IN describing the healing that results from a scientific understanding of real being, Mrs. Eddy writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 259), "The Christlike understanding of scientific being and divine healing includes a perfect Principle and idea,— perfect God and perfect man,—as the basis of thought and demonstration." This scientific rule destroys all error when properly understood and applied. Starting from the basis of God's perfection, and knowing that man as His idea must also be perfect, establishes the thought-process that vanquishes all claims that seem to oppose this twofold truth.
The first chapter of Genesis gives an account of the perfect creation, including perfect man, thus affording divine authority for Mrs. Eddy's scientific teaching. This record declares: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him;" and, "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good," statements of spiritual fact remarkable for their brevity and completeness. From the sixth verse in the second chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation, however, the vagaries of human belief are set forth in many places in contradistinction to the divine creation described above. In the third chapter of Genesis the lie about God and man is whispered by a talking serpent, an anomaly unworthy of credence. In Revelation, John sees the belief in the reality of evil as "a great red dragon;" but he adds the significant statement, born of spiritual understanding, that it was "cast out." John plainly states that this serpent is the devil, or Satan. Jesus said that the devil was "a liar, and the father of it." This is the view Christian Science takes of evil; for it accepts the Bible as the chart of life, and Christ Jesus as the Way-shower.
Christian Science treatment is based upon the truth about perfect God and perfect man, and error is denounced in all its visible and invisible forms as untrue, and therefore unreal. As this truth is clearly realized, enlightenment and demonstration follow. There is unmistakable evidence of Immanuel, or "God with us," in the disappearance of the discord, be it sickness, sin, lack, or any other form of error.
