Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, discerned the subjective nature of human experience and stated in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 86): "Mortal mind sees what it believes as certainly as it believes what it sees. It feels, hears, and sees its own thoughts." In other words, mortals see objectified the beliefs of the human so-called mind. Not understanding the Science of being, mortals fear that present good may not continue. Likewise, their belief in and consequent experience of the opposite of good, evil, is accentuated and prolonged because of self-ignorance, self-pity, so-called righteous indignation, criticism, resentment.
An individual may intellectually see that his harmony or the absence of it, his progress or the lack of it, are determined largely by his own thinking, whether he accepts the suggestions of mortal mind or denies that his destiny is at the mercy of chance and circumstance. But unless he understands how scientifically to control his thinking, these admissions may abandon him to hopeless discouragement, self-condemnation, and despair. For instance, one may be suffering from what is termed hereditary disease, disposition, or poverty, apparently through no fault of his own. It would be cruel to assert to such a one that he himself is the author of his troubles. However, in the light of Jesus' admonition, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven," is not the individual responsible? If he learns in Christian Science how to be obedient to the Master's injunction to acknowledge his heavenly Father alone as his real parent or creator, he need not be in bondage to the belief of heredity, which he has ignorantly accepted and appeared to see manifested in his experience.
Again, an individual may seem to be the innocent victim of a domestic tyrant, circumstances making it appear impossible for him to escape. Can this, too, be laid at the sufferer's own mental doorstep? It must be answered, Yes, in so far as he is responsible for the thoughts he admits to his own consciousness. The primary need is to acknowledge the absolute truth about man, stated in the first chapter of Genesis, that he is the spiritual image and likeness of God, who saw His creation as "very good." In the measure that one accepts and maintains in his thinking this true concept of man, will its manifestation be experienced.
