One of the great assurances of Christian Science is that those who have learned to know God as the source of all that is good can no more lose anything that is good and enduring than they can be separated from God. "It is impossible that man should lose aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his," writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 302 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures."
Perhaps the greatest challenge to a Christian Scientist is that of helping another regain what is often defined as "lost inspiration." The inspiration which he had once known may seem to have waned while he has been working out a problem of personal relationship, or struggling with some physical handicap or a discouraging effort to find remunerative and interesting work.
Many of us at some time through the years have found ourselves feeling that we have lost some of our earlier sense of confidence in our ability to demonstrate the presence of God, that our light has dimmed. In those moments it is defeating to lament and to ask, "Why, oh, why?" and to struggle to recapture something which we think we have lost.
The specific truth we should begin with in order to help ourselves or to help a brother in such a state of clouded consciousness is that no good perceived and experienced can ever be lost. What God has created—all good—is permanent, eternal, living. What we have temporarily lost is a consciousness of this spiritual fact. What we need is reassurance that the truth of God and man is real; that what we have heretofore demonstrated of Truth's availability is irreversible. We want to be reassured that the darkness of material sense can only temporarily obscure Truth's light.
Perhaps it may seem wise to confide our sense of disillusion to a fellow worker, a Scientist in whom we have confidence. He will not chide us. He will take our hand and gently lead us back from wandering in a material sense of existence to a realization of our abiding place in Soul. He will bring healing and comfort to us not so much by argument as by his own serene exemplification of Love and Truth. He will be among those who have demonstrated what Mrs. Eddy has pointed out to her followers (ibid., p. 418), "By the truthful arguments you employ, and especially by the spirit of Truth and Love which you entertain, you will heal the sick."
We cannot in reality lose health. Health is a quality of Life, Mind. It means wholeness, completeness, oneness. What we have lost when we seem not to be well is our consciousness of the fact that God is our Life and that Life is expressed in vigor, enthusiasm, health, constant renewal. The renewal of thought and body is manifest in proportion as we are consciously confident of the truth that Life, Mind, is the source of all being and that there is no opposite to what is true.
Error is a negation. It is ignorance or misapplication of the truth. It takes many forms and has many unfortunate results. But error has no real power when true concepts replace erroneous concepts of God and His creation.
We cannot in reality lose wisdom. Wisdom is a quality of Mind, of Spirit; and Mind is permanent, all-embracing, ever communicating its ideas to the listening human consciousness. Spirit defines these ideas, making them immediately perceivable and practicable. Wisdom applied to the problem of maintaining our inspiration unfolds the action of divine Mind, Spirit, and leads us to take right and sure human footsteps.
We cannot in reality lose immortality. Immortality is the very basis of Christ Jesus' teaching and practice and therefore of Christian Science teaching and practice. "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain,' said St. Paul (I Cor. 15:14). That is, if the fact of eternal life—consciousness without beginning and without ending, as demonstrated by Christ Jesus—is not understood, then our words are empty and our protestations of faith are ineffective. The fact of immortality, the continuity of individual consciousness, is the essence of all treatment in Christian Science. We cannot heal a cold in the head or a wart on the hand unless we take into account the fact that we live in eternal Mind, divine consciousness, and that we do not live in what is called matter. We know matter to be only a name for an erroneous state of externalized thought. The only thing that dies, Christian Science assures us, is the false sense of life in matter.
Christ Jesus, our Exemplar, promised (John 8:51), "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death." This "saying" surely includes the reiterated command to love God and therefore to know Him and His wholly good creation, the highest manifestation of which is individual man.
No, we cannot lose health, wisdom, immortality. But if we seem sometimes to lose the consciousness of their presence, we must remind ourselves that they are among the divine qualities which compose us, which constitute man. They are immutable. Even when we are in what we call the best of health, when we are guided by that wisdom which directs us to take the right steps under the circumstances, or when we are sure that we live and move and have our being in God, our daily work is consciously to define God and our relationship to Him.
We should affirm constantly that there is nothing we need to know which we cannot know if we turn to the one perfect ever-present Mind, which is always revealing itself to us and being reflected by us. Our work is to strengthen our consciousness of God so that we may be sustained and supported when mesmeric sense would obscure the light of inspiration and blind us to the fact that without God, man would not exist; and without man, God would be unexpressed.
Working in this way to fortify our conscious confidence in our spiritual understanding, we can ever prove, and do daily prove, what Mrs. Eddy writes in her inspired interpretation of the book of Genesis (Science and Health, p. 504): "The rays of infinite Truth, when gathered into the focus of ideas, bring light instantaneously, whereas a thousand years of human doctrines, hypotheses, and vague conjectures emit no such effulgence."
God is able to make all grace abound toward you;
that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may
abound to every good work: . . . being enriched in
every thing to all bountifulness, which causeth through
us thanksgiving to God. — II Corinthians 9:8, 11.
