Power of Prayer MARY BAKER EDDY          My answer to the inquiry, "Why did Christians of every sect in the United States fail in their prayers to save the life of President McKinley," is briefly this: Insufficient faith or spiritual understanding, and a compound of prayers in which one earnest, tender desire works unconsciously against the modus operandi of another, would prevent the result desired. In the June, 1901, Message to my church in Boston, I refer to the effect of one human desire or belief unwittingly neutralizing another, though both are equally sincere.          In the practice of materia medica, croton oil is not mixed with morphine to remedy dysentery, for those drugs are supposed to possess opposite qualities and so to produce opposite effects. The spirit of the prayer of the righteous heals the sick, but this spirit is of God, and the divine Mind is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; whereas the human mind is a compound of faith and doubt, of fear and hope, of faith in truth and faith in error. The knowledge that all things are possible to God excludes doubt, but differing human concepts as to the divine power and purpose of infinite Mind, and the so-called power of matter, act as the different properties of drugs are supposed to act — one against the other — and this compound of mind and matter neutralizes itself.          Our lamented President, in his loving acquiescence, believed that his martyrdom was God's way. Hundreds, thousands of others believed the same, and hundreds of thousands who prayed for him feared that the bullet would prove fatal. Even the physicians may have feared this.          These conflicting states of the human mind, of trembling faith, hope, and of fear, evinced a lack of the absolute understanding of God's omnipotence, and thus they prevented the power of absolute Truth from reassuring the mind and through the mind resuscitating the body of the patient.          The divine power and poor human sense — yea, the spirit and the flesh — struggled, and to mortal sense the flesh prevailed. Had prayer so fervently offered possessed no opposing element, and President McKinley's recovery been regarded as wholly contingent on the power of God, — on the power of divine Love to overrule the purposes of hate and the law of Spirit to control matter, — the result would have been scientific, and the patient would have recovered.          St. Paul writes: "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." And the Saviour of man saith: "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them." Human governments maintain the right of the majority to rule. Christian Scientists are yet in a large minority on the subject of divine metaphysics; but they improve the morals and the lives of men, and they heal the sick on the basis that God has all power, is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, supreme over all.          In a certain city the Master "did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief," — because of the mental counteracting elements, the startled or the unrighteous contradicting minds of mortals. And if he were personally with us to-day, he would rebuke whatever accords not with a full faith and spiritual knowledge of God. He would mightily rebuke a single doubt of the ever-present power of divine Spirit to control all the conditions of man and the universe.          If the skilful surgeon or the faithful M.D. is not dismayed by a fruitless use of the knife or the drug, has not the Christian Scientist with his conscious understanding of omnipotence, in spite of the constant stress of the hindrances previously mentioned, reason for his faith in what is shown him by God's works?   Excerpted from The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany by Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 292-294

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