BEFORE the days of recorded literature, imaginatively gifted people devised and recited fictional tales and adventures to satisfy the human craving for refuge from the dullness and hazards of human experience. Today the printing press facilitates the production of ephemeral literature, similarly inspired to afford a temporary distraction by creating an imaginary world remote from the reader's daily life.
Excessive reading of such literature produces effects from which one turns again to face, unsatisfied, his human experience. When Mary Baker Eddy wrote her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," and her other books, and when she established the Christian Science periodicals, she gave to the world a literature that affords the only genuine escape from the illusions and limitations of human experience. This literature opens up to the human mind a realm of spiritual reality, in which relationships are satisfying, supply abundant, opportunity unrestricted, and sin, disease, and death unknown.
Christian Science teaches that man has never fallen from his original state of perfection, as described in the first chapter of Genesis, and that this truth can be realized in human experience through spiritual, scientific thinking. Each glimpse of the real universe is a spiritual awakening that brings not merely temporary surcease, but a permanent escape from some form of discord or limitation.
