Free to all

According to a recent newspaper article, it will most likely become necessary in the future to ration medical care paid for by the government. This will happen, the article states, because technological advances in medicine have caused health care costs to skyrocket, making it impossible for the government to provide these services for everyone desiring them.

It certainly seems unjust that some should be helped while others are not, even that some should live and others die. Yet isn't this concept, that there just isn't enough good to go around, inherent in all human, materially based systems? This is because the very essence of matter is limitation.

Logically, then, the way to provide unlimited health for everyone would be to look beyond the parameters of finite resources to a system in which matter ceases to be a factor, a system based on the premise that there is infinite good freely available to all. Does such a system exist?

Yes, it does. And it is being employed successfully by many today. This new-old system, Christian Science, is based on matter's opposite - Spirit, or God. Health care in this Science is based on the premise that what God creates, including man, is spiritual, perfect, infinite, expressing the nature of its creator. Since health, or wholeness, is a quality originating in the divine Mind , God, it must also be infinite, universally available.

Is this mere theory, or is it provable truth?

The power of universal, ever-available spiritual truth to heal the ills of mankind, including disease, was proved in the teachings and life of Christ Jesus. Not only did he give the moral framework for bringing to light man's spiritual perfection; he proved this truth by healing the sick through spiritual means alone.

The early Christian practice of spiritual healing was gradually lost in the period that followed Jesus' ascension. In the late nineteenth century, however, Mary Baker Eddy, a devoted student of the Bible, discovered and founded Christian Science - she discovered the spiritual law or Science governing the healing done by Jesus. She found that through an understanding of divine law, of God's absolute supremacy and goodness and man's perfection as His spiritual likeness, she could heal herself and others. And she saw that all could benefit from this healing law.

Mrs. Eddy came to understand the unlimited love of God for man and His inexhaustible resources always at hand to heal. She writes: ''Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need. It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine love supplies all good.''n1 What a comforting thought: all mankind . . . every hour . . . all good!

n1 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 494.

If this is what is actually going on, doesn't this render powerless the false supposition that health is a sometime thing? Doesn't it establish health as an inescapable quality of man's being? If health seems to be lost, our need is to realize that God is ever present, expressing His infinite perfection, including perfect health, in His creation. We also need to deny the false sense of health as material and therefore temporary. To pray with this understanding - and to maintain a pure, Christlike state of thought in accord with Jesus' teachings - is to discern one's God-given wholeness and to experience physical healing.

Health, freely given by God, is the common heritage of all people, because all are, in truth, God's spiritual offspring. From a material standpoint, this may seem an abstraction, having nothing to do with the way things really are. But as we claim health to be the reality of being for all, we'll help mankind, at least to some degree, progress out of the false belief in the necessity for sickness. And we'll be equipping ourselves to help those who may call on us for healing. Didn't Christ command us to do this? Didn't he say, ''Heal the sick . . . : freely ye have received, freely give'' ? n2

n2 Matthew 10:8.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE Unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings. Malachi 4:2