This incident illustrates another facet of reality that Mary Baker Eddy saw, which she termed divine Love.  She saw a reality devoid of evil, sickness, and death.  She pointed to Christ Jesus as her authority on this, who overcame this triad of human misery in the context of bearing witness to the truth.  She reasoned, that if these evils were realities instituted by God, no one, not even Jesus, could have annulled them.  But as images of a mortal mind, they were neither attached to God nor to reality, but were errors in consciousness that Jesus, or any other man or woman, had total freedom and authority to correct.  Her authority to heal, thus, was solidly founded on the scientific perception of God as divine Love.  This gave her that profound conviction that projected its remarkable power over all sorts of diseases.  On this platform, all diseases can be understood as having one common denominator: that of not being founded in divine Love or reality.

The authority to heal on this scientific platform is open for anyone to claim.  No extensive schooling is necessary to accomplish scientific Christian healing, nor are personal uniqueness and special instruction from the discoverer of this science required.  Anyone can heal, anywhere in the world, so long as the basic concepts about reality that Mary Baker Eddy understood, can be comprehended and applied with the same scientific clarity that she had attained.

The following two cases should illustrate this.

In 1869 Mary Baker Eddy was called to attend a patient of a distinguished medical doctor.  The patient was dying of pneumonia.  Upon her arrival, the physician stood at the patient's bedside, declaring to her that the patient could not live.  On witnessing with his own eyes the patient being healed, and this without any material aid, the doctor asked if she had any work prepared describing her system of healing.  She answered that she had not, so he urged her to immediately write a book that would explain to the world her curative system of metaphysics.*(Miscellany 105:19)  Little did the good doctor know about the great effort she had already expended towards such a goal, and how much more was still required before such a work could be published.

The work was completed six years later.  It had its first publication in 1875 after a total of nine years of work on it.  It became known as the Christian Science textbook.  The book carries the title: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, commonly referred to as: Science and Health.  Over three hundred editions with various alterations along the way, were printed during her lifetime.

As stated before, a chapter was added in later years, called, Fruitage, consisting of one-hundred pages of testimonials, of people who have healed themselves by simply reading or studying the book.  The testimonies speak of a broad range of healing - the healing of heart disease, cancer, TB, fevers, an ulcerated tooth, Bright's disease, catarrh, asthma, stomach troubles, eye disease, deafness, insanity, astigmatism, eczema, and the list goes on and on.

One man testifies to having been healed of cataract.  He wrote that he could only read for a few minutes at a time, otherwise his eyes would hurt severely.  A copy of the book was lend to him.  He wrote, that on the first night that he read it, he found the book so interesting that he completely forgot about his eyes, until he realized, four hours later, that he must have been healed; which turned out to be so.  His wife noticed the next day, looking into his eyes, that the cataract had disappeared.*(Science and Health p.607)

The striking commonality of all the testimonies in the chapter, Fruitage, is an almost universal lack of a scientific explanation of the specific 'shifts' in consciousness that had allowed the healing to take place.  Mary Baker Eddy provides a general explanation in the preface to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, of how the healing process works.  She writes: "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation.  Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural.  They are the sign of Immanuel, or 'God with us,' - a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself, coming now as was promised aforetime,

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche