"WHEN the condition is present which you say induces disease, whether it be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office as porter and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears. Exclude from mortal mind the offending errors; then the body cannot suffer from them. The issues of pain or pleasure must come through mind, and like a watchman forsaking his post, we admit the intruding belief, forgetting that through divine help we can forbid this entrance" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 392, 393). In these words our Leader enunciates the preventive rule of Christian Science.
Much has been written and spoken concerning the healing works of Jesus and of Christian Science, but we must not lose sight of the words of admonition of both these teachers, warning mankind that it does not have to accept the multitudinous phases of sickness, sin, decay, and accident, from which it must be restored to soundness and safety, and telling it that there is a way to avoid all such manifestations of evil.
The world has been so deeply plunged into discord of every name and nature that it longs for a healing system which will extricate it from its troubles. When the Master fulfilled his mission as the Saviour of men, in that he taught them how to overcome every phase of human suffering, he did not omit to tell of the life to be lived and the kind of thinking to be done which would prevent the expression of error. Hear these significant words: "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death;" also, "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life." Here we have his promise of prevention of discordant experience. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, declared that death entered into the world through sin. Then it logically follows that a cessation of sinful thinking will ultimately destroy "the last enemy."
