The tendency of the human mind to try to bolster us with half-truths is too little recognized. How often when a man is discouraged or believes he is failing or is the victim of overwork or some other discordant condition, he glosses it over with some optimistic platitude instead of knowing the dynamic truth that the argument is a lie about his real self, the son of God! He says to himself: "Now, slow down. Take it easy. Get hold of yourself. Take it in your stride." Yet half hopefully, half fearfully and uncertainly, he dangles on the brink of despair.
To tell another to take sickness, sin, death, lack, and other ills in his stride does not heal, for the suffering one can see no reason to obey the advice. All that the human mind has to offer is human will, human ways and means, by which it tries in vain to move the troubled one out of the morass of physicality. And material ways of treating discordant conditions of mind, body, or human affairs can never bring about harmony or enable one to attain to the understanding of the fullness and perfection of being as revealed in Christian Science.
Mary Baker Eddy, in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," writes (p. 369): "The prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the preventive and curative) arts belong emphatically to Christian Science, as would be readily seen, if psychology, or the Science of Spirit, God, was understood. Unscientific methods are finding their dead level. Limited to matter by their own law, what have they of the advantages of Mind and immortality?"
