Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/249

Rh The earthly price of spirituality in religion and medicine in a material age is persecution, and the moral distance between Christianity and materialism precludes Jesus' doctrine, now as then, from finding favor with certain purely human views. The prophets of old looked for something higher than the systems and practices of their times. They foresaw the new dispensation of Truth and the demonstration of God in His more infinite meanings, — the demonstration which was to destroy sin, disease, and death, establish the definition of omnipotence, and illustrate the Science of Mind. Earth has not known another so great and good as Christ Jesus. Then can we find a better moral philosophy, a more complete, natural, and divine Science of medicine, or a better religion than his?

God is Spirit. Then modes of healing, other than the spiritual and divine, break the First Commandment of the Decalogue, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” There are no other heaven-appointed means than the spiritual with which to heal sin and disease. Our Master conformed to this law, and instructed his followers, saying, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also.” This is enough.

All issues of morality, of Christianity, of pleasure, or of pain must come through a correct or incorrect state of thought, since matter is not conscious; then, like a watchman forsaking his post, shall we have no faith in God, in the divine Mind, thus throwing the door wide open to the intruding disease, forgetting that the divine Mind, Truth and Life, can guard the entrance?

We earnestly ask: Shall we not believe the Scripture, “The prayer of faith shall save the sick”? In the