Your interesting article on the subject of "Spiritual Healing"...

R. Ashley Vines, Committee on Publication for Victoria, Australia,—Melbourne

Brother Bill's Monthly

Your interesting article on the subject of "Spiritual Healing" has been brought to my notice by numbers of your readers—even readers beyond the State of Victoria. They are pleased to note the high esteem with which you regard Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, when you describe her as a woman who "must rank as one of the great benefactors of humanity."

However, several statements in your article might lead to a misunderstanding of the true position of Christian Science and of Mrs. Eddy's relationship to this religion, if these statements were to remain unchallenged.

The assertion that Christian Science "becomes a cult of self-interest" is not upheld by the opening sentence of the first chapter of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where Mrs. Eddy says, "The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love."

It is not found true amongst those experienced in the work of Christian Science churches and societies "that Christian Science makes its greatest appeal to those of middle and later years." Quite frequently the necessity for increased accommodation is felt, in the first instance, in the Sunday school.

Those who appealed to Jesus for healing did not feel their case "hopeless," otherwise they would not have made the appeal. And those who appeal to Christian Science discover when they are healed that their disease does not exist and that the philosophy of Christian Science is not "hopeless," but full of joy and peace that passeth all understanding. Is it "presumptuous folly" under such circumstances "to assert that disease does not exist"?

Christian Science has a definite challenge to the assertion that it is "very, very difficult to prove that all disease is contrary to the will of God." Christian men and women throughout the centuries have sought to annihilate every type of disease. Would they have dared, and would they continue to do so, were those diseases in accordance with God's will? Mrs. Eddy puts the case in this way (ibid., p. 229): "If the transgression of God's law produces sickness, it is right to be sick; and we cannot if we would, and should not if we could, annul the decrees of wisdom. It is the transgression of a belief of mortal mind, not of a law of matter nor of divine Mind, which causes the belief of sickness. The remedy is Truth, not matter,—the truth that disease is unreal."

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