In her book Retrospection and Introspection, Mrs. Eddy writes, "It is well to know, dear reader, that our material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man's real existence, and the dream has no place in the Science of being."Ret., p. 21; On the next page she states, "The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged."
Human thought is sometimes slow, if not reluctant, to surrender its claim to a past. It can readily rejoice both in an awakened sense of God's guarding presence here and now and in the happy prospect of ever-unfolding good. But how often is a discordant past held in consciousness as something that is indelible because, as we say, it happened? And so sorrow, regrets, or suffering continue to disturb the peace of mind we are so earnestly seeking.
There are important lessons to be learned from pondering the healing by Christ Jesus of long-standing physical and mental ills. The man at the pool of Bethesda incapacitated for thirty-eight years, the woman bowed together for eighteen years, the man blind from his birth, the insane man dwelling among the tombs—these and many others were promptly released from the grip of a condition that had been pitifully real to them for years. Then suddenly, after all that time, the condition disappeared. Had Christ Jesus obliterated some form of reality? Or had he revealed the reality of man's true being?
