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RATIONALE OF SPIRITUAL HEALING 135 great truth and principle of Christianity which has been dropped out of the life of the Church and forgotten. After the appearance of Jesus as a spirit to His disciples or scholars, He said to them, "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. Whose soever sins ye remit (that is, banish, bear or send away), they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” (John XX, 21, 23.) The term sin is here used in its radical sense, of an "aberration from the truth”, or the divine reality of things, an error, a falsity, an illusion, and not in its corrupted theological signification.
In this sense sin is the psychic germ of disease, the idea or living image of it, and that alone from which it can exist. The disciples of Jesus in all ages, through the coming to them of the Paraclete as the spirit and power of truth from him, and as the inward Word, which was to be inspired into them by his spiritual presence, were to be endowed with power to remit or put away sin, as being the cause of every physical malady, from the minds and life of men. How this is to be done in harmony with the laws of the mind has been shown above. We take up into ourself the morbid condition of the patient, and assume the psychic embryo of the disease, so that we vicariously represent him, and "bear it in our body up to the tree” (1 Pet. ii, 24) - profound Kabalistic expression. We take up into ourself his condition in order that we may form a clear idea of it, and this idea of it is the real disease, the ding an sich, or thing in itself.
