Christ Jesus came teaching and demonstrating the power of God to heal the world's ills, including sickness and sin. This was the Master's mission, and for about three hundred years his followers practiced Christian healing until, through a decline in spiritual understanding, the healing power was lost sight of. The words of truth which the Master left were not lost, however, and they are recorded in the Bible, to be understood and demonstrated by spiritual thinkers in all ages. A spiritually minded woman in this age, Mary Baker Eddy, caught their spiritual significance, interpreted their full meaning, and presented to the world her discovery—Christian Science. So today, even as in Jesus' time, the sick are being healed and the sinning redeemed by the understanding and application of the truth.
Sickness and sin are both proved untrue and unreal by Christian Science. How could anything so unlike God, good, be true or real when God is infinite, the only creator? How could evil be true when man is the spiritual and perfect likeness of God? This we learn from the first chapter of Genesis, wherein it is stated that "God created man in his own image," and that "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Through the truth of God's allness both sickness and sin are proved unreal and untrue. Students of Christian Science must learn the procedure by which to prove their unreality. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy elucidates this method, where she says (p. 461): "If you believe that you are sick, should you say, 'I am sick'? No." She adds: "If you commit a crime, should you acknowledge to yourself that you are a criminal? Yes. Your responses should differ because of the different effects they produce." In the same paragraph she says: "To prove scientifically the error or unreality of sin, you must first see the claim of sin, and then destroy it. Whereas, to prove scientifically the error or unreality of disease, you must mentally unsee the disease; then you will not feel it, and it is destroyed." She further explains this necessity for exposing sin in order to destroy it by saying (ibid., pp. 447, 448),"To assume that there are no claims of evil and yet to indulge them, is a moral offence;" and, "If evil is uncondemned, it is undenied and nurtured. Under such circumstances, to say that there is no evil, is an evil in itself."
The Master in a parable told of the Pharisee and the publican who "went up into the temple to pray." The Pharisee prayed thus: "God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess." But the publican, "standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner." And the Master added, "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other."
