Programs to restore lives and property, rehabilitation schemes aiming to help drug addicts, convicts, disaster victims, attempts to restore run-down areas in cities, renovation of historic buildings—surrounded by such programs of human readjustment and repair, we may not fully realize the importance of spiritual rehabilitation.
Almost two thousand years ago Christ Jesus restored purity to the debased, health to the ill and lame; he gave men a new sense of individual worth. His rehabilitation program had a spiritual foundation. It did not merely readjust; it healed.
For a few centuries after Christ Jesus, the ministry of healing was, to some extent, carried on as a natural effect of the Christian teachings. Today, the world has once again been able to witness restoration through spiritual means. The Manual of The Mother Church refers to Mrs. Eddy's aim in founding The Church of Christ, Scientist, as follows: "To organize a church designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing." Man., p. 17; The same power of the Christ, man's divine sonship, evidenced through Jesus' works is being seen today in the renewal and reconstruction of individual lives.
