To the beginner in Christian Science, the method of procedure is as new and novel as is the method of the primary grade to the child just entering on his school career. The child's first glimpse of this new phase of life awes and mystifies him. He has come in touch with a system of government and law that, no matter what his home training has been, is new to him. This law governs not only himself, but every other child in the school; and he soon learns that those children who conform to the law get along smoothly, while those who rebel against it are frequently in trouble. The child of a larger growth who approaches Christian Science, finds himself face to face with a repetition of this childhood experience, many times magnified. He is told that this law in whose presence he now stands is the law of God, omnipotent good; and since the claims of evil are still pressing hard round about him, he is perplexed and wonders how this can be. Perhaps the privilege of attending a Christian Science service becomes his, and observation convinces him that the people who are striving to conform to this law are healthy and happy, while those who fail to recognize it are subject to sickness and discord.
As the primary teacher begins to teach the science of numbers by methods which the child can comprehend, so does the practitioner begin to illustrate the Science of being by those things which the learner can understand. As soon as the child has been taught that two pencils and one pencil make three pencils, he is sent to the board to express in figures the knowledge he has gained, and every primary teacher can tell of the funny little figures, some upside down, that appear as the results of these first efforts. When the Christian Science beginner has been taught that God is the source of life, health, happiness, all-good, he is told to go and manifest, express, or, to use a familiar term, demonstrate what he has learned. His effort to express his knowledge is often as crude as that of the child, but both are learning addition; day by day the child grows more expert in his handling of figures, and day by day the adult is adding to his store of understanding. When each day's work is counted up, the result is added health, added hope, added blessings of many names and natures.
Just as addition is not all of the science of numbers, neither is it all of the Science of being. The next step in both cases is subtraction. Whereas in the former case all has been a process of accumulation, now the process is one of apparent loss, but this loss is only apparent, not real; for in the case of numbers that which is taken away may be added to what is left, thus giving back the original, while in Science it is only by the taking away of false qualities—envy, greed, jealousy, malice, selfishness, etc. — that the real man, made in the image and likeness of God, can be discerned at all. In other words, what seems to be subtraction is not subtraction after all, for nothing real is taken away; it is only a case of separating and distinguishing the good from the bad, holding to the former and rejecting the latter. The lesson of separating having been mastered, the learner in each case now goes back to his first lesson in addition, but he is taught how to add faster by the new process of multiplication. Thought begins to expand, and the seemingly impossible becomes easily possible. With the child, a long row of figures is produced with small effort, and with the young Scientist good results attend his mental efforts in a manner that often surprises him. Having sought first, "the kingdom of God, and his righteousness," he finds that all things are being added unto him, and he begins to rejoice in the affluence of good, of divine Love.
