Every earnest student and practitioner of Christian Science is striving continually to improve his methods in order to bring about instantaneous healing of the sick and speedy solution of other human problems. To this end he may well analyze frequently what the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science says is required for this desideratum. While pointing out the value, in the student's practice, of arguments of truth against disease or error, so long as such arguments are needed, the author of the Christian Science textbook indicates that the ultimate, truly scientific way is a realization of the absolute truth, in which neither a problem nor a patient appears. On page 411 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy declares, "If Spirit or the power of divine Love bear witness to the truth, this is the ultimatum, the scientific way, and the healing is instantaneous."
Spirit, divine Love, is the infinite God, or Mind, that is conscious of its own infinitude of perfect spiritual ideas, which constitute the real man and universe. Individual man, as the image or expression of God, reflects perfect health, sinlessness, completeness. This Christlike, spiritual perfection of man is the truth to which "Spirit or the power of divine Love" bears witness. As Paul said (Rom. 8:16, 17), "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: ... and joint-heirs with Christ."
The ultimatum is the scientific certainty of divine Love's ever-presence and all-power and of man's inclusion, now and forever, in Love's infinite self-containment as its idea. "Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord" (Jer. 23:24). Instantaneous healing, then, is not dependent on the human skill or presence of the practitioner, but upon his vivid realization of the Christ, the spiritual idea of Life, which reveals man's oneness with God as His reflection. Seeing man aright lessens the belief in human personality, well or sick, and health is restored as a condition of the true being of man.
