Many people are beginning to recognize the link between thought and experience, including health. But sometimes they find the implications disturbing. Does this correlation mean that sick people are necessarily more wicked than anyone else?

In Medical World News Dr. Howard M. Spiro, professor of medicine at Yale University, wrote: "The emphasis today on personal responsibility for one's own health is admirable as long as it doesn't turn into guilt for getting sick. . . . Increasingly, disease is seen as punishment for bad behavior . . . ." ^{Medical World News, January 7, 1980, quoted in Detroit Free Press, March 16, 1980.}

Undoubtedly some diseases are directly attributable to various degrees of sin, and Christianly scientific healing has to include a change of heart and motivation. Indeed, sin-induced disease can sometimes be a powerful incentive for this change of thought. Christian Science shows how wrong thinking can be acknowledged and repudiated through the redeeming power of the Christ. Then the feeling of guilt is purged, and the attendant suffering disappears.

But it is an oversimplification to assume that all disease is the result of moral fault. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, tells us, "The procuring cause and foundation of all sickness is fear, ignorance, or sin." ^{Science and Health, p. 411.} Our own experience affirms this is so. A child who was a pupil in a Christian Science Sunday School once found this out for herself when there was an epidemic at her school. Through prayer, she herself was quite untouched by contagion, but she said to me very thoughtfully, "You know, it isn't the naughty children that have got it!"

What made the better-behaved children suffer? Not bad behavior, but just their unthinking acquiescence in others' thoughts and fears for them. Mankind typically views disease as being quite indiscriminate and induced solely by material conditions, irrespective of thought. The textbook explains how to counteract this unjust sentence: "God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion. If man seems to incur the penalty through matter, this is but a belief of mortal mind, not an enactment of wisdom, and man has only to enter his protest against this belief in order to annul it. Through this action of thought and its results upon the body, the student will prove to himself, by small beginnings, the grand verities of Christian Science." ^{Ibid., p. 384.}

Had these children, or someone on their behalf, understandingly made this mental protest, they need not have continued to suffer. The effectiveness of this scientific method has been proved many times. Once I had a small proof of it myself. I went out on a rainy day and got very wet. The next morning I woke up with a cold. Immediately I thought: "Well, I didn't do anything wrong yesterday by going out into the rain, so I don't have to accept any penalty." The next time I thought about the cold it had gone.

The mental protest that is needed in such a case isn't dependent on human reasoning or willpower. It must be based on a deep conviction of the wisdom, justice, and love of God—not a vindictive God always waiting to punish, not an indulgent God willing to pardon without correction, but a patient, gracious God, always helping us to get things right.

Christian Science isn't a negative, condemnatory religion. It says to those coming to it for help: "Whatever your misconception of yourself may be, you can change your thinking and living. You can give up your false belief. You can understand that in reality you are the child of God—sinless, fearless, wise, innocent alike of unhealthy thoughts and their unhealthy symptoms. And you have a God who helps you prove this."

This new sense of man's true nature and potential as an individual incorporeal idea governed by Mind and reflecting only this Mind loosens and lifts human thought. It helps free people from responding to mortal mind's fears, doubts, and inhibitions, its inertia and self-justification, its stresses and strains. And it also helps people to see their past experience in a different perspective so that they are better able to face up to wrongdoing, forgive themselves, and go forward free and healthy. As Mrs. Eddy writes: "It is error to suffer for aught but your own sins. Christ, or Truth, will destroy all other supposed suffering, and real suffering for your own sins will cease in proportion as the sin ceases." ^{Ibid., p. 391.}

The story of the palsied man whom Christ Jesus healed illustrates this point. ^{See Matt. 9:2-8 .} Jesus didn't reproach the man for sin or condemn him to perpetually suffer from it. Instead he said, "Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee." And when scribes questioned the power of the Christ to forgive sin, Jesus proved his authority by healing both sin and debility: "Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house," the Master commanded. And the man was able to rise, both physically and morally.

Jesus' actions don't imply that this person's sins didn't matter or that they could be pardoned without being corrected. But the Master's clear view of man's sinless nature helped the invalid to overcome sin and leave it behind. Jesus was always confident that sin and sickness were powerless before God and His idea.

And, of course, not all the people Jesus healed were immoral. Some were afraid and insecure; some were ignorant; some were mentally ill. Jesus could detect each person's particular thought and need, not by psychological analysis, but by spiritual perception. And he healed people by this same perception, which revealed to him man's unsullied perfection as God's child.

The Christ is ever available to operate on our behalf, even though Jesus is no longer present in person. The purpose of prayer isn't to pin blame or to allocate rewards and penalties. The purpose of prayer is to liberate, and to heal both sickness and sin.

The scientific understanding of the link between thought and experience doesn't make one feel guilt-ridden. Rather, it opens the way to healing and better health, because it shows people the mental source of their troubles and how to remedy them through the Christ.