What Is Health?

George Shaw Cook

A group of physicians, including some of the most prominent members of the medical profession in Great Britain, sent to a conference recently held in the United States a message which included a statement to the effect that fear, self-indulgence, jealousy, and resentment are causes of disease. As reported by the press, the message also contained the following declaration: "Our immediate task is to teach patients that health is not mere absence of disease but includes a moral and spiritual foundation for life."

It is no disparagement of these enlightened physicians to say that over sixty years ago Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, wrote in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 404), "Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers."

Doubtless the leaven of spiritual truth in human consciousness has made it possible for intelligent, thoughtful persons, like the physicians above mentioned, to arrive at the conclusion that there are many erroneous mental states which result in so-called physical disease. The physicians have probably reached this conclusion mainly through observation, research, and experimentation, whereas Mrs. Eddy's final conclusions were the result of spiritual enlightenment, revealing to her the nature of the human mind and its phenomena.

The liberation of human thought by reason of the appearing of spiritual truth has enabled many to approximate the views forth in Christian Science with regard to the mental nature of disease. Thus we find a clergyman in California recently quoted as saying: "Health is often an emotional problem. Wrong emotions entertained, indulged, repeated, are potent causes of illness."

However, to recognize and admit that wrong thinking results in sickness is but one step in the direction of ridding mankind of disease. Freedom from human suffering can come only through seeing as unreal the erroneous beliefs that appear to cause the suffering. And that is why Mrs. Eddy, in the passage from Science and Health quoted above, points out that "neither material medicine nor Mind" can permanently help the one who is sick as the result of wrong thinking "unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers."

It is quite plain that material medicine or surgery can do nothing by way of changing, correcting, or destroying wrong thoughts. Material means may seem temporarily to relieve or even, apparently, to remove the effects of erroneous thinking, but they can do nothing to the cause, and as long as the cause continues to exist in belief, there is liability to the reappearance of the effect. It is obvious, therefore, that permanent healing of so-called physical diseases or defects can be brought about only through spiritual power—the of divine Mind. Perhaps the prophet Jeremiah understood this, in some degree, when he said, "Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved."

The physicians quoted at the beginning of this editorial set forth an important fact when they stated that their task "is to teach patients that health is not mere absence of disease," but that its foundation is moral and spiritual. On this point, also, it is notable that Mrs. Eddy preceded the physicians in this discovery by more than half a century, for on page 120 of Science and Health, which was first published in 1875, she says, "Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind; nor can the material senses bear reliable testimony on the subject of health." The Mind to which our Leader refers in the foregoing passage is of course infinite, divine Mind. Therefore, real health, being a quality of Mind, Soul, Spirit, is spiritual wholeness or perfection, and is to be found only in the spiritual realm and never in matter or a material body.

In their endeavor to establish more harmonious and healthful conditions in human experience, Christian Scientists are learning to be less concerned with the testimony of the material senses, whether that testimony indicates the presence of physical disease or of physical health. A normal bodily condition is, as a matter of course, preferable to an abnormal or diseased condition, and normal conditions are what Christian Science has established in the experience of many thousands of its students. And it has done this by revealing the fact that health is primarily spiritual, and that man created in the likeness of God, divine Mind, possesses and expresses perfect spiritual health or wholeness, now and always. Therefore in reality man is under no necessity for being healed or restored to health, because he exists forever at the standpoint of perfection.

George Shaw Cook

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