Christ Jesus relied on prayer, not on material means, for healing. His example calls for the healing of disease, lack, inharmony, and other troubles by spiritual means alone. Healing, as Jesus practiced it, plainly involved meeting the spiritual needs of those who turned to him for help. Some who appealed to him may have had no higher hope than physical relief. Jesus, the Gospels show, did not condemn these people. He healed them. But his healing work opened up for them a vision of man's relationship to God.
Christian Science explains that Jesus perceived in each case man's true nature as God's son, and this perception annulled blindness, lameness, epilepsy, and many other ills. At the same time, and more fundamentally, it proved man's Godlikeness.
Many people who need healing have found that Christian Science treats illness just as Jesus did. He regarded it as falsely mental. On one occasion he said, "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man." Matt. 15: 19, 20; By casting out these deleterious mental states, he showed that in man's Godlikeness they have no actuality. Proofs of healing in Christian Science, as in Jesus' day, spiritualize the lives of those they benefit.
