IN Science and Health, under the marginal heading "Genuine healing," Mrs. Eddy writes (p.366), "If we would open their prison doors for the sick, we must first learn to bind up the broken-hearted." And she continues on the next page, "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."
There is a vast difference between human pity and the pity which is a quality of God, divine Love. God's pity is a compassionate quality of Soul which sees no evil though it responds to the human call for help. Divine pity is conscious only of perfection even while it expresses the love of God, which comforts the woes of the mourner and heals the sufferings of the invalid with unsurpassed tenderness and divine power.
Human pity, on the other hand, makes one feel deeply for the pain of another, and one enters into the darkness of the sufferer's sorrow and shares in the bitterness of his affliction. In an urgent desire to comfort and assist, human pity frequently leads the would-be helper into grieving with the sufferer. This sympathetic commiseration, devoid as it is of the healing power of God, often leaves the case worse than before.
