The success of Christian Science in the healing of all manner of disease is the result of its dealing with mental causes in every case. Starting from the premise that God is the one and only Mind, hence the one and only cause, this Science uncovers the carnal mind's claim to causation in its various aspects and, destroying false mental causes, goes on to see evil physical effects disappear. The truth of cause thus wipes out error's presumption of cause.
Mary Baker Eddy writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 423): "The Christian Scientist, understanding scientifically that all is Mind, commences with mental causation, the truth of being, to destroy the error. This corrective is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system. According to Scripture, it searches 'the joints and marrow,' and it restores the harmony of man."
Not until one is well established in the truth that divine Mind is the only cause is he ready to deal intelligently with false mental cause. One fallacy which sometimes seems to appeal to individuals is that every disease is the result of personal sin and that the sin must be probed for and exposed in order that healing may result. But Mrs. Eddy gives a broader basis for dealing with the so-called cause of disease. She says (ibid., p. 411): "The procuring cause and foundation of all sickness is fear, ignorance, or sin. Disease is always induced by a false sense mentally entertained, not destroyed."
To search for some hidden sin is often falsely to accuse an innocent victim of general belief or to ignore a fear which requires the compassionate assurance that there is nothing to be afraid of, God being All and governing all. A friend of mine was wont to say, "Don't make a sinner of your patient in order to heal him."
Undoubtedly, sin must be dealt with in many instances of illness and always when sin has been the soil in which disease has flourished. Obedience to moral law is a requirement for health, and one cannot long remain healthy without this obedience. Nothing distorts the body so stubbornly as unrepented sin, particularly the sin of self-righteousness and hypocrisy, which believes itself to be good, but is quick to belittle and assail genuine Christliness.
The Master pointed to this sin with deadly aim when he rebuked the chief priests and elders who questioned his authority and later crucified him. Jesus said to these opponents (Matt. 21:31), "Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you." But even the hard-bitten error of hypocrisy must eventually be self-seen and abandoned for the health-giving qualities of humility and love.
Fear, which accompanies all disease, is silenced when the materialism underlying fear is destroyed. And the only cure for materialism is the actual consciousness of Spirit, the opposite of matter. In the light of Spirit's dawn, one awakes to true substance, which is tangible to spiritual sense, convincing to thought, and harmonizing to the body. One who has caught even a glimpse of Spirit can never return to the fears which beset him when he considered matter to be the only substance. The practitioner's special task is to rouse the spiritual sense of the patient to view the all-pervading presence of Spirit. As Spirit becomes gradually more visible, matter becomes less real to the patient, and fear vanishes. Disease is then obliterated by spiritual light.
Probably the most frequent cause of sickness is some particular belief held by the majority of mortals which the sufferer has permitted to enter his thought and become individualized there. This may occur either consciously or unconsciously; but it cannot occur when the individual maintains a conscious sense of unity with Spirit.
When the patient is roused to deny the belief of life and substance in matter and the delusion that error is real, the sickness is healed, because these errors are the materialistic avenues through which it has operated. The patient becomes a law unto himself when he realizes that laws of disease are mortal beliefs and that the understanding of God's allness destroys the seeming action of false laws.
And when the individual becomes a law unto himself, he is equipped to prove that the intentional efforts of mortals to harm him by mental means cannot act as a law of disease in his experience. Keeping his consciousness harmonious through obedience to God's law, he protects himself from any sinister influence that would silently disturb his mind and consequently his body.
One of the principal teachings of Christian Science is that the whole material sense of existence is a realm of belief, not of reality. All ignorance results from one's believing in the material instead of understanding the spiritual. For this reason, the corrective of sickness is the lifting of a patient's thought above believing error into knowing truth. When this is done, errors of belief inevitably come to the surface where they can be destroyed. By this method, Love's law discloses whatever one needs to know in order to prove Love's government of all.
In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy makes a statement which may be said to answer all questions as to the cause of inharmony and the way to destroy it on a mental basis. Here she says (p. 184): "Belief produces the results of belief, and the penalties it affixes last so long as the belief and are inseparable from it. The remedy consists in probing the trouble to the bottom, in finding and casting out by denial the error of belief which produces a mortal disorder, never honoring erroneous belief with the title of law nor yielding obedience to it."
Fear, ignorance, and sin all belong to the realm of belief and can act as laws of sickness only as long as they are believed. The moment the realm of reality is brought to light in the patient's consciousness, the claim of these errors to act as cause ceases. They are made powerless when God is known as the only cause and His truths are understood as the only laws. There is but one creator, one Mind, in whom all reality exists. This is the truth we need to grasp as we go higher in our demonstration of the one cause, whose effect is health and immortality.
