INTERVIEWER: In his book, "The Need to Believe," Murdo Ewen Macdonald says: "For the ordinary man to-day religion is a last ditch recourse, something he turns to in desperation when nothing else offers him any hope." [Copyright, 1959, Murdo Ewen Macdonald.] We would be interested in your comments on this.

SPEAKER: Prayer should not be our last resort; it should be our first resort. I say this because prayer is not just for emergencies, but for every day. It is not just pleading with God as one would plead with a parent or with a judge. Prayer is understanding the law of God that heals.

INTERVIEWER: You, as a Christian Scientist, would say that prayer heals disease. Can you explain why?

SPEAKER: Yes, let me review the points that were highlighted in our last three programs: The first brought out that disease itself is basically mental, that is, mental in origin and mental in effect; the second brought out that disease is overcome by spiritualizing consciousness, by bringing it into harmony with God; and last week's program explained that this process of spiritualization brings to light what actually already is, namely that man is spiritual and normal, as God's likeness. Now, all this is prayer, and this is why we can safely rely on prayer for healing.

INTERVIEWER: Doesn't this put very heavy demands on prayer?

SPEAKER: No, no greater demand than Christ Jesus himself made on prayer. He told his disciples, "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give" (Matt. 10:8). And he also said, "The things which are impossible with men are possible with God" (Luke 18:27). It is a matter of Scriptural record that, through prayer, Jesus healed all kinds prayer, Jesus healed all kinds of conditions: the blind, the lame, the paralyzed, the deformed, the sinful. Furthermore, he encouraged his disciples to follow his example and went so for as to say that this applied to all who believed.

INTERVIEWER: Doesn't effective prayer require believing in something very deeply?

SPEAKER: Yes, but belief, regardless of how deep it may be, is not enough. The actual understanding of God and man and of how God's law governs all constitutes effective prayer. Such prayer is not something vague and intangible. It is specific, systematic, and definite. It includes the use of spiritual facts to correct false concepts of health manifested on the body. These spiritual facts or rules of Christian Science include affirming understandingly what God is and having an awareness of God's omnipresence. They include shutting out physical sense evidence and being willing to listen to what God is telling us.

We need to affirm that which is true, spiritually true, of God and of man's relationship to Him and then to deny, refuse to accept in consciousness, the physical sense evidence, which would try to refute that. We specifically deny it from the standpoint of the allness of God, good, and the fact that it has no genuine reality in God's sight. And, certainly, if it has none from the standpoint of God's knowledge, it has none from the standpoint of man's knowledge.

Prayer is not a matter of pleading with God to somehow change a sick person into a well person. Instead, prayer is seeing man as God actually made him, spiritual, whole, perfect.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me, can we actually see a sick man as being well?

SPEAKER: This is what we do. We exchange the mortal view of man as sick, material, and sinful for the true view of man as a spiritual idea, as God's own likeness. God's creation is already spiritual and perfect, and the Bible makes this clear. This means, then, that man's well-being is spiritual, God-given. It is something that is already established. From this, it is obvious that man's health must be maintained eternally by God, by infinite Spirit and Life, the source of all being.

Such reasoning follows the example of Jesus. Note how Mary Baker Eddy refers to the Master in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 476, 477): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour sawGod's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."

INTERVIEWER: What actually restores health through this approach? Is it faith, or what is it?

SPEAKER: Well, faith is needed; but it isn't faith alone. The primary ingredient is a deep understanding of God, an understanding through which we experience the power of God. Healing, you see, results from the action of the Christ, or Truth, which brings human consciousness into harmony with God.

INTERVIEWER: I wonder if you have an illustration in mind as to just how this all takes place—how this approach to healing actually works.

SPEAKER: Yes. A woman in Indiana had an experience which illustrates this very well, it seems to me. She had been confined to bed about three months when a lung specialist told her that she had tuberculosis in its beginning stages. A friend of her mother offered her a copy of Science and Health. She began reading it, more from curiosity than for healing. The chapter on Prayer gave her a new concept of God as Love. She gained the assurance that God loves all His children and that that certainly included her.

From this she began to realize that it was not a matter of asking God for something; she had to understand Him; she to love Him. For the first time in her experience, she glimpsed the close relationship of God and man. She saw that her reason for existing is to express the qualities of God, to express the nature of divine Love. Acting upon this, she made an effort to express good, not evil; health, not sickness; love, not criticism, in her thinking and her relations with others. She saw that this was praying without ceasing.

Life then began to take on new meaning. Three weeks after the commencement of her study of Christian Science, she was moved to her parents' home many miles away. Her parents, who were not Christian Scientists, called a local doctor, who asked that she be hospitalized for tests and X rays. The morning she was moved to the hospital, she felt an influx of spiritual light, an overwhelming power of regeneration. Her heart was filled with gratitude to God for His goodness.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me, how about the tests? What did they result in?

SPEAKER: They showed that she was completely free of the condition, to the surprise of those examining her. Within a few weeks she regained her normal strength, and the healing has been complete and permanent.