When I began reading Science and Health, I remember how my attention was drawn, constantly, to a statement which said the sick were healed by simply reading this book. That statement printed on the obscure fly leaf, has at last become clear. How reading a book could cure the sick was a question with me. I could hardly believe that statement. It would have been easier to believe if it had said we were to use some method in our reading. But no method, no system, no plan for the reading was required. All you had to do was to read. After six years' "reading," the truth of that statement has dawned upon me in a remarkable manner. Remarkable in its clearness.
I discovered one evening, while reading, that every paragraph I read was a declaratory statement of some sort, — of Truth against error; and that the whole of Science and Health, if examined from this point of view, becomes a compilation, a collection, of declaratory statements of Truth; and it never leaves any one statement partially declared. The declaration is complete. If in reading you find the sentence (I have here opened the text-book at random, p. 394), "By conceding to discord such great power, a large majority of doctors depress mental energy, which is the only recuperative power," you will notice the first part of the sentence that "a large majority of doctors depress mental energy," is finished by a declaratory statement of Truth, that it [mental energy] "is the only recuperative power." Thus the reader is constantly protected. The author, Mrs. Eddy, has shown once more her spiritual understanding in the construction of these sentences forming her remarkable book.
By this inspired thought is made possible the presentation of enough of the picture of error to meet and destroy it, and yet, by constantly meeting it and denying it as we are being informed upon it, no bad effects can follow. Error being powerless but for the belief in its power, is unable to gain our consciousness after it has been exposed and then declared powerless by the might of Truth. Wherever you find a reference to the operation of error, in Science and Health, you will be sure also to find it is immediately met and denied by a statement of Truth.
