Christian Science teaches that the spiritual man and universe of God's creating are unchangeably harmonious and complete. While the student of this Science wholeheartedly subscribes to this truth, he soon discovers that a mere intellectual knowledge of the subject, a familiarity with the letter without corresponding spiritual progress, is insufficient to equip him for the demonstration of Science. An experience of some kind may bring him an awakening from his complacency, an experience that he may wrongly ascribe to outside sources instead of looking within for the cause and up to God for the remedy.
Christian Science requires us to realize that in reality we are spiritual ideas of divine Love; but merely affirming this to be the case, however earnestly, is insufficient. Our present human conception of ourselves, compounded as it is of the consciousness of true being and of that carnal misconception of life to which we are all seemingly in some measure in bondage, must be transformed by an increasing awareness of man's true and perfect individuality as an idea of Spirit. And this transformation is to be effected as much through prayer and inspiration as through merely asserting absolute Truth.
We may affirm that everything in the garden of our thought is lovely; but in order to render it so, we must uproot weeds of error and plant seeds of righteousness. Spiritual and harmonious being will be established in our consciousness only as we face up to the blatant and latent suggestions of the carnal mind—self-will, egotism, resentment, and the like—see their unreality in the light of Truth and Love, and then discard them. This activity will disclose the self-existent fabric of true being, the quietness and gentleness of Spirit, the unbroken harmony of Soul, the unlabored strength of Life, and the tender provision of Love.
