CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS have found it of fundamental importance to be able to give a correct answer to Pilate's famous question, "What is truth?" To answer this question it has been found necessary to make a distinction which is not commonly made; namely, to discriminate between what appears true to mortals and what is true; in short, between appearance and actuality. Jesus set forth the necessity for such a distinction when he said, "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment." Sense testimony, and reasoning based on sense testimony, report and judge of appearances. Spiritual discernment, faith, and correct reasoning based on the nature of God, report and judge of what is true. When he wrote, "The flesh [the testimony of the fleshly senses] lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other," St. Paul recognized that reports and judgments based on sense testimony and reports and judgments based on spiritual discernment are contrary to each other, and so need to be distinguished and a choice made between them.
Appearances change, but God and His works do not change. "I am the Lord, I change not." "The works were finished from the foundation of the world." It follows that a statement of changing appearances could hardly correspond with the changeless facts of existence in God's universe, which is the only true universe; hence, what appears to the physical senses is not the truth. The truth is a statement of the eternal realities of being. It is not one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow. Truth is synonymous with divine Mind. The infinite Mind does not think finite thoughts. It does not know one thing to-day and unknow it to-morrow. God knows the truth as it eternally is, and what God knows or thinks is the reality of being, and the reality of being constitutes the manifestations of Truth. These manifestations are always spiritual and metaphysical, although they may be made evident to the human sense through appearances which are named physical. Thus health, or harmony, which is true and spiritual, may be made manifest in connection with the human sense of a physical body.
Let us illustrate the practical importance of the distinction, which in the mere statement may appear somewhat abstruse and academic. A Christian Scientist, if called as a witness in a court of law, would testify according to the evidence of the physical senses (because that is the kind of evidence the court of law requires), and so might testify that at a given time a certain man, John Smith, had the rheumatism. Yet the same Christian Scientist, if called to treat John Smith, would silently pursue a line of thought which would include the recognition of man as the child of God, and hence not subject to disease and death; while he would know that disease is but a manifestation of the false belief of life and substance in matter, a belief without reality and without power. John Smith says that he has rheumatism, but this is not the truth of being. It is but a statement of false material sense, and many times such a line of thought has proved, at once, that the belief of sickness is entirely erroneous, nothingness. The writer personally knows of a case in which a severe form of disease, of six weeks' standing, vanished under such treatment in a few minutes. Thus it is that the realization of the truth, and the prayers of faith, in Christian Science have been effective in dispelling all manner of disease and sin. The practical importance of distinguishing between what sense testimony asserts to be true and the truth itself, is thus made apparent. Christian Scientists will admit that disease and sin and other phenomena reported by sense testimony have that kind of validity which passes for evidence in a court of law, but, from the absolute standpoint of Science, they recognize the reports of sense testimony to be error, and use the understanding and declaration of the truth to overcome and destroy this error, whenever and wherever it presents itself, so far as they can do so without trespassing upon the freedom of others.
