WE find in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, as well as in her other writings, many references to the illusions under which mortals labor, or to the illusory nature of the various forms under which so-called mortal mind attempts to simulate reality. We learn from the study of Science and Health that these illusions masquerade under many different names; that whatever they call themselves, whether beliefs in sickness, sin, lack, discord, or even death itself, they are all claims of the one evil or evil one, and that they will all be finally destroyed by Truth. Mortals have believed death to be inevitable; yet the Bible teaches, and Christian Science makes its teaching clear, that death itself is to be overcome, it being but an illusion of material sense carried to the extreme.
A definition of "illusion" is, "An unreal or misleading image presented to the vision; a deceptive appearance." One might hold that the many phases of sickness, sin, lack, and discord, apparently so vital a part of the experience of mankind today, are by no means what could be called unreal or misleading in their presentation to human vision, and that they are too real to be deceptive. But the conclusion is based on a false premise; and the premise being false, as must be the claim that anything but good can proceed from God, the only cause, the conclusion must also be untrue. To the mortal senses every one of the various phases of error has the appearance of truth, each one seeming real when judged from personal experience; and it is here that Christian Science brings to the weary and heavy-laden the corrective truth about God and man.
Christian Science teaches that all is mental and spiritual, not material; hence, that what seems to the five socalled human senses to be matter or substance is not real. Regardless of how real a condition may appear to be to these human, material senses, if it is not a manifestation of God, good, it is not real. Truth alone can destroy the illusions that apparently beset us, and destroy them by proving them to be untrue.
