Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/162

146 to his students was healing, and he proved his faith by his works. The ancient Christians were healers. Why

has this element of Christianity been lost? Because our systems of religion are governed more or less by our systems of medicine. The first idolatry was faith in matter. The schools have rendered faith in drugs the fashion, rather than faith in Deity. By trusting matter to destroy its own discord, health and harmony have been sacrificed. Such systems are barren of the vitality of spiritual power, by which material sense is made the servant of Science and religion becomes Christlike.

Material medicine substitutes drugs for the power of God — even the might of Mind — to heal the body.

Scholasticism clings for salvation to the person, instead of to the divine Principle, of the man Jesus; and his Science, the curative agent of God, is silenced. Why? Because truth divests material drugs of their imaginary power, and clothes Spirit with supremacy. Science is the “stranger that is within thy gates,” remembered not, even when its elevating effects practically prove its divine origin and efficacy.

Divine Science derives its sanction from the Bible, and the divine origin of Science is demonstrated through

the holy influence of Truth in healing sickness and sin. This healing power of Truth must have been far anterior to the period in which Jesus lived. It is as ancient as “the Ancient of days.” It lives through all Life, and extends throughout all space.

Divine metaphysics is now reduced to a system, to a form comprehensible by and adapted to the thought of