The names Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science are indissolubly woven in the annals of history. To think of either of them is to think of healing.
Christian Science was ushered in with healing. Mrs. Eddy's own remarkable healing, wrought of God alone when she was suffering from serious injuries, resulted in the discovery of Christian Science. This healing, which occurred as the Scriptures were illumined, came so quietly, so gently, the world scarcely noticed. Later mankind was to marvel and to see the effects of her healing and teaching reach the corners of the earth.
The tremendous revelation of the allness of God and the scientific nothingness of mortal mind and matter—the powerlessness of evil to defeat God's holy purpose— had unfolded to her. This, she knew, was Christ's Science, God's unerring law, which is destined to lift the burden of mortality from the shoulders of mankind—the Science as almighty in demonstration as when Christ Jesus lived and proved its truths almost two thousand years ago.
In her autobiography, "Retrospection and Introspection," she tells how her discovery brought the radiance of divine Love to everything she beheld. And then she adds, "Frozen fountains were unsealed."Ret., p. 31; As we ponder her mission and the heights to which it took her, we see that her healing works were constantly unsealing the world's frozen resistance to Truth, melting the hardened concepts of the carnal mind's fear and incredulity and revealing the man of God's creating full-blown in beauty and holiness. The presence of God was to her a living fact. In the Christian Science text book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she writes, "The evidence of divine Mind's healing power and absolute control is to me as certain as the evidence of my own existence."Science and Health, p. 177;
In the magnitude of her spiritual healing Mrs. Eddy stands alone in this age. Her work shone with the resplendence of divine Love. To her, sonship was untarnished by mortality. She saw man as the Father has created him, wearing the robes of righteousness, and on these robes there are no stains of sin or earthiness.
Christ Jesus stood as her shining example. Throughout her life was threaded the prayer to understand him better and to do the healing works he promised his followers would do. "The Son can do nothing of himself," he declared, "but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise."John 5:19; She recognized his marvelous vision in seeing God as the All-power. Reverently she writes of this scientific seeing: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."Science and Health, pp. 476, 477;
And now in 1866 this healing had come to her. The words of Peter and John as they stood before the tribunal in Jerusalem may well have echoed in her thought, "We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard."Acts 4:20;She too had been commissioned of God to speak.
But how could she make mankind hear, how could she make them understand, this lone woman, this only Christian Scientist on the earth? Not by human means. She was sure of this. In the mighty work that lay before her there could be neither trust in nor dependence upon human means. The human must yield to the divine. Divinity must reveal itself; this alone could show her the way. In selfless love and communion with God she prayed—and listened. Then in clearest terms her direction came from the Father: "Healing!"
This was her answer. This is what mankind would understand. This they would want. Just as Christ Jesus sent his disciples forth to heal, so the command from the Christ came to this disciple to heal. In faithful obedience she started out to offer healing to anyone who would listen. She did not offer treatment. She offered healing. Many were healed. And some stayed to learn the theology of this healing, so different from anything they had heard before, a theology that would transform their lives. They were familiar with the scholastic teaching which says God and man have been separated by "original sin," by a remote mortal named Adam.
But here from the lips and pen of this woman they learned of a God who is Love —of perfect God and perfect man, a great First Cause and a radiant effect called man and the universe, ever distinct but never divorced. In Mrs. Eddy's continuing spiritual awareness no belief of a broken relationship dimmed her vision of the oneness of God and man. It is this oneness, or unity, she knew, that is evil's surest annihilation. She never left her inspired standpoint of looking out from the understanding of God, Mind, to see correctly the one and only creation.
In the life of Mrs. Eddy, healing was not a robe to be donned on certain occasions when uplifting or helping someone in distress. It was an uninterrupted awareness of Immanuel, or "God with us," present in the minutest detail of her everyday living.
In the Christian Science Sentinel of July 18, 1908, we read of a man who was badly crippled. He could do nothing for himself but was dependent upon his brother, with whom he lived, to take entire care of him. On pleasant days a special policeman was engaged to wheel him out on Boston Common for an airing. One day as he sat there in his chair Mrs. Eddy passed by. She stopped and talked a moment with him about God. When the man was taken home he insisted that Mrs. Eddy had helped him. For days after that when he was on the Common he waited and hoped for her coming again.
She did come, and again she stopped and told him of the Christ. After this talk he was healed. His niece, in writing of this to Mrs. Eddy, said that her uncle's legs were straightened and that he was restored to complete health. He was able to establish himself in business and become self-supporting. The niece concluded her letter with these words: "It was you, dear Leader, who spoke to him of the healing Christ and set him free."
What depths of holiness must Mrs. Eddy have seen as she looked at this man! What glory of ever-present Love must she have beheld to have so changed and renewed a life! The purity of her own thought and vision revealed what was actually present —not a crippled mortal who needed to be healed, but man, made in the image and likeness of God.
As she walked across the park that day, how easy it might have been to have ignored this crippled man, this stranger. But no. With Mrs. Eddy it was the Christ-spirit at every point, the outpouring love, the healing touch. To her, realization and demonstration were one, not the demonstration trailing the realization but Mind and manifestation, simultaneous and coexistent.
There was neither dualism nor doubt in the work of this great woman. With authority she wielded the sword of the Spirit, the understanding of Truth, which is far more effective than the knife of the surgeon. In her book "Unity of Good" she tells of healing instantaneously a cancer which had eaten its way to the jugular vein. And she reveals the secret of this healing power by saying "that an acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power nothing else can."Un., p. 7;
Where could one find teachers more radical and absolute than Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Baker Eddy? Yet neither of them disregarded what appeared as the human need. The hungry were fed, the sick healed. Their work was specific and pointed. There is nothing vague or abstract about scientific healing. At one time, after healing a case of dumbness and deafness, Jesus said, "If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you."Luke 11:20;In like manner the work of Mrs. Eddy illustrated "the finger of God," the pointed, focused, unscattered activity of divine Love operative as Christian Science treatment.
What does healing mean? Not merely relief from physical difficulties. Divinely wrought, it means a new birth. In a certain sense healing indicates the necessity of Love to express itself. It is God made manifest here and now, showing forth the order, health, certainty, and holiness which constitute true identity. Nor can it be left there. One must, as Mrs. Eddy did, bring out these facts in daily experience, in hourly living. This healing is not achieved by careless or flippant repetition of words, by dilatory methods, or by thoughtless leaning upon others. It demands the deepest humility and consecration, a willingness to put off the self-centered view of oneself and one's universe.
Mrs. Eddy has removed from healing the swaddling clothes and winding sheet of materialistic methods. Because of her spiritual greatness and the revelation she has given to the world, healing now shines forth in its full and scientific meaning, free from material theories, unmixed with medical techniques.
She dared to challenge the depths of the carnal mind's subtlety, to throw the light of Truth on its hidden ways of accomplishing evil, and to prove its powerlessness. She has given her followers the priceless knowledge of how to handle the claims of animal magnetism, which oppose Christ's healing power. Each wise student of Christian Science gives careful heed and willing obedience to these instructions. She saw incredulity, hatred of the Truth, misrepresentation of herself and her motives, fall into meaningless dust before the released power of Mind lived and demonstrated as the animating purpose of her life. She was neither dazed nor dazzled by the human scenes confronting her, and she was unmoved by the efforts of evil to exploit her personality. Principle, not person, was the basis of her healing work and of the Church she founded.
Mrs. Eddy discovered and explored the power of Mind to heal and to remove the mists which would hide reality. She has made understandable the scientific fact that because man is never sick, mankind can be healed of their diseases. It is such knowing and proving that makes Christian Science as valuable in the age of space as when Jesus healed multitudes on the shores of Galilee. The love of Mrs. Eddy reached over zones and hemispheres, latitudes and longitudes, to bless. Her tireless labors for mankind evidence the energies of ministering Love. More than half a century ago when most men's horizons extended not much farther than their city or their nation, the universal love of this great woman inspired her to write, "From the interior of Africa to the utmost parts of the earth, the sick and the heavenly homesick or hungry hearts are calling on me for help, and I am helping them."The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 147;
The brotherhood of man is a divine reality, but the brotherhood of man without the fatherhood of God is a hollow dream, a human mockery of a spiritual fact. To reveal what God is and what the true nature of man is as His son—this was the inspiration of our Leader's healing works. These works go on. Each individual healed by reading her textbook, each life uplifted by a Christian Science church service, each seeker having the torch of his understanding lighted by her example of humility and devotion—these are the healing works of Mary Baker Eddy.
In selfless love she has followed the command of Christ Jesus, "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give."Matt 10:8. Behold how freely she has given!
