Christian Science teaches that scientific healing is accomplished through a spiritually mental process. It insists that the habit of giving undue attention to the body must be reversed, and that one's endeavor must be directed instead to the correction of erroneous thoughts and beliefs. Disease is seen to be not a merely physical condition, but rather an outward manifestation of the error of believing some false accusation against the perfection of man. The accuser, as Christian Science has shown, is a suggestion that evil can be included in real being; but this fabrication is necessarily baseless and insubstantial. Until this fact is seen and proved, however, mortals may seem, in the illusion, to endure a sense of suffering as if the deception were fact.
A primary step, then, in Christianly scientific healing is to learn the false nature of the accuser, and to understand that upon the basis of the perfection of God and spiritual man the illusion may be destroyed. If one were to be accused of some reprehensible characteristic or deed of which he knew himself to be innocent, he would stoutly deny the falsehood, on the ground of the truth which he knew about himself. He would not for a moment dally with the falsity by attempting to excuse it because of some extenuating evidence; he would refute the falsehood absolutely and thus have done with it.
When Christian Scientists learn, through increasing understanding of the allness of God, how to be as positive in denying mentally any false evidence of sin or disease as they would be in repudiating false accusation against character or conduct, they will, doubtless, more uniformly realize the prompt cures of which Christian Science is capable. What too often hinders a sudden rejection of disease or discord is a tendency to excuse the erroneous thinking—the fear, the sin, the habit, the wrong desire—which begets the outward manifestation. Christian Science is not, however, a convenient remedy through which ease in the senses may be produced while error in thought is retained. Accuser and excuser are, in fact, the same pretender; and thought must be cleansed of all that claims to be unlike perfect divine Mind and its idea. Then and thus is Christian healing, profound and permanent, realized.
