It is a comforting fact that through Christian Science, health, happiness, and well-being are available to all. They are the inevitable results of a correctly applied understanding of God's goodness and allness. They are prerequisites to the ultimate demonstration of spiritual life. Christian Science teaches that when we let God, Truth, govern our thought, the result is a correspondingly better human experience. And only through a step-by-step material improvement is it proved that the thinking is spiritually correct.
Mary Baker Eddy writes (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 316), "Christ, Truth, was demonstrated through Jesus to prove the power of Spirit over the flesh,—to show that Truth is made manifest by its effects upon the human mind and body, healing sickness and destroying sin." To assume that Truth can be understood and the complete consciousness of spiritual being attained without correction of error in thought and the consequent improvement of human experience is to misunderstand Jesus' words and works. Why did the Master direct (Matt. 10:8), "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils," if these acts were not in themselves vital to ultimate salvation?
A follower of Christ Jesus cannot be relieved of the individual responsibility of healing the sick nor escape from the necessity of destroying sin. Evil conditions, being unlike God, good, have no reality and appear only as evidence of false beliefs entertained by mortals. Evil conditions are removed from experience as the Christ, Truth, lifts thought to an understanding of error's falsity and the universality of good. One could not believe something and then remove himself from his belief. Human consciousness is not an entity with certain concepts outside of it. This consciousness consists of the things of which one is conscious, his world, in other words. And only through his correcting or healing of all that is erroneous in consciousness is perfection reached.
