Paul’s Demonstration

In Christian healing the instantaneous demonstration has always made men marvel, some at the understanding of man, all at the power of God. In the healing work of Christ Jesus the immediate answer to his call on Truth was invariable, the one exception of the progressive healing of the blind man proving the rule. In consequence, instantaneous demonstration has been generally attributed to the measure of the power with which the healer is endowed, which power arouses in the patient a faith responsive to it.

Paul was the recipient of such a healing, and in tracing its cause through his writings it becomes evident that this elemental faith develops many ramifications in demonstrable understanding. Of these a few may serve as a valuable model for guidance. Saul of Tarsus was a supreme egotist, “a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee,” as he calls his faith in creedal formula, and so firmly did he uphold these doctrines of men that he dedicated himself to the persecution of all who refused to follow his philosophy.

While he was most actively prosecuting this unrighteous purpose, the revelation that he was falsely engaged came to him, and the very might of the light of Truth rendered him blind to the material world about him. For three days, fasting from all material suggestions, he submitted to be led, but when the messenger who was sent him offered healing and the Holy Ghost, instantly through faith he accepted, and we read the brief but complete statement in Acts: “Immediately there fell from his eyes as it, had been scales; and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.”

The key-note of this healing, and many others unrecorded even today, in the light of Christian Science, Paul himself sounds in this admonition: “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” When the healing truth was offered him, there might have impeded him a depth of misery in the memory of all his “threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord,” and of all he had sent bound into Jerusalem.

Paul might even have indulged condemnation of his sin to the exclusion of the liberating truth, but even before he had apprehended, that is, laid hold on a large measure of understanding of spiritual Life and its law, he put his mistakes behind him and utterly forsook their memory. This ability to forget hastened his perception of the unreality of material life and the man-made philosophy of it. Instead of nursing the past in remorseful explanation and useless regret, he quickly saw the falsity of all that the carnal mind declares, and his refusal to dwell in the memory of any of its boasts proved his complete rejection of its nothingness. So long as a painful sense of past dreams of sickness and sin is held in thought, that long is a material selfhood held in thought.

The torment of self-condemnation has led many through prolonged wanderings in the drouth and heat of suffering; indeed it is an old story that many a mortal mariner has been delayed in reaching port, the home-land of harmonious consciousness, because he has been tossed about in the whirlpools of a stormy past, in a dream life apart from God. The condemnation of such an experience can be the condemnation of a material selfhood only, and self-condemnation, tritely defined as egotism turned inside out, is no more wise or just than self-gratulation, which attributes power to mortal man and attempts to sustain mortality. Paul’s healing from this phase of egotism, now called pharisaism, and a refusal to condemn it as real, was the basis of his redemption and of that persuasion that nothing dead (the false sense which alone can die) could separate him from divine Love.

Paul claimed the Christ, for he accepted the Holy Ghost. He determined to know nothing among men save Christ Jesus. Him he made the perfect model, and in living Christ’s commandment he was as merciful to others as to himself. He began for all time to separate the false from the true, or, in his own phraseology, to abandon the natural man for the spiritual man. In that splendid exposition of the unreality of this so-called “natural man,” and of the Christ-ideal, in the second and fifteenth chapters of I Corinthians, he explains that the “natural man” never receives the graces and wisdom of God, for they seem foolishness to him, of necessity being spiritually discerned; but he who is able to judge spiritually leaves judgment to God, and comparing spiritual things with spiritual, endeavors in every direction to exercise the Christ-mind. He thus found that only through a false sense of man had he consented to Stephen’s death and bound and imprisoned the other Christians whom he had persecuted. A metaphysical understanding awakened him from his unregenerate state, and restored to him the knowledge that man created in the image and likeness of God is eternally and indestructibly linked with the Father. Transformed through spiritual consciousness, he made that mental state the basis of the fulfilment of salvation for himself and the saving truth for others.

The third step is now to be taken. The scales of vanity and self-deceit have fallen, and carried with them spiritual blindness; the Holy Ghost has revealed “perfect God and perfect man,—as the basis of thought and demonstration” (Science and Health, p. 259), and now the baptism must be accomplished. Paul’s baptism is completed as he brings the water of life to others,— a complete reversal and just recompense for having persecuted the strong and excluded the weak from a free adherence to and joyful illumination of spiritual truth. He becomes an apostle of the teaching which he had repudiated, and in the promulgation of it suffers joyfully more violence than he had accorded others. He carries on Jesus’ work with a power and breadth and universality that today helps to reveal the reign of Christ. He redeems his past by giving to all who come within the sphere of his activity the light of spiritual understanding, that demonstrable understanding which apprehends the present and makes the past profitable as a guard against evil and a justification of good. His self-righteous egotism he uses as a pressing example of the falsity of mortal man’s wisdom which renders him dead, unresponsive to the truth. Having redeemed his blunders, he proves the mortal sense of both cause and effect to be but a dream, from which even a partial perception of the truth awakens one; and out of his own experience he comfortingly exhorts: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

In this fearless apostle’s letter to the Romans is this declaration of every man’s responsibility in upholding right: “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.” It is true that no human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness therein, and that he increases or decreases his own in equal ratio. Should he, however, be bound by a sense of bitterness and self-condemnation that he has injured those whom he would most have chosen to benefit, he has the testimony and example of this intrepid disciple of Truth: lie can put the past and all its nightmares absolutely and finally behind him, and with a stanch right about-face to the true and the just, with his own uplifting he can uplift others, no matter how circumscribed his opportunity for action may be. Then his past becomes not a hindrance but a help. The “faith unfaithful” which kept him “falsely true” to a false past, can be exchanged for a consecration to the humble following of that basic faith which is “the substance of things hoped for.” Then, pressing forward for the prize of the high calling of the followers of Spirit, he will fulfil the conditions of salvation for others as zealously as for himself, and in humility and meekness for the glory of God.