OUTSIDE the northern wall of the temple area at Jerusalem may be found the remains of a basin supposed to have been the pool of Bethesda, beside whose waters Jesus healed a man who, it was said, had suffered from an infirmity for thirty-eight years. The circumstances connected with this healing are related in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, where it is stated that a great multitude of people, having divers diseases, were waiting at the pool for a periodical agitation of the waters, when, according to a generally accepted belief, an angel "troubled" the water, after which, whosoever first stepped into the pool was healed of whatsoever disease he might seem to manifest. As Jesus was passing by he paused and said to the impotent man, "Wilt thou be made whole?" The man replied, "Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me." Whereupon Jesus said to him, "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk;" and, "immediately," the narrative states, "the man was made whole." Later, upon meeting him in the temple, Jesus said, "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee."
The question, "Wilt thou be made whole?" which Jesus asked the one who believed that certain waters could cure him, is the same question which Christ, Truth, is asking to-day of those who may still be looking for healing through material means. "To be every whit whole, writes Mrs. Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp.369, 370), "man must be better spiritually as well as physically." A few lines farther on she adds, "The body improves under the same regimen which spiritualizes the thought." A dictionary gives the definition of "regimen" as "a systematic course of living," which makes it clear that if one would experience true health and peace he should seek to spiritualize his thinking and living. Systematic living also implies conforming to an accepted standard of rules and regulations. The Ten Commandments, upon which was based the moral law, were designed to establish a system of living that would promote righteousness, health, and prosperity; but the moral law lacked the spiritual vision of true love and true brotherliness.
Christ Jesus brought to the world a gospel of kindness and good will; he urged men to seek the truth and live it, if they would be free from the ills of the flesh and find the way to heaven and harmony. Practice of the course of living which Jesus recommended would have prevented the world's subsequent suffering and poverty, but the divine Principle and rule by which alone it could have been demonstrated were not understood; and eventually the Master's teachings were partially forgotten, or remembered only as applicable to certain favored generations of the past. Christian Science, however, has come to this age to reestablish the teachings of the Master. As stated by Mrs. Eddy in the Preface to Science and Health (p. xi): "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural. They are the sign of Immanuel, or, 'God with us,'—a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself, coming now as was Promised aforetime.
