Chapter X
BECAUSE OF YOUR UNBELIEF
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“He that believeth in me,
the works that I do shall he do
also.”
--John 14:12
[106] In
view of the fact that we have arrived at
the conviction that the “gift of
healing” by no means indicates that
God is a respecter of persons, bestowing
upon the favored few what so many are
pining for, it is well to inquire what
are the requirements if one would be a
healer of his fellowmen. In a world that
is filled with sin, sorrow and sickness
he is a strange person who has not, at
some time, sighed for the power, not only
to reform the sinner, but to heal the
sick.
The drunkard
would, if he could, prevent other men
from becoming as weak, unhappy and
miserable as himself, and any man who has
ever suffered great mental unrest or
physical pain will tell you that he would
give a great deal to be able to cure
another in a similar state. How often we
hear a man say, “I would not wish
to see my worst enemy suffer what I have
suffered,” and yet when he sees his
best friend in similar suffering [107] he
finds himself utterly unable to be of the
slightest assistance in actually casting
out the demons of sin and disease by the
Word of God.
The desire
at the heart of every man to lessen
sorrow and increase joy in the world is
God-implanted, and is the foundation of
all healing. Sometimes this impulse does
not extend itself beyond one’s
immediate family, in which case it is
selfish. Again, it reaches out among
friends so that a man will leave his
comfortable fireside to spend time with
one who is benefited by his visit. Then,
again, there are those whose desire to be
of service is not limited to relatives
and friends, but who, like Father Damien,
go to Molakai, or, like Dr. Grenfell, to
Labrador.
Back of all
this we see that the so-called gift of
healing is based on unselfish love. It is
as impossible to heal by merely using the
words, or the name of Jesus, without
living the life of Jesus, as it would be
for the moon to melt the frozen crest of
Mont Blanc. The reason why spiritual
healing is not often as instantaneous in
result as it was in the early days of
Christianity, is not because the law of
healing has become suspended, but because
we do not “live the life.”
The sooner we recognize and correct this,
the better it will be for the world and
for ourselves also.
The
obligations of the healer are not
confined to studying the latest works on
abstruse metaphysics, or in being able to
write intelligently on these subjects,
for one might easily do all of this [108]
and still lack the love and the personal
purity necessary to make his treatments
effective. It is becoming more generally
recognized than it has been in the past
that he or she who would become a healer
of men must keep himself unspotted by the
world. It is at this point that we are
told that healing is a
“special” gift, for the
reason that only a few can live such a
detached life as it requires. On this
presumption we might argue that only the
few can enter into eternal life because
only the few can live so as to be worthy
of it. God demands perfection, and
nothing short of it will satisfy, for God
will accept nothing as being His own
“Image and Likeness” which
does not bear that resemblance.
If the
obligations resting upon the healer seem
to be of an uncompromising character, let
us realize that the healing art of
Christianity is purchased at a price of
much self-surrender, but that which we
are called upon to relinquish is as
nothing compared to that which we receive
in return. It is like throwing a sprat to
catch a whale. To give up the false
pleasures of the worldly life and find in
their place the joys of heaven is no
great loss, but any attempt to gain the
one without giving up the other is as
foolish as the attempt of a child to
seize a new plaything when the hands are
already full of other objects.
The man who
would be successful in healing by
spiritual means must be one of high moral
character, actuated more by the love of
man than by the love of money, for it is
a dreadful thing [109] to fall into the
hands of one professing spiritual healing
who is not living, to the best of his
ability, the Christ-life. The emanations
which go out from one who heals by mental
or spiritual power will partake of the
quality of his predominating mental
states, and if these are not of the
highest and most unselfish character, his
patient will feel these mental states,
rather than any influence which his mere
words or personality might exert.
Patients under spiritual treatment are
infected by the healer’s
spirituality, or lack of it, so that the
responsibility of one who would heal as
Jesus healed is very serious. It is
evident from this that the nearer one
lives in accordance with the teachings
and practices of the Master, the more apt
one will be to do the works of the
Master.
A fact that
must never be overlooked is that the
spiritual healer’s state of soul is
of far more importance than the so-called
strength of his will, or even the
condition of his physical health.
Healing, as Jesus taught it, is effected
by spiritual force and not by mere will
power or physical strength, therefore it
is more essential that the practitioner
be a man of sterling spirituality than
one of magnetic personality or dominating
will-power. It is not necessary, as some
imagine, that one should be acquainted
with physiology and anatomy in order to
heal by the power of prayer, for then all
of Jesus’ disciples must needs be
graduates of medical colleges. In fact,
it is sometimes a hindrance to the
success of one in [110] spiritual healing
to know so much of these sciences, for
the reason that one is more apt to be
influenced by symptoms than by Spirit. It
has been proven again and again that the
less one knows of material laws,
so-called, and the more one knows about
spiritual law, the better.
It is not so
much a knowledge of man’s body that
is of importance in the healing of the
sick, by any system, as it is a knowledge
of the secret intents of the heart, the
concealed emotions of grief and fear,
lust and selfishness, which are, all too
frequently, the provoking causes of what
men call physical maladies. It were folly
to prescribe coal tar preparations for
insomnia when the thing that is
preventing sleep is anxiety on the one
hand, or a guilty conscience on the
other. In the one case it is better to
destroy fear with love, and in the other
to correct a guilty conscience by
revealing the impossibility of cure so
long as sin is unrepented. Spiritual
Science finds the cause of all disease in
sin and ignorance, and it sees no cure
save that which is effected by spiritual
enlightenment through which sin and
ignorance are overcome.
One of the
great obligations resting upon him who
would heal as Jesus healed is that he
should be able to detect the sin or
sorrow, as the case may be, which is back
of a patient’s physical or nervous
malady, for in this way his helpfulness
to humanity will be greatly augmented.
Jesus dissected souls not bodies, and
hence his success where others failed.
When the woman at the [111] well of
Samaria tried to lie to him he read her
mind and told her “all that ever
she did.” As one grows in Spiritual
Science one is better able to penetrate
beneath the surface and see the mental
causes which are producing physical
effects.
We must not
forget that in addition to all other
things one must have great faith in God,
for without faith nothing can be
accomplished. When Jesus was asked by his
disciples, on an occasion when they had
tried to heal a case and could not,
“Why could not we cast him
out?” he answered, “Because
of your unbelief.” Herein lies the
secret of all the failures in the world.
Through unbelief we create our own
impotence, when through belief or faith
we might generate an unlimited power for
good. An intelligent faith in the power
of good over all apparent evil puts the
mind of man in working harmony with
omnipotence Itself, where all things
become possible. It fortifies the mind as
nothing in the world can do, and, by so
doing, furnishes one with a sure weapon
of attack as well as defence. With every
other mental capacity and no faith one is
like a well-equipped engine without
steam.
A profound
belief in God as the only power in the
universe endows the soul with a
consciousness of superiority which
nothing else can confer. Some day we
shall realize the value of faith, and
when we do we shall see what Jesus meant
when He said, “If thou canst
believe, all things are possible [112] to
him that believeth.” Before the
aeroplane and submarine ever materialized
someone had to believe in their
possibilities, for without such belief no
attempt would have been made to construct
them.
Not only
must the practitioner in Spiritual
Science believe in God, but he must also
believe in himself as the messenger of
God, and it is at this point that most of
us fail. It is an easy matter for us to
believe that God can heal the sick if He
so desires, but that man, when working in
accordance with God’s plan, can
also heal the sick is not so easy of
acceptance. And yet when we take a closer
view of the matter we see that
man’s part in the healing art of
Christianity is an indispensable part,
for “God never does for man
what He can only do through
him.” The belief in one’s
self as a channel through which the
purifying love of God flows, as the water
from a reservoir passes through the
unobstructed pipes to the homes for which
it is intended, is a necessary part of
the healer’s equipment.
This
confidence in one’s self ought not
to be in the nature of personal vanity,
but a grateful acknowledgment of the
truth that it is the Father in us that
“doeth the works.” We, of
ourselves, can do nothing, and we are
only too conscious of the fact, but
living and working in harmony with
Love’s law of perfection along all
lines, we can do much. No man, however,
can really believe in himself the way
Jesus recommends except he has true
self-respect, and no man can respect
himself [113] unless he is doing all in
his power to live as he knows he should
live. Others who know him only as they
see him on the surface may respect him,
but seeing himself from the inside, he
alone knows whether to believe in himself
or not. A sinful man may prescribe
medicines, but a practitioner who is not
consistently striving to rise above his
sins can never heal the sick in the way
of God’s appointing.
When called
upon to deal with almost insurmountable
difficulties, we require something more
than the mere letter of Divine Science,
for this without the spirit is dead, and
the Spirit is personal purity. He only
can heal the sick who can conquer his own
evil inclinations. In order to be endued
with power from on high we must elevate
thought above the body with all its
so-called pleasures and pains, for if we
have not proved our authority over our
own moral weaknesses, it is hardly to be
expected that we can cast out the belief
in physical weaknesses from the minds of
others. If we would impart physical
purity to another we must first have
moral purity in ourselves; otherwise we
shall be as the blind leading the
blind.
All this
does not imply that we should wait until
we ourselves are without “spot or
blemish” morally, before we begin
to try to help others. We should, in
addition to adding to our intellectual
knowledge of truth, be constantly
guarding against everything that is
sinful in our own natures. When Paul, at
the conclusion of some [114] of his best
healing work, was about to be made the
object of the worship of the people, he
cried, “Sirs, why do ye these
things? We are men of like passions with
you, and preach unto you that ye should
turn from these vanities unto the living
God.”
While still
suffering from “a thorn in the
flesh,” whether this were a moral
weakness or a physical disability, Paul
nevertheless, like his Master,
“went about doing good.” Paul
knew that he was not healing the sick
with his body, but with a mind that was
so filled with the allness and goodness
of God that there was no room in it for
evil or error of any name or nature.
Moreover, the same truth which he spoke
for others finally made him free from his
own infirmity, for it is a law that the
truth you speak for another reacts on you
as certainly as the boomerang returns to
the hand of the thrower.
This setting
forth of the obligation resting on the
practitioner of Spiritual Science is
merely for the purpose of bringing about
a better form of healing than at present
prevails, for one cannot read the New
Testament with its accounts of spiritual
healing and not feel that the best
results of mental or spiritual healing
today are puerile by comparison with
those of Jesus and his immediate
disciples. What is needed nowadays, above
all other things, is not so much the
remembrance of the Jesus of two thousand
years ago, as is the consciousness of the
everpresent Christ.
[115] We
must know that the Christ is that Truth
which assures us that only that which is
created by God is real; and since sin,
sickness and disease are not real, man,
through the knowledge of this Truth, has
dominion over them. To know the Truth as
Jesus taught it, is to know that
“every plant that my heavenly
Father hath not planted shall be rooted
up.” The plants of sin, sorrow, and
sickness were not planted by our heavenly
Father, and for this reason they shall be
rooted up by any man who knows this Truth
and lives it. On the principle that we
affect and infect others with our
thoughts, it ought to be easy for us to
accept the possibility of communicating
sanative ideas, for this is precisely
what takes place in all spiritual
healing.
For Jesus to
communicate an idea of health was for his
patient to take up that idea in the
subconscious mind and work it out in a
bodily state. It is in some such way that
all spiritual healing takes place today.
When one is baptized of the Spirit; that
is, when one is sure that sickness is no
part of God’s creation, all the
powers of his spiritual nature become
quickened. Dormant faculties are
stimulated into healthy activity, during
which man becomes an instrument in the
hands of God for the lifting up of them
that are bowed down. A little success in
spiritual healing has the tendency,
wherever men are honest, to increase
concentration and consecration.
When it is
understood that purity is the foundation
of power, then men will seek purity for
[116] power’s sake, and, finding
it, they will understand what Jesus meant
when he said, “All power is given
unto me, in heaven and upon earth.”
The conditions for healing are the same
now as they have always been. Just as
susceptible of fulfillment now as it ever
was is the promise that, “The works
I do ye shall do, and greater works than
these shall ye do, if ye believe on
me” (and live as he lived).
Chapter
11
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
