The inspired writings of Mary Baker Eddy are today offering a satisfactory answer to the age-old question of how to meet and master the adverse conditions of human experience. In these writings the scientifically Christian method taught and utilized by Christ Jesus in demonstrating dominion over all evil is again made available to those who desire to exercise this dominion and are willing to strive for the spiritual understanding of God and man which is essential to the attainment of such sovereignty.
Since dominion "over all the earth" is the divinely bestowed heritage of spiritual man, we can, through spiritual understanding, exercise this dominion and thus free ourselves from the binding and destructive influence of a false material sense of existence. Failure to do so unquestionably results from our ignorance of God and of man's relationship to Him. Misinterpretation of the record of creation appearing in the second chapter of Genesis has undoubtedly contributed largely to this ignorance of the true nature of God and man. Mrs. Eddy's profound statement on page 522 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," removes forever any mystery surrounding these two seemingly contradictory narratives: "The Science of the first record proves the falsity of the second. If one is true, the other is false, for they are antagonistic. The first record assigns all might and government to God, and endows man out of God's perfection and power. The second record chronicles man as mutable and mortal,— as having broken away from Deity and as revolving in an orbit of his own. Existence, separate from divinity, Science explains as impossible."
Students of Christian Science accept unreservedly this scientific explanation of these Scriptural passages and early learn the importance of cultivating the ability to discriminate rightly between the spiritual universe, created, sustained, and governed by divine Mind, and the unreal and untrue manifestations of the false material sense of creation. Victory over adverse human conditions begins when the awakening thought accepts conclusively the great fact of one creator and one perfect and eternal spiritual creation. It is this comprehensive knowledge of the allness, perfection, and infinitude of divine Principle and of man's relationship to this Principle as spiritual idea, or reflection, that enables us to exercise our God-given dominion.
