Christian Scientists accept the teachings of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, because they give the true, demonstrable understanding, of God, and therefore present to mankind the only practicable way out of the discord into which their misconceptions of the Supreme Being and of His creation have engulfed them. The tenacious tendrils of a false religious education are sometimes slow to unloosen from the student's thought, and hence it is not strange that he occasionally lapses into his old sense of a personal deity with human qualities and attributes. There may be with him at times a feeling almost of protest because he has not been delivered from some wrong condition, even though his knowledge of God is not yet sufficient to remove such an error from his belief. When, through further study, he clearly discerns what Christian Science teaches of the nature of God as divine Principle, infinite good, and that evil is but the opposite error, he no longer underestimates the work required of him, nor expects of the truth more than he understands.
The student's correct relation to Christian Science is indicated in the words themselves. A student is a learner, and science is demonstrable knowledge. A student of Christian Science is one who is working to gain a demonstrable knowledge of Christian truth as enunciated and practised by Christ Jesus. He is not a suppliant for favors, he is seeking to know. Superstition, ignorance, and error cannot victimize him within the sphere of his personally demonstrated knowledge of the truth, but beyond that he must continue to labor and wait. The beneficiary of any branch of scientific knowledge is indebted to it to the extent of what he knows and applies or what another knows and applies in his behalf, but is not otherwise rewarded except with the promise that perfect knowledge will give him perfect dominion. Jesus prophesied the freedom of mortals through knowing the truth, not through merely believing in it. To know God and Jesus Christ is required to reach the consciousness of eternal life, but this knowledge does not result from faith only, but is gained through the patient study and application of Christianity. This is the student's work, the true Christian's daily life.
Human history proves that mere faith or belief in God does not give mortals that knowledge of Him which delivers from evil. A degree of faith is essential in the student or he will have no confidence to learn, but a professed faith in God which struggles for existence side by side with an almost equal faith in evil, will not take its possessor far into the knowledge or demonstration of omnipotent good. The mathematical student believes in the truth of mathematics or he would not apply himself to the study of it, but it is what he learns of it and not his faith that helps him in his problems. He knows that his ignorance will not be overlooked, no matter into what straits it may take him, and that he will not reach the right result irrespective of his understanding and use of the rules involved. He knows at the outset of his study that he will gain only the results of the knowledge he is able to prove in actual work.
