The new student of Christian Science, as he considers its teaching of the unreality of matter, is sometimes apprehensive that his progress in Science may wipe out the things he has held dear and leave a kind of emptiness in their place. The truth is, however, that progress in the demonstration of Christian Science has just the opposite effect, as Mary Baker Eddy indicates in the following words (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 264): "As mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, which before were invisible, will become visible. When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness."
What appears in ordinary human experience as good—a good home, a good business, a good government, and the like—is found in Christian Science to be but the human mind's limited concept of good, which actually is both infinite and ever present. Good things, as they seem humanly to be, do not represent more of good than exists in divine reality, but far less. They meagerly represent, or misrepresent, in every instance, some manifestation of the divine Mind, which is in actual fact perfectly substantial, imperishable, altogether beautiful and satisfying; and as one's vision is cleared through the growing understanding of reality, one perceives not less, but more and more of the divine manifestation, and is proportionally satisfied.
The Apostle Paul was, clearly, pointing to this process of enrichment when he wrote: "For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit." And in two great passages in "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy refers to the same process. In the first (pp. 60, 61) she writes: "Every material belief hints the existence of spiritual reality; and if mortals are instructed in spiritual things, it will be seen that material belief, in all its manifestations, reversed, will be found the type and representative of verities priceless, eternal, and just at hand." In the other passage (p. 87) she writes: "In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: 'I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied.'"
