"Christian Science rests on proof, not profession. It is not a theory, but a demonstrative system of healing, and it must be supported by proof of its power to heal. It is only in this way that the false Scientist and the true are discerned, and the people undeceived."
This department of the Journal can be made, perhaps, the most interesting and convincing of any, to inquirers in Christian Science, and the most instructive to Scientists. But to make it so, each must do his or her part in the report of cases.
Many persons have been deterred heretofore from reporting cases, by an unwillingness to put themselves prominently before the public; also, by the fact that reports of cases have sometimes been too much in the nature of certificates to a supposed personal power of the healer, instead of testimonies to the power of Truth. The person healed is naturally grateful, inclined to give undue prominence to personality, and to the external features of the case on which his own attention was mainly fixed. Such reports have no value for the body of Scientists, and depreciate Science with the outside public, who are apt to regard them either as made of the benefit of the healers mentioned, or much in the light of endorsements of a novel patent medicine.
