The People's Idea of God: Its Effect On Health And Christianity

The glorious Godhead is Life, Truth, and Love, and these three terms for one divine Principle are the three in one that can be understood, and that find no reflection in sinning, sick, and dying mortals. No miracle of grace can make a spiritual mind out of beliefs that are as material as the heathen deities. The pagan priests appointed Apollo and Esculapius the gods of medicine, and they inquired of these heathen deities what drugs to prescribe. Systems of religion and of medicine grown out of such false ideals of the Supreme Being cannot heal the sick and cast out devils, error. Eschewing a materialistic and idolatrous theory and practice of medicine and religion, the apostle devoutly recommends the more spiritual Christianity, – "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." The prophets and apostles, whose lives are the embodiment of a living faith, have not taken away our Lord, that we know not where they have laid him; they have resurrected a deathless life of love; and into the cold materialisms of dogma and doctrine we look in vain for their more spiritual ideal, the risen Christ, whose materia medica and theology were one.

The ideals of primitive Christianity are nigh, even at our door. Truth is not lost in the mists of remoteness or the barbarisms of spiritless codes. The right ideal is not buried, but has risen higher to our mortal sense, and having overcome death and the grave, wrapped in a pure winding-sheet, it sitteth beside the sepulchre in angel form, saying unto us, "Life is God; and our ideal of God has risen above the sod to declare His omnipotence." This white-robed thought points away from matter and doctrine, or dogma, to the diviner sense of Life and Love, – yea, to the Principle that is God, and to the demonstration thereof in healing the sick. Let us then heed this heavenly visitant, and not entertain the angel unawares.

The ego is not self-existent matter animated by mind, but in itself is mind; therefore a Truth-filled mind makes a pure Christianity and a healthy mind and body. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in a lecture before the Harvard Medical School: "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse writes: "I am sick of learned quackery." Dr. Abercrombie, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, writes: "Medicine is the science of guessing." Dr. James Johnson, Surgeon Extraordinary to the King, says: "I declare my conscientious belief, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there was not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist, druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now obtains." Voltaire says: "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

Believing that man is the victim of his Maker, we naturally fear God more than we love Him; whereas "perfect Love casteth out fear;" but when we learn God aright, we love Him, because He is found altogether lovely. Thus it is that a more spiritual and true ideal of Deity improves the race physically and spiritually. God is no longer a mystery to the Christian Scientist, but a divine Principle, understood in part, because the grand realities of Life and Truth are found destroying sin, sickness, and death; and it should no longer be deemed treason to understand God, when the Scriptures enjoin us to "acquaint now thyself with Him [God], and be at peace;" we should understand something of that great good for which we are to leave all else.

Periods and peoples are characterized by their highest or their lowest ideals, by their God and their devil. We are all sculptors, working out our own ideals, and leaving the impress of mind on the body as well as on history and marble, chiselling to higher excellence, or leaving to rot and ruin the mind's ideals. Recognizing this as we ought, we shall turn often from marble to model, from matter to Mind, to beautify and exalt our lives.