Christian Science brings to every field of human endeavor a better and improved concept of activity. This is true for the student and scholar as well as the businessman, the artist, the laborer, and the homemaker. The student, because he works in the realm of thoughts instead of things, sometimes fails to make the distinction between that which is humanly mental and that which is divinely so, and thus he remains in the area of effortful process instead of accepting the freedom and spontaneity of thought which proceeds from the one Mind, God. Human intellectual endeavor is said to stem from intelligence in brain, a mind in matter, subject to all sorts of limiting beliefs having to do with heredity, environment, educational opportunities, and the like. It also seems to be dependent on bodily conditions, such as health, strength, vision, hearing, and to take place in a time world, which constantly classifies results as quick or slow, speedy or deliberate. The student believes he has to acquire knowledge as something outside himself and expects this acquisition to be attended by effort and toil.
Now the truth of man, as taught in Christian Science, reverses all these false, limiting beliefs and frees the student to be what he is in reality, namely, reflection; for a Christian Scientist starts from the premise that the one Mind, the only one there is, is not in matter, in brain, but is the creative intelligence which made the universe. Accepting the Word of the Bible, the Scientist knows his true selfhood to be God's own image and likeness or, as the prophet Isaiah put it, God's witness.
To see oneself, then, as God's witness, testifying to the nature and character of his creator, is to leave the mortal basis of limitation and in proportion to one's understanding of the nature of God let his life and his activities show forth that which he actually is by reflection. Now Paul tells us that the things of Spirit are spiritually discerned, and the student, grasping this fact in some measure, sees that Mind could not be cognizant of human knowledge as such. For Spirit to know or be concerned with the material laws of physics, for example, or for divine Mind to be aware of the minutiae of human history, or language, or any other branch of human knowledge is an impossibility, for Mind dwells in its own realm. This does not in the least prevent the Christian Scientist who is a student in a school or college from making use of the facts of Mind in his studies.
