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JUST WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?

From the December 1948 issue of The Christian Science Journal


CONFRONTED with present-day emphasis on human psychology and with the oft-heard expression, "That is good psychology," it is important to ask ourselves, "Just what is good psychology?"

With her penetrating understanding of all our needs, our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, gives us the answer, an answer based on her realization that the true sense of psychology is not a mode of human thought analysis. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," under the marginal heading "Matter not medicine," she refers to psychology as "the Science of Spirit, God." The entire quotation reads (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?"

We should heed the last two sentences of this paragraph as a warning against confusing psychology, as that word is popularly used, with the healing truth which is practiced in Christian Science. When Jesus said (John 12:32), "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me," he was realizing the irresistible attraction of the Christ, the true idea of God and man, which the "Science of Spirit, God," reveals.

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