On page 402 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy writes: "The time approaches when mortal mind will forsake its corporeal, structural, and material basis, when immortal Mind and its formations will be apprehended in Science, and material beliefs will not interfere with spiritual facts." Again on page 20 she says, "Material belief is slow to acknowledge what the spiritual fact implies," thus accounting for our much stumbling. Every direction of our textbook, however, as well as of the Scripture which it elucidates, urges us to keep seeking the spiritual fact and to cling to it as fast as we find it; for to recognize, contemplate, and demonstrate the facts of God and His creation is to find salvation, heaven. A saved man would naturally imply a man knowing what is true about God and about himself, about whatever God has made; nothing could hold fuller salvation than seeing and knowing God's creation as God sees and knows it. Christian Science maintains that spiritual man, reflecting God, divine Mind, has now this spiritual understanding; and that to lay aside material believing for this right understanding of God and all His works, is to enter upon the process of salvation.
Through spiritual revelation, reason, and logic, Mrs. Eddy discerned in orderly unfoldment the divine facts of creation, the truth itself; then she went about persistently contemplating these facts in a way that excluded from her thinking all former material beliefs,—she demonstrated them, and thereby expelled wrong belief. This done in good measure, she set down in her writings the entire text of the revealed facts, exposed the nature of the material beliefs which contend against Spirit, and put before us explicit rules for proving spiritual facts to be true. Her thought and life were not "slow to acknowledge what the spiritual fact implies;" and ours will not be when we love divine facts more than we love the complexity of human beliefs which call themselves mortal life.
A spiritual fact, like an astronomical fact or a mathematical fact, is something which has always existed and always will exist. It cannot be constructed by mortals, nor can anything be taken from it or added to it; human opinion affects it not at all. It can, however, be discovered, appreciated, demonstrated. In the life of Christ Jesus the world sees unique phenomena,—even the sick healed and the dead raised by spiritual means alone. Following this proof that Christ Jesus understood something the rest of the world did not discern, like signs marked the work of his disciples; proof again that spiritual facts are here for all men. The gracious Master of Christendom healed the centurion's servant and raised the widow's son from death as surely as he cleansed the life of the Magdalen. Sickness and death dissolved under his spiritual thinking as lawfully as did sin, showing that none of the three belong to the spiritual facts of being. Christian Science discovers spiritual reality operating through spiritual law to bring about these results, and proves, too, that such experiences can recur today when true discipleship receives and again correctly applies the law of God.
