HOW can we prove good to be real in our experience? By giving it activity and expression in our thinking and in our life. This is what is meant by the realization of good. To understand the fact that God, good, is expressed through man, His spiritual image and likeness, and then to live accordingly, is to embody the ever-active laws of divine Principle, which are eternally self expressed and self-expressing.
God is not a theory. God is infinite good, and His individuality is constantly represented in individual man. Christ Jesus came to prove this very fact. He healed all manner of sickness and sin and even raised the dead through the understanding that Truth sustains its idea, Soul manifests itself in the harmony, health, and beauty of man, and Spirit constantly expresses itself as man's substance and intelligence.
All that actually exists is the one infinite Mind and its infinite creation or manifestation. The endless variety of Mind's ideas is ceaselessly reiterating the goodness of God, His loving kindness, His fathering and mothering of man. Real man is necessary to God in order that His nature, substance. and holiness be manifest, and man's ability to express divine Mind is from Mind itself. True man is eternally at one with His Father-Mother, having the consciousness of good only.
Humanly this truth of being has to be perceived, understood, and then lived. The qualities of the real man emanate from the divine Mind and include spirituality, integrity, gentleness, purity, wisdom, understanding, love. Claiming these qualities of Christliness and actively expressing them in daily living, we acknowledge our sonship with God, and in the measure of this acknowledgment we feel God's healing presence and power.
Understanding man's at-one-ment with God brings the knowledge of our separateness from evil, or error. Because God is infinite and infinitely expressed, evil is nowhere and has no expression, no man. Evil, or error, is a supposition, an illusion, a belief that there is a power apart from God, infinite Love. To be sure, it seeks an identity in order that it may continue its delusion. A lie is sustained only by belief in its claim to be true, and it fades into its nothingness before the truth of being. A zero claims no value except when it is attached to a numeral. Here then is an important step in destroying evil—sin, sickness, and death—namely, to separate it from any individuality, either your own or another's, to deny its claim to reality, and then to abide in the understanding of God's allness and His complete expression.
To impersonalize evil is to deactivate it, to render it theoretical and of none effect. With the authority of spiritual understanding, Jesus said to the evil spirit, "Come out of him, and enter no more into him" (Mark 9:25). He caused evil to be seen as the abstraction it really is and proved health and harmony to be real and individual. When we individualize good, we are demonstrating a scientific fact; when we impersonalize evil, we are simply dispelling an illusion.
Let us never claim error to be our own. Any occasion of sin or disease is but a defined instance of false belief. Self-condemnation implies a misconception of self. God is the only I AM. We condemn error, never man; and we condemn error to its extinction. The divine nature of man is ever showing itself to be sinless and diseaseless. Mary Baker Eddy states in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 538), "Truth should, and does, drive error out of all selfhood." We open our consciousness to the truth of being through study and prayer when we seek the divine presence and understanding. The activity of Truth in our thinking always has the effect of correction, enlightenment, purification, and healing.
Jesus taught the necessity of individualizing good, that is, of being occupied with right ideas and true activity. His parable of the man out of whom an unclean spirit has been cast represents the evil spirit wandering about seeking a place to rest. Finding none, it returns to the man, and finding his consciousness empty, it calls "seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first." We need the constant consciousness of Truth, the armor of God, in order to be free and stay free from the aggressive suggestions of mortal thinking. Our protection is in being ever about our Father's business of reflecting the one Mind, God's omnipresence and omniaction.
Willingly to lay off the mortal, material sense of selfhood and to put on the new man in God's likeness is to proceed on the road to salvation. We must begin to identify ourselves with infinite good, the unlimited nature and qualities of the divine Mind. The resources of Soul, the capacity of Spirit, and the power of Love are all ours by reflection. We can do much for ourselves and others when we recognize and act on the fact that man is the expression of God. In her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 Mrs. Eddy states (pp. 8, 9): "Spiritual love makes man conscious that God is his Father, and the consciousness of God as Love gives man power with untold furtherance. Then God becomes to him the All presence—quenching sin; the All power—giving life, health, holiness; the All science—all law and gospel."
Sometimes when one is laboring over a problem without too much success, he finds release when he unselfs his purpose. He can realize that the error is not true about anyone. Not one of God's ideas ever was so afflicted. In this way one more nearly reflects the all embracing nature of divine Love. To love our neighbor as ourself is a good treatment for ourself.
The sense of resistance to Truth is only error's claim to selfhood and continuity. It shows up in self-will, self-love, and self-justification—mortal mind arguing for its own false concepts and materially educated beliefs. But that which is unreal in the first place has no power to continue. There is in reality no material sense of selfhood, and therefore nothing for error to cling to and nothing to cling to error. Man has no selfhood apart from God, and he is always joyfully acknowledging his real source and being to be the great I AM, the one God and Father of all.
The triumph of Truth is recorded in Jesus' healings and in his demonstration of eternal Life. His supreme demonstration in overcoming death was made as he laid aside all sense of selfhood apart from God, or divine Life. Here again he illustrated the fact that omnipotent Principle is eternally sustaining man, God's perfect image and likeness. God is the only healing power, the only Life, or Mind, and this Mind is expressed in man. When Philip said to him, "Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us," Jesus answered, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?" Here is evidence that the Master was conscious of man's inseparability from God; that he knew that the activity of the divine Principle manifests itself as the healing Christ.
As we learn more of the truth of being and are healed by this Science of Christ, we begin to appreciate the lives of the individuals who have made this truth available to mankind. We should not have Christianity manifest as it is if it had not been for the pure, healing ministry of Christ Jesus. We should not have the wonderful benefits of Christian Science, the second coming of Christ and scientific interpretation of Jesus' healing power, had it not been for the love and spiritual mindedness of Mrs. Eddy. All who follow the Master and our Leader shed light and healing on the lives of others and, in turn, reap the rewards of righteousness.
To reduce error to its native nothingness and give evidence of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God is to wield the two-edged sword of Truth in scientific demonstration. With the understanding that nothing can change the unalterable fact of man's unity with God, we can face the suggestions of error with the full consciousness of their nullity and powerlessness. Mrs. Eddy states in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 160), "To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relation with the divine, the spiritual, and the eternal, is to individualize infinite power; and this is Christian Science."
