On the great walls of the Extension of The Mother Church, to the right of the Readers' rostrum as one faces it, are inscribed statements based upon lines written by Mary Baker Eddy and found on page 270 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." As they appear on the walls they read: "If sin makes sinners, Truth and Love can unmake them. If a sense of disease produces suffering, and a sense of ease antidotes it, disease is mental. Hence the fact in Christian Science that the human mind alone suffers, and the divine Mind alone heals it."
The importance of these words may be inferred from their position in the auditorium. One might say that the first statement concerns a basic fallacy of orthodox theology—the belief that sinners make sin, and hence that sin can be separated from the sinner. Christian Science corrects this fallacy by showing that the carnal mind, the one evil, produces sinful mortals; that mortals are inseparable from the false mind they represent; and that both sin and its sinful concept disappear in the presence of divine Mind. The second statement concerns the basic fallacy of medical practice, the belief that disease is in the body and hence that changing the chemical and mechanical structure of flesh through drugs and surgery can produce health. Christian Science shows that both sin and sickness are mental states, caused by the very sense in which they appear, and that this sense must be changed for the true sense of life in Spirit if sinlessness and health are to be demonstrated.
Spiritual consciousness and supposititious material consciousness do not mingle. Countless healings have occurred when thought has been lifted by Christian Science to grasp the fact that man is not a mind, but the idea of the one all-inclusive divine Mind, God; that the consciousness of matter, arranged as it is into five physical senses—five modes of mortal thought—is false and unreal and no part of God's man. Man is the individual consciousness of God and His universe of spiritual concepts. His identity, or consciousness, is as eternal as Spirit, and its distinctness can never be lost. The suppositional mortal self, on the other hand, is individualized mortal mind, the consciousness of matter and evil. It has no identity, although it claims an ego, and its sins and sicknesses disappear when true identity, characterized by love and peace and purity, is demonstrated.
