THE word "belief" is often used in the teaching of Christian Science to designate evil. Indeed, we begin to see something of the falsity of evil when we gain a sufficient understanding of God, good, and His allness to affirm with conviction that evil is nothing more than a mistaken belief. But we have to progress further, to the point where we realize with some measure of spiritual understanding that there is in Truth's universe and man no belief. God, Mind, is infinite, and this infinite intelligence forever knows its own allness, wherein is man, who as Mind's reflection also knows. Neither divine Mind nor its reflection, man, ever believes.
But in the suppositional realm of material thought, which is mortal mind's misconception of life, creation, and man, belief seems to play an important role. For instance, on page 155 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy uses several times the phrase "general belief" to indicate beliefs held by a majority of mortals.
She says, "When the sick recover by the use of drugs, it is the law of a general belief, culminating in individual faith, which heals" (ibid., p. 155). And further she observes, "When the general belief endorses the inanimate drug as doing this or that, individual dissent or faith, unless it rests on Science, is but a belief held by a minority, and such a belief is governed by the majority."
There are many forms of general belief apart from those attributing healing power to drugs. Some of these are called heredity, the incurability of certain diseases, the inevitableness of old age and decrepitude, the uncertainty of human life, the fatality of some poisons, and the generality of lust.
Christian Science teaches that no one should fear an evil belief because lying mortal mind puts the word "general" before the belief. That only means that a considerable number of materially thinking mortals, because of their ignorance of God, have consented blindly to accept as final the classification tag that mortal mind has placed on some phase of its false sense of life. Can the ignorant viewpoint of the majority of materially-minded thinkers ever enact a law which can affect the life and condition of God's reflection, man? Does God ever abrogate or delegate His control of man to the Adamic race of mortals?
"Unless it rests on Science" individual dissent from general belief may be unavailing. But when that dissent rests on the acceptance of God as infinite Life, eternal Mind, universal Love, omnipotent and omnipresent good, and of man as indissolubly one with Him, the arrogance of general belief and its challenge to the universality of Truth is exposed as impotent and futile.
Christian Science treatments are always based on the infinitude of God, ever expressed in His universe of ideas, the highest of which is man. No mind is in this infinitude but eternal Mind, and the all-knowingness of this Mind is individualized in man. False mortal mind can never enter God's kingdom, can never know a single verity of Mind. It simulates Mind's activity, in its fictitious realm, by causing its mortal personalities to believe what it says. General belief is its product, but that product is as truthless as its source. It is absolutely nothing to God and equally nothing to man. It is never a law to the God-constituted life, individuality, health, harmony, and continuity of you and me, and we have the Mind of Christ expressing the omnipotence of omniactive intelligence wherewith to nullify it and prove its impotence. General belief never stalks or talks in God's kingdom. It has no place or prestige in Truth's universe. In the scales of reality its weight is nil.
General belief meant nothing to Christ Jesus. He knew it had nought to do with God, His law, and His man. When general belief said the man with a withered hand was incurable, the Master bade him stand forth in the very midst of those who entertained that belief, and forthwith healed him. The turning of the water into wine, the pacifying of the tempest, the feeding of the multitudes, the healing of the blind, the deaf, the dumb, and the insane all proved the impotence of general belief to legislate for men when it was reversed with an understanding of the universality and omnipotence of God, to whose will and law man is alone subordinate.
Our work is ever to refuse to concur in the mistaken judgments of material thinking which form this lie called general belief. Why waste time building up the prestige of evil? Challenge its false claim to recognition bolstered up with godless general belief. Realize that general belief is an aggregation of zeros, of many erroneous mortal viewpoints accepting as a law a lying sense of cause and effect which never has been and never can be law or truth in the sight of God.
What if mortal mind does say everybody believes this disease is incurable, or that age, affliction, and death are inevitable, or that the uncertainty of human life is inescapable, or that some evil indulgences are desirable? Are you interested in what evil, error, says, or in what God, Truth, says are the facts of being? Are you willing to give more credence to the one evil than to the one God?
"What is the chaff to the wheat?" (Jer. 23:28.) What is error in its totality to God and His idea? Confined by its own negative nature to its realm of supposition and doomed to self-destruction, it has not entered and cannot enter, under the designation of general belief or otherwise, Love's kingdom or touch the God-given life and nature of man. What matters is not what error persistently and generally claims for itself, but what God, deific Mind, and His Truth-inspired children know is reality. There is no door through which general belief can enter Mind's infinity, no power that general belief can exert against God's omnipotence. "The Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him" (Rev. 19:6, 7).
