Great fortunes have been spent in the setting up of laboratories, clinics, and foundations bent on searching out the causes of humanity's countless ills; and elaborate remedial measures have been developed for coping with the ills themselves. Nevertheless, a system which commences with material effects, such as atoms, germs, diseases, poverty, unemployment, war, and from these effects attempts to work back to causes, will ever prove futile. For does not the Bible state (Isa. 45: 12, 22): "I [God] have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded. . . . Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else"?
But despite God's revelation of Himself as cause, there appears to be a great desire on the part of mankind to find a material cause for all its ills. Even among Christian Scientists this temptation persists. Sometimes one seeking help of a Christian Science practitioner, in stating his case will say, "I haven't the faintest idea what caused the difficulty." Or, as if in an effort to help the practitioner, he may venture, "My work is especially heavy at this time of the year, and I may be overweary." Note the challenging statement from the pen of Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 170), "Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress." That only which is good, pure, and holy can be causative. God, Mind, without beginning or end, self-knowing, self-perpetuating, self-animating, self-nourishing, is continually expressing Himself and is the only cause. His allness precludes the possibility of an opposite cause. Our God is truly a jealous God.
Our Leader tells us (ibid., p. 207): "There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause." At every point effect coincides with cause. In support of this fact the Master tells us that we cannot "gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles" (Matt. 7:16). Therefore, that which does not emanate from the great and only cause can in nowise be true. Materia medica, hygiene, mortal mind laws so called, fear, animal magnetism, war, disease, time, sin, and death are not cause or effect.
