ONE of the outstanding features of the religious life of to-day is the tendency towards the practice of spiritual healing. The method of spiritual healing was early lost by the Christian Church; and it was not until Mrs. Eddy's discovery of Christian Science in 1866 that it was restored to the world. Through many long years matter was practically the sole means used in the healing of the sick: prayer might be resorted to by more deeply religious people or in dire extremity, but it was not the prayer of spiritual understanding; for too often God was looked upon as in all probability responsible for the trouble. He might relent; or He might counteract the so-called material laws which were supposed to determine the cause and continuance of the disease; but that was problematical, since He seemed to be actuated by the same variable and uncertain motives which characterized mankind!
It is readily apparent to all who in an unbiased manner study the gospels of the New Testament, that Christ Jesus did not hold the belief that God is changeable or that He answers prayer at one time, but not at another. Neither is it rational to suppose that God heard and answered the petitions of the Master because he was Christ Jesus and not some other one. The reason of Jesus' success in spiritual healing was not because he was specially favored of God, but because of his understanding of God, divine Principle, and the law of Principle which governs all real being. Every one of the miracles, or wonders, to human sense, he performed, which are recorded in the four gospels and of which many were healings, was the result of accurate spiritual understanding of God and His law, scientifically applied to the cases presented to him. Whether the disease were blindness, deafness, fever, dropsy, leprosy, palsy, lunacy, hemorrhage, or the raising of the dead, Jesus applied the law of Principle, thereby destroying the error or errors of belief; and with the overcoming of the mental fallacies, through spiritual understanding, health was restored.
Jesus showed plainly that the method of healing the sick he employed was not to be confined to himself, because on two occasions he actually sent out his followers to do the works of healing he himself had been performing. When the seventy, he once sent out, returned to him with joyfulness to report the result of their successful mission, saying, "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name," he replied with these words of prophecy and encouragement: "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." Was Jesus playing fast and loose with the hopes and expectations of mankind when he uttered these words, or was he, out of the profundity of his knowledge of divine Being, directing attention to the power to resist and overcome evil of all kinds which would accrue to those who gained the same understanding of God as he himself possessed? Christian Science shows the latter to be true, because it endows those who have in a degree the same knowledge of reality and of God's law as Jesus possessed with power to overcome the beliefs of evil in precisely the way he said.
