Since the days when Jesus the Christ ministered and taught on earth, none has realized so definitely as the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science the healing quality of compassion. Mary Baker Eddy, always compassionate toward suffering, wrote in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 367,) "The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love."
It is sometimes asserted that Christian Scientists are unsympathetic because they deny the reality of suffering. But God's ways are not human ways. In order to help and heal it is necessary for the Christian Scientist to see suffering of all kinds as an illusion of the material senses. In this way he protects his own thought against the acceptance of a lie, and is able to correct the belief of the one who turns to him for help in times of seeming pain or sorrow. If a mother, called to the bedside of her child and finding him in the throes of a nightmare, were to lie down beside him and dream a similar dream, of what benefit would this be to the child? Or if she merely stood helplessly beside the bed with a heart full of pity for him, in what way would he be helped? How much better to awaken the child and gently assure him that the experience is unreal—a dream and nothing more!
The fact that Jesus wept when he was informed of the death of Lazarus is often used to bring out the point that our Master was not unsympathetic to the sorrows of those around him. But the student of Christian Science knows that had he allowed himself to be mesmerized by human sympathy he could not have raised Lazarus from the grave. Rather may we infer that he wept because those who had so often listened to the words of truth and seen so many proofs of God's omnipotence, still failed to realize the eternality of life, and so continued to believe suffering and death to be real. But Jesus' thoughts were raised so far above the currents of mortal mind that he saw the divine reality, and thus was able to express gratitude to God, and to present Lazarus alive.
