The sick can be healed by Christian Science prayer. This has been proved in innumerable instances for many decades.

We can heal the sick by understanding the illimitability of Spirit and the nothingness of matter, in which disease seems to inhere. But the method of Christian Science healing is not in manipulating human thought—its method is not merely to persuade or suggest to sufferers that their suffering is not true. Its method is scientific and spiritual and involves understanding and knowing immutable facts. It is not simply a verbal activity, either mentally or audibly verbal. Mrs. Eddy insists: "The sick are not healed merely by declaring there is no sickness, but by knowing that there is none." ^{Science and Health, p.447;}

Sickness is not healed by mortals shallowly talking about God, discussing His goodness and love. It is not healed by superficially conversing about "man's perfection as Mind's image," true as this is. Healing comes about through the deep knowing—the acknowledgment, feeling, and conviction—that God's allness has outlawed even the least instance of disease throughout all time and eternity.

Christ Jesus did not just talk about the nature of God and man. He healed. Decisively. Instantaneously. He didn't heal simply through nice talk. Or through merely believing in God's goodness, or through human reasoning, either expressed or silent. He healed through metaphysical and scientific prayer. In Mrs. Eddy's words, "It is neither Science nor Truth which acts through blind belief, nor is it the human understanding of the divine healing Principle as manifested in Jesus, whose humble prayers were deep and conscientious protests of Truth,—of man's likeness to God and of man's unity with Truth and Love." ^{ibid., p.12;}

Jesus' "deep and conscientious protests of Truth" healed because they were sustained and enforced by Truth itself. These protests, or prayers, were not human declarations or thoughts, but absolute spiritual acknowledgments of the verities of God and man.

If we today would heal metaphysically, we can take the lead from the Galilean healer. But let's be fully awake to the fact that this doesn't mean just chatting about Christian Science with those we would help—narrating some of our experiences in applying it, relating the healings of others, casually repeating phrases a lecturer may have used. In fact, engaging in and willingly listening to long conversations that would impress a merely emotional and personal sense of Science on our thought may even be anti-healing.

The consciousness that heals is the consciousness that is deeply spiritual and impersonal: the consciousness that aims to "know," not merely "declare." This is the consciousness the materiality of which is thinning out and is letting through the light of Spirit, the only healer.

To genuinely, profoundly, acknowledge and feel the truth of being is to experience the presence of the Supreme Being. Such silent realization, or prayer, heals because no imagining or arguing or apparent manifestation of material sense—whether it is evidenced as a bodily organ or a business or a relationship not operating rightly—can exist within or alongside the consciousness of the presence of God.

None of this means, let it be stressed, that the Christian Science healer should never voice the truth. The metaphysical truth that he knows can be helpfully and healingly communicated to the patient. The discussion or correspondence with the patient may include references to the Bible, to the writings of Mrs. Eddy, to points mentioned in the Christian Science periodicals, and so on.

The dialogue might well include some expressions of the patient's thought, too, and some of his views and responses to whatever is troubling him. Such interchange can, of course, be very useful to the healer in detecting, denying, and dissolving specific elements of error seemingly comprising the problem. But shallow, unrealized declarations, no matter how metaphysical the wording, can do little to relieve suffering. The truth that is voiced needs to be seen as authorized and empowered by divine Truth.

Viewed purely spiritually, Truth is the only speaker. The truths we seem to utter are effective to the extent that we see they have their roots in immortal Truth. Otherwise, are we not—in effect— breaking the commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain"? ^{Ex. 20:7;}

Divine Truth is the origin of all truth. The more we are assured of this the more our conversations with those we would help with Christian Science will be succinct, to the point, enlightening, spiritualizing, regenerative.

To grow in the ability to heal spiritually is to less and less depend on "talk" in doing so. James tells us, "If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain." ^{James 1:26.} The true metaphysical healer not merely declares words but knows (utterly and unreservedly realizes) the absolute and unresistible truths of being that originate in divine Truth, that stay within the infinite compass of divine Truth, and that heal because Truth, their source, is omnipotent.

Geoffrey J. Barratt