Expectation of good is a most desirable and helpful state of mind for the promotion of happiness and well-being. Those who, through Christian Science, are spiritually equipped to maintain a calm and steadfast expectation of good are assured that the seeming discords and sufferings of mortal existence are unreal and therefore terminable. Such people bring encouragement and hope wherever they go.
Acquaintance with the Science of being, or Christian Science, inspires expectation of good, for it shows that God, who is Love, always expresses Himself in man, His idea. Thus man is always at the standpoint of receiving spiritual ideas, which are his real substance and which flow from Mind, man's inexhaustible source. And since God, Mind, is ever present, as Christian Science in conformity with the Bible shows that He is, His spiritual ideas are constantly unfolding. This means that there can be no vacuums in Truth. There is, therefore, no possibility of the absence of good anywhere at any time. To acknowledge these truths inevitably quickens expectancy, for one must expect to experience what he is convinced is factual and true.
The influence of thoughts, whether true or false, on the life of an individual is indicated in the well-known lines from Proverbs (23:7), "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he." And when Jesus declared (Luke 17:21), "The kingdom of God is within you," he indicated that the harmony of one's environment, one's prosperity, and well-being are the objectification of his own right thinking. The superstitious belief in the presence and power of evil, of something apart from God, destroys one's expectation of good; and the fear that, sooner or later, evil may disturb his harmony and wreck his best efforts produces an unhappy and fearful state of mind. Yet Christian Science teaches that evil never actually has any power and can seem to have power only in proportion to one's belief that it has.
