University of Virginia Library

Personal confidence

Sometimes it is said; "Rest assured that whatever effect Christian Scientists may have on the sick, comes through rousing within the sick a belief that in the removal of disease these healers have wonderful power, derived from the Holy Ghost." Is it likely that church-members have more faith in some Christian Scientist, whom they have perhaps never seen and against whom they have been warned, than they have in their own accredited and orthodox

pastors, whom they have seen and have been taught to love and to trust?

Let any clergyman try to cure his friends by their faith in him. Will that faith heal them? Yet Scien- tists will take the same cases, and cures will follow. Is this because the patients have more faith in the Scien- tist than in their pastor? I have healed infidels whose only objection to this method was, that I as a Chris- tian Scientist believed in the Holy Spirit, while they, the patients, did not.

Even though you aver that the material senses are indispensable to man's existence or entity, you must change the human concept of life, and must at length know yourself spiritually and scientifically. The evi- dence of the existence of Spirit, Soul, is palpable only to spiritual sense, and is not apparent to the material senses, which cognize only that which is the opposite of Spirit. True Christianity is to be honored wherever found, but when shall we arrive at the goal which that word implies? From Puritan parents, the discov- erer of Christian Science early received her religious education. In childhood, she often listened with joy to these words, falling from the lips of her saintly mother, "God is able to raise you up from sick- ness;" and she pondered the meaning of that Scripture she so often quotes: "And these signs shall follow them that believe; . . . they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."