IN various passages throughout the Bible reference is made to choosing, and we are shown how necessary it is for us to make a choice as to what we shall worship—what we shall accept as God. In the twenty-fourth chapter of Joshua we read, "Ye are witnesses against yourselves that ye have chosen you the Lord, to serve him." Emphasizing such choosing, our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has written in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 450), "The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen evil, disease, and death; and he will overcome them by understanding their nothingness and the allness of God, or good."
When an individual first commences the study of Christian Science, he has made his first decision, his first choice on this important subject of enlisting. He may not realize at first that he has enlisted, nor just how great a change is to take place in his subsequent thinking and experience. However, as he begins a serious and sincere study, he finds his beliefs changing. He may have been steeped in medical theories which he had accepted as law. Universal opinions and various superstitions may have bound him. He may have had some definite opinions about religion and prayer, or felt that he disbelieved in God. But as the light of this glorious new-old truth is shed upon his unsatisfying beliefs, he finds them to be unlawful, and they begin to vanish from his thought.
The new student is often puzzled as to his ability to lessen evil and disease because he feels himself so ignorant as to the method of handling these phases of belief. Christian Science does not teach us to ignore or forget evil or suffering. It does, however, teach us that we must see these errors to be without cause or foundation, since God, infinite good, made all that was made, and all that is like Him is good. The student finds that error must be given less and less power in his thinking, and never attached to person. If one truly understands the nothingness of evil and disease, he will have no fear of them, and will find no pleasure in sinful thinking. He will not allow himself to be handled by error; nor will he hold others in their former false beliefs by referring to them.
