IN the practice of Christian Science a very sacred and tender relationship is established between patient and practitioner. It may be likened to a little child's placing his hand in that of an elder brother while both go home to father and mother, the little one trustingly confident that his brother knows the way, the brother encouraging and helping onward the footsteps of the child with loving assurance. The number of one's years has nothing to do with making one an elder brother in this respect. The one leading the way is that one who has a conscious sense of home as harmony; and the other, one who has got a bit of dust in his eyes which has blurred his vision, or who has become confused and so has lost sight of his direction home for a moment.
The practitioner holds whatever may be related to him by the patient as strictly confidential. He fills his own thought with what God knows concerning the situation, and brings the truth about man to bear upon the condition so that the error may be completely annihilated, leaving no symptoms to be rehearsed in the memory of the patient and nothing to be repeated to or by the practitioner. When this has been done, the demonstration of perfection rather than the phase of distress is uppermost in thought; and true gratitude for his delivery should enable the recipient of the healing to respond to the invitation given at the Wednesday evening services to tell the reason for the joy in his heart.
No condemnation of the patient is ever in the thought of the true practitioner. Someone has written, "A just man hateth the evil, but not the evil doer." The practitioner does not see the disease or the sin as real, but as a false sense which is to be destroyed, not mentally entertained. He does not see a sick or sinful man and try to change him to a well or good man. The practitioner instantly brings the true facts concerning the problem brought to him into his thinking and maintains this mental position until the lie and its resultant expression yield to the truth, which expresses itself in harmony. The error, not man, is condemned as unlike God, without law and a place of operation. It must go down under the sword of Truth; and the practitioner saves the patient by helping him to loosen his mental hold on the error. This the patient may already have done to some extent in bringing the problem to the practitioner. The practitioner accepts it as his problem to work out, confident that he knows the truth which will bring out the right answer or state of harmony.
