Watching Point 135

135 — WATCH lest you believe that your best growth will come through the effort to treat cases of sickness year after year, like a cook who, once having learned to make biscuits, continues to make them year after year. As a student grows spiritually, the healing should be accomplished from an increasingly higher understanding. It should be done more and more through the Spirit, and less and less through argument. It should broaden and extend beyond the mere healing of physical ailments.

As the student advances in spiritual understanding, less of the human is mixed with his perception of truth; hence his work becomes less stereotyped and more inspirational. He regards each case that comes to him as an original problem that he must take up with God. His endeavors gradually outgrow the ideal of simply trying to make mortal man harmonious in the flesh. He seeks to help him to throw off a mortal sense of man, although, of course, healing physical sickness will still remain the most impressive phenomenon to convince mortals of the power of Mind.

If a student is progressing, he will watch lest an overconscientious sense of duty lead him to permit those in trouble to make such overwhelming demands upon his time and thought, that he becomes thought-weary, and hence loses that brightness, freshness and spontaneity of thought that is so essential. Mrs. Eddy once wrote, “Jesus did what he saw was best for his own spiritual welfare, no matter if the multitude did throng him. He left them and went up into the mountain to refresh himself. He did not look around and say, ‘Just see how many need help — no mount for me today or tonight.’ He left them and went and returned refreshed and helped them more.”

The progressing student watches lest he forget that, although as Science and Health says, a grain of Christian Science does wonders for mortals in the beginning, he must take quiet time apart from his practice to gain a larger unfoldment of Truth and to assimilate his thought to God. This is necessary, not because he has not already learned how to heal the sick, but because he needs more understanding to keep his spiritual confidence and expectancy buoyant, as well as more discernment to probe and expose the more subtle claims of animal magnetism.

The student should never forget that he must keep his spiritual confidence and expectancy alive, since it is not the arguments that heal, but the spiritual unction that brings forth expectancy in both the patient and the practitioner. It is expectancy that brings spiritual animus and prepares the way for God’s law to operate. God does the healing, and our arguments merely prepare the patient, so that God will take him up.