CHRISTIAN SCIENCE declares and demonstrates that God, the infinite, omnipotent Mind which was so fully manifested by Christ Jesus, heals the sick today, and is "the savior of the body," to quote St. Paul, as well as the savior, or redeemer, of that human sense which has long been called the soul. This Science also declares that the physical ills of the human body are not products of the flesh, but that all bodily discords, all abnormal conditions, are the results of fear or wrong thinking. They are caused by false beliefs which manifest themselves on the human body, according to the nature of the belief. Hence their cure must be mental, wrought through the right understanding of cause, rather than the giving of attention to effects. If the corrective attention proceeds from a right understanding of God and of the true spiritual status of man, it results in the destruction of the mental influence which claims to produce the disorder, and the malady then vanishes.
All healing work is largely mental, even when the work is alleged to be accomplished by material means. Practitioners in materia medica do not treat simply the effects which manifest themselves on the sick man, woman, or child. While they address much attention to the visible or invisible effects of which the patients may complain, still their treatments are largely mental, because they make demands on thought-processes, including appeals to the faith of the patient or of those in charge. It is what the physician, the patient, parents, or others think about the drug or the drugging system, and what the general mortal thought claims to set in action as the result of administering a drug, which produces any seeming effect.
Many, discovering the powerlessness of large doses of drugs, take a slight step forward to homeopathy, where drugs become almost negligible and mental influence is given more power. Others go farther by dropping all material medication and relying on the human mind. Then the attempts to heal become humanly mental;but those who pursue this method are still groping in the dark, because they are not only ignorant of causation, but also lack an understanding of the one true spiritual process of mental healing which was taught and practised by Christ Jesus, and is today revealed anew in Christian Science. All mental or material methods aside from the Christ-method are unscientific, because they appeal to human will and are mesmeric; they seek to utilize and hence are limited by mortal mind, which, from the spiritual standpoint, is not Mind at all.
