IN "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" we read: "How true it is that whatever is learned through material sense must be lost because such so-called knowledge is reversed by the spiritual facts of being in Science" (p. 312). These awakening words by Mrs. Eddy have been productive of much thought on the part of the writer. Trained to be a teacher, and always much interested from a sociological standpoint in the education of the child, it was hard for me to see the truth of this statement, and at the same time to understand the use of the so-called physical senses and what they seem to give us of the material world, as we humanly know it. Mindful of Mrs. Eddy's statement that "only through radical reliance on Truth can scientific healing power be realized" (p. 167), and convinced that she had given to the world the demonstrable truth, I set myself the task of scientifically apprehending her teaching respecting the giving up of whatever is learned through material sense.
I saw that the evidence given by these long-trusted senses falls into two classes: First, the testimony which gives us a beautiful world when we see it at its best, together with lovely and loving friends, whom we believe in and enjoy; and second, the opposite testimony, which gives us a world of accident, catastrophe, sin, sickness, and death. Personally, I was willing to see the truth in the face of seeming discord, willing and eager to see harmony as the reality in all things; and being disposed to accept and use what I could understand as I went along, I left, for the time being, the consideration of the sense testimony which gives us a harmonious world.
I realized that in the present state of human unfoldment, Christian Science must smite the inharmonies and false sense testimony. I believed that Christian Science did set forth a scientific standard or theory, demonstrable in human experience, by which humanity could prove the nothingness of evil in all its myriad forms; and I recognized that the whole problem of living is just this of overcoming the beliefs of inharmony, supported by material sense.
