Students of Christian Science find that there is nothing more satisfying than to be successful in the healing work—to help others to know themselves spiritually. But before we can help others, we must know ourselves correctly. In an article entitled "The Way," our Leader states (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 355), "The physician must know himself and understand the mental state of his patient." And later in the paragraph she says, "Learn what in thine own mentality is unlike 'the anointed,' and cast it out; then thou wilt discern the error in thy patient's mind that makes his body sick, and remove it, and rest like the dove from the deluge." The healer must cleanse his own thought in order to see clearly what the patient needs to know. He must cast fear out of himself; he must watch that he is honest in his dealings with others, and he must put God first.
As one endeavors to know himself, he finds that he must deny that he was really ever born in the flesh and that he must die out of it. In order to cast out what is wrong in our own or in another's thinking, we start with perfection, the allness of God, good. We accept the truth that all of God's ideas have their identity in God, Principle, and that any un-Godlike thought is illusive, unreal. Matter is unknown in the infinitude of Mind. Because God is all-knowing Truth, we find ourselves discerning step by step the wholeness of Truth and proving error's nothingness. We find health to be good and available to all. Error is never really true. It has always been a nonentity because God, Truth, is infinite.
One does not purify himself in order to see evil as something real which, in another, needs to be healed. Jesus said (Matt. 7:5), "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." One finds himself as the blessed child of God in order to find that all of God's children are pure and holy.
