It is obvious in Christian Science that men's release from their difficulties is not necessarily dependent on the lapse of time. It depends on their enlightenment, their recognition of the truth of being, by which they find they are not subject as they had supposed they were to limitation and evil. This fact is indicated in the statements on pages 476 and 477 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" concerning Christ Jesus' method of healing the sick. Here the author, Mary Baker Eddy, writes: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." It was the scientific, the truly enlightened view that brought the happy results.
That the same method is applicable today, as in Jesus' time, to the healing both of disease and of other discordant conditions, the experience of Christian Scientists continually shows, and indeed Mrs. Eddy makes it plain at many points in her writings that the method is equal to the overcoming of all evil. She writes in the same work, for instance (p. 242): "There is but one way to heaven, harmony, and Christ in divine Science shows us this way. It is to know no other reality—to have no other consciousness of life—than good, God and His reflection, and to rise superior to the so-called pain and pleasure of the senses." Thus the accurate and unqualified recognition of spiritual truth is seen to be the one requirement for establishing the evidence of good in any and all departments of men's experience.
Science shows with the utmost clarity why this is so. Evil in any of its aspects—disease, sorrow, loss, lack, despair, fear, disability, or trouble of any other kind—is never real. It is forever impossible in the omnipresence and allness of God, good, and therefore, so far as humanity is concerned, is never more than someone's, or perhaps many people's, mistaken vision of reality. An incorrect view of anything is, in other words, all that ever is the matter with it—or ever seems, rather, to be the matter with it, for nothing is ever actually wrong with the divinely real and only creation. Because such an incorrect view is all that is ever the matter, the correct view is all that is ever necessary for setting things right, for obtaining the clear evidence of reality and harmony. And the obtaining of the correct view is never irrevocably deferred by any condition whatsoever. It does not have to wait on time or any material circumstance. The correct view is spiritually natural at all times, and the proof of this fact is always available through sincere work in Science.
