The compassionate and warmhearted long to restore happy associations and normal health to those who have lost them. They deeply desire to bring the moral wanderer back to the innocence of former days, to return sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. They pray for the renewal of mental and physical strength to the aged and for the recovery of homes to those who are bereft of them. Christ Jesus possessed this warmth of compassion, and in many instances his prayers brought back lost treasures of health and character and life. But this was because he saw that the basic need in each case was the restoration of spiritual sense, with its consciousness of all things as they exist in God's kingdom. This is the universal need of mankind.
In his Sermon on the Mount the Master spoke of God's ability to supply human needs; and then he gave this important precept (Matt. 6:33): "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Here he was making it plain that the establishment of spiritual consciousness must precede the fulfillment of right human desires. No doubt he loved the twentythird Psalm, in which David sang of God, "He restoreth my soul." Through the restoration of soul, or spiritual sense, the healing influence of reality is made available.
When the true idea of health or sight or home or character is restored to understanding, the normal human sense of these concepts appears. And this restoration marks the progress of mankind out of the illusion of life in matter into the consciousness of eternal being. The goal of Christian Science is the same as Christ Jesus' aim; it is spiritual, not material—unseen to the physical senses, but real and tangible to spiritual sense.
