We who are its grateful beneficiaries need prayerfully to remind ourselves from time to time that the now world-wide Christian Science movement began when a devout Christian woman, believed to be fatally injured, opened her Bible at the New Testament and read anew the account of Jesus' healing of a palsied man. Concluding in logical fashion that the eternal power which had healed the man must still be available to all, she reverently prayed for spiritual enlightenment. Her thought was so illumined that she arose from her bed, dressed herself, and confidently announced to those who were waiting in an adjoining room for the end to come that God had healed her. When one of them asked in astonishment whether Christ had returned to earth, Mary Baker Eddy calmly replied in effect that the eternal Truth and its healing power had never been absent.
Obviously, Christian Scientists do not claim that this incident, which marked the beginning of their great Leader's ministry of healing, was unique in Christian history. Instead, they gratefully remind themselves that whenever sufficient spiritual faith and unselfed love have been expressed on earth, it has been possible, as Christian history records, for devout men and women to experience at least to some extent God's healing and saving power.
However, Christian Scientists do claim that Mrs. Eddy was the first person to succeed in understanding what brought about her recovery and in making available to mankind the hitherto unknown Principle and law by which her own and other healings, including those of the Master, were accomplished. (See Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 147.) She tells us that her recovery meant to her what the falling apple had meant to Newton; it supplied the occasion whereby right reasoning, supplemented by divine revelation and rare spiritual perception, led to the crowning discovery that the real universe and the real man are now and forever spiritual, harmonious, and intact, human belief and experience to the contrary notwithstanding.
