Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/405

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REPLY TO A CRITIC.
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that sprang from half-hidden Israelitish history was scholastic and void of healing power. The Master often refused to explain his words, because it is difficult for a material age to apprehend spiritual Truth. He said: “This people's heart hath hecome gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn from their ways, and I should heal them.”

Where my critic loses faith in God's power to heal the sick, I cannot follow him. Neither can I heal, if I plant myself on his material platform.

I became a member of the Orthodox Congregational Church when a child. Later, when I was an invalid, my own prayers failed to heal me, and so did the prayers of my faithful friends. When I discovered the spiritual sense of the creed, the Science of Christianity, it was to me a present help. It was the living, palpitating presence of Christ, or Truth, that healed me.

We cannot bring out the practical proof of Christianity, that Jesus required, while error is as potent and real to us as Truth, and while we make a personal devil and a personal 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 spiritual and scientific rule of Christian healing, which proves the nothingness of error by the all-inclusiveness of Truth.

Our Master declared that his material body was not Spirit, evidently considering it a mortal belief; whereas the Jews took a diametrically opposite view. To Jesus,