It is not an uncommon experience for Christian Scientists to entertain the belief that they can do better and quicker work for others than they can do for themselves. More than one earnest student has been, for the moment, discouraged by the suggestion that it is easier to heal others than to heal oneself. The great Teacher himself, at the climax of his supreme test, was assailed by the taunt: "He saved others; himself he cannot save;" and Job was reproached in these words, "Behold, them hast instructed many, and thou hast strengthened the weak hands. Thy words have upholden him that was falling, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees. But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest; it toucheth thee, and thou art troubled." The purpose of this argument is patent to the careful student of metaphysics. It is intended to accomplish the utter undoing of the Christian Scientist who believes in it. Its purpose is malevolent and it is the dictum of that devil of whom Jesus said, "He is a liar, and the father of it." The assertion, then, is a false one; we need not believe it, and this must be the saving truth that penetrates the black despair of those who have been gripped by the fear that they cannot save themselves.
A moment's consideration will show how wicked is this evil doctrine. We learn in Christian Science that it is every one's business to save his own life by refusing to know evil, by refusing to know that which is opposed to Life, refusing to accept and believe all the thousand and one arguments which are intended to separate us from God, and which induce the belief that there is something besides God,—some other life, some other presence, some other power and law. Now the process of salvation, as is quite evident, is entirely mental; it consists solely of knowing the truth about real being, and denying the false claims of a supposed existence apart from good. What we call healing, then, in Christian Science, is nothing else than an exhibition of right thinking, of supremely righteous knowing, which effaces the spurious evidence of discord; and while this healing is of tremendous importance to the so-called patient, it is of even greater importance to the practitioner, for every healing means that the practitioner has risen in thought to the point of realization that God is All and there is none beside Him.
The practitioner seems to be working for the patient, and so he is in a certain sense, but the real significance of his work is that he is saving his own life, rescuing his own sense of existence from the blight of mortality by refusing to believe the fictitious evidence that there is life, presence, reality, other than infinite good. Mrs. Eddy says that "disease should not appear real to the physician, since it is demonstrable that the way to cure the patient is to make disease unreal to him," and in the tenets of the church she speaks of "the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal" (Science and Health, pp. 417, 497).
