Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/317

Rh The author became a member of the Orthodox Congregational Church when a child. And later she learned that her own prayers failed to heal, and so did the prayers of devout, loving parents and the church; but when the spiritual sense of the creed was discerned, in the Science of Christianity, it was a present help. It was the living, palpitating presence of Christ, Truth, which healed the sick.

We cannot bring out the practical proof of Christianity, which Jesus required, while error is as potent and

real to us as Truth, and while we make a personal devil and an anthropomorphic God our starting-points; especially if we consider Satan as a being coequal in power with Deity, if not superior to Him. Because such starting-points are neither spiritual nor Scientific, they cannot work out the Spirit-rule of Christian healing, which proves the nothingness of error by the all-inclusiveness of Truth.

The Israelites centred their thoughts on the material, in their attempted worship of the spiritual. To them

matter was substance, and Spirit was shadow. They thought to worship Spirit from a material standpoint, but this was impracticable. They might appeal to Jehovah, but their prayer brought down no proof that it was heard, because they did not sufficiently understand God as able to demonstrate His power to heal, — to make harmony a reality, and to make discord the unreality.

Our Master declared that his material body was not

spirit, evidently considering it a mortal and material belief of flesh and bones; whereas the Jews took a diametrically opposite view. To Jesus