patient to a higher plane of thinking, oftentimes instantaneously, must he be considered irregular?

Believing in the reality of evil to the extent of wanting to tell a person that he is sick or that he looks ill is not a healing potion for sick humanity. But with the pure, scientific consciousness of the Master, which enabled him to say to the crippled woman whom he had healed, that Satan had bound her for eighteen years,—a virtual admission that God never made or sent disease,—healing is being accomplished everywhere, and God, infinite Mind, is being glorified. Whoever accepts Christ Jesus as the Way-shower knows that he certainly taught us how to think about a so-called sick man; and this thinking, spiritually understood and applied, is known to bring about healing results that cannot be explained by the worldly-minded.

The true healing recorded in the New Testament and repeated to-day in the consecrated lives of Christian Scientists, cannot be materially explained. Even the modern professing Christian must radically change his mode of thinking before he can tell others how Christian Science heals the sick. It would be very helpful to him when called upon to explain the modus operandi of true healing, to stop long enough to ask himself the question, How did Jesus think on this subject? The moment he is humble enough to grasp Jesus' point of view, he can begin to think and to talk intelligently upon the subject, but not before. Thinking that man is sick to-day and well to-morrow requires little or no real intelligence to express itself. But to think and to know that man is forever spiritual, the image and likeness of God, and consequently never under the domination of Satan or evil, requires a higher order of intelligence than is usually exercised by the average thinker.

True healing is synonymous with reformation. A right explanation of how to heal involves the understanding of how to reform men. Learn how to bring about reformation of character, and you have learned the secret of true healing. No mortal ever experienced healing in Christian Science without being made better and inspired with loftier aims and ambitions. There is no experience on earth that means more in the emancipation and Christianization of the human race than true Christian Science healing. It is the realization of "God with us," rebuking all sin and healing every bodily ailment. Whoever makes light of Christian Science healing exposes his own lack of repentance and reformation of character to conform to the standard of the Master.

In a clipping taken from the Express, Denver, Colorado, and republished in the Christian Science Sentinel of November 10, 1923, we find this pertinent comment: "If you want to be healed, you must be healed by the power that made you, and that power is spiritual. Search your heart. You cannot be filled with God when you are filled with hatred, bad temper, or selfishness. Is God a reality to you—or, do you simply want your eye or ear healed?" This is a helpful prescription for all who are reaching out for the true healing. If it is God they are after, it is a sure proof that they desire to know the truth that makes free from sin as well as disease.

If Christian Science were simply a human cure-all for mortal ailments, there would be no serious objections to it from any source. But because it is the true healing, which takes cognizance of immorality as well as disease, and insists upon reformation of character in proof of its divine origin, the carnal mind, being "enmity against God," cannot consistently do otherwise than denounce what it imagines Christian Science to be. Meanwhile, the dignity and grandeur of Christian Science remain untouched by human opinion.

Copyright, 1924, by The Christian Science Publishing Society, Falmouth and St. Paul Streets, Boston, Massachusetts. Entered at Boston post office as second-class matter. Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized on July 11, 1918.