To every earnest worker in the field of Christian Science there is likely to come not once but many times the question as to its possibilities in meeting promptly and effectually the false claims of evil to place and power. He is a skeptic indeed who today, in the face of unnumbered thousands of testimonies of the healing of "all manner of disease," attempts to refute the assertion that Christian Science, as taught and demonstrated by its adherents, does make whole the sick and the sinning,—the fulfilment to this age of the Master's promise, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also." "Christian Science," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 445 of Science and Health, "silences human will, quiets fear with Truth and Love, and illustrates the unlabored motion of the divine energy in healing the sick." God does heal the sick, cleanse the sinner, lift up the fallen, today just as when the Master, "moved with compassion," responded to the leper's appeal, "I will; be thou clean."
Yet even the great Teacher took to himself no credit for the works of mercy he performed. He was simply the instrument in the Father's hands, doing the work whereto he had been sent; he was the clear channel through which the healing, saving truth might flow unobstructed to bless all mankind, if they would but accept it. Jesus never claimed that in and of himself he had any power, even to spare his body from the burden and anguish of the cross. The Father of whom he could say with such confidence, "I knew that thou hearest me always," was ever to him the omnipotence he might so easily have invoked when in answer to Pilate's boast of place and power he replied, "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above."
Nor does the Christian Science practitioner, though there be critics who mistakenly think so, pride himself that the relief from sin and sorrow which he has been instrumental in bringing to suffering humanity is through any innate power. It is his part to keep his own thought free from any taint of evil; and in the measure he is able to accomplish this, the more alert he will be to discern the error that is holding the sufferer in bondage. It is God, divine Life, Truth, and Love, that heals, not a human personality, and it is the clear recognition on the part of both practitioner and patient of God's allness and error's nothingness that opens the way for the instantaneous healings of which this Science is capable. No one, then, who has, even in a small degree, experienced the power of Truth in the overcoming of sin and disease, can reasonably doubt the ultimate vanquishment of evil, even to the annihilation of the "last enemy," death itself. "The whole is equal to the sum of all its parts," and every temptation resisted, every error cast out, every illusion of sickness dispelled, is just that much of evil done away with, just that much of an advance toward the final triumph of good.
