If words have any meaning at all, Christ's words have meant that personal sacrifice is the cost of spiritual growth. For eighteen hundred years, men of every kind--scholars, mystics, priests, laymen, ascetics, and saints--agreed on that. Then arose a new group of cults--faith-healers--which not only gave a new meaning to those words but a directly opposite meaning. Success and prosperity, they asserted, are outer signs of inner spiritual growth. The end result was that they tried to use spiritual forces solely for their own personal purposes and material benefits, instead of trying to surrender to those forces and submit to higher purposes. They denied--contrary to the experience of all religious history--that material loss and personal failure could ever be the working of such purposes.
-- Notebooks Category 10: Healing of the Self > Chapter 5 : The Healing Power of The Overself > # 92
