Christ Jesus knew God to be Spirit, the one Father or cause of all, and this understanding empowered him to prove that man, the effect of Spirit, is spiritual and consequently sinless, diseaseless, deathless. As the Way-shower, he fully demonstrated his own sonship with God, and the fleshly Jesus, the Son of man, disappeared. The Christ, the Master's real self, was thus revealed—"the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature" (Col. 1:15). In the case of those he healed, he destroyed diseases and deformities, which claimed to obscure their real manhood, by silencing the material thoughts that produced them. His ministering spiritual touch not only gave his patients a view of their true quality as God's sons, but provided an example which all must follow in proving that everything unlike Spirit is foreign to man; hence is causeless and illusive.
The acknowledgment of God as the only cause bases the theology and practice of Christian Science, and it brings again the healing power that comforts mankind and restores reality—God's spiritual, harmonious creation. Mary Baker Eddy tells of her discovery of this Science in "Retrospection and Introspection," and she relates (p. 24), "During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon." Many socalled mental systems of healing seek to trace certain phases of ill-health to states of thought, but Christian Science alone denies the existence of a carnal mentality and demonstrates God as the only Mind, hence the only cause. This relegates both disease and its claim to a cause to the realm of unreality—nonexistence.
Science explains all physical life—the corporeal senses and their self-evolved phenomena—to be mortal belief, which has no part in Spirit's kingdom and no actuality. Consequently, when the student of Christian Science traces disease to a mental cause, it is only for the purpose of conforming the argument of his treatment to meet the specific needs of the case. As a general rule, it is best for him to know whether the difficulty confronting him is the effect of some form of sin or of fear, or if it is merely the result of assenting to a disease belief. But he never leaves his treatment in the realm of mortal mind. He goes on to lift his thought and the patient's above matter and its conditions to the realization that God is the only cause, hence the source of every real effect; that because God is Mind, His creation is mental—incorporeal; that because Spirit is cause, effect is spiritual and good.
