"UNDER divine Providence there can be no accidents, since there is no room for imperfection in perfection." This remarkable statement by Mary Baker Eddy in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 424), is revolutionizing mankind's thinking in regard to accidents. Furthermore, our Leader herself demonstrated the truth of this declaration, for it was a mortal belief called accident that led her to her discovery of the divine Principle of spiritual healing.
In the year 1866 Mrs. Eddy sustained an injury, the result of a fall on ice, which her friends believed would prove fatal. The third day after the fall, however, she was instantaneously healed while reading and pondering the Biblical account of one of Jesus' healings. She had touched the chord of harmonious being. Like the Apostle Paul when he revived the young man named Eutychus, who had fallen from the third loft (Acts 20), she too proved false the belief of accident. Of this experience she writes (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 24), "My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself, and how to make others so." She made practical the Science of perfection, based on the understanding of one God, perfect and eternal, and man created in His image.
Today the plea for someone to do something is often heard in times of stress or emergency. If one is a Christian Scientist, he is indeed doing something, be it for himself or another, or for the situation as a whole. Turning away from the evidence of the material senses, he realizes the truths about God and man as set forth in the textbook. He knows that God, good, is All-in-all; that He is everywhere present, governing His spiritual universe—the only universe—in perfect order and harmony. He realizes that the real man is immune from accident because man is spiritual, harmonious, the complete and perfect reflection of God, eternally at one with his creator. Perfection, man's normal state of being, cannot be reversed or nullified. Under the marginal heading "Indestructible relationship" our Leader writes (Science and Health, pp. 470, 471), "The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history."
