The Psalmist says of God, "In his hand are the deep places of the earth."Ps. 95:4; A darkened condition of thought may seem to be long and deeply entrenched. A diseased condition of the body may appear far recessed beyond the reach of cure. But whatever the depth of these conditions divine Spirit is already there, to respond with healing to our scientific prayer. St. Paul speaks of "the deep things of God."I Cor. 2:10; These are deeper and more potent than the deepest things of despondency and suffering. And through these "deep things of God" Christian Science heals.
The healing practice of Christian Science requires that we do not make too much of disease or too little of it. We should not underrate it or overrate it. We should not permit it any buildup; but neither should we neglect or disregard it. We prove the nothingness of disease from the standpoint of the allness of God, good; but as a step toward this we must assess the claims of disease correctly.
All disease is mental, materially mental; it is a mental concept entertained in a supposed material consciousness opposing itself to the divine Mind, God. This supposed consciousness may claim to operate through either individual or general thought; but all its conditions are illusory, neither substantial nor permanent.
So-called physical diseases are just as much mental, just as much projections of thought, as those commonly classified as mental diseases; they are all phenomena of a supposed mortal and finite consciousness. The power that heals disease, whether called mental or physical disease, is not the exercise of human thinking, however positive or enlightened. The healing power is from divine Mind, revealing the spiritually scientific facts of its own wholly good and spiritual creation.
It isn't enough to call disease fancy, and disease needs something stronger than opposite fancies to counter it. Mrs. Eddy is explicit on this point. In Science and Health she writes: "Sickness is more than fancy: it is solid conviction, it is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being."Science and Health, p.460; For healing sickness we need well-marshaled spiritual facts, understood and compassionately presented.
The solid conviction that constitutes disease, though illusory, is often deep-seated in human thought. It is sustained there by what this thought wrongly accepts as sound logic and reliable evidence, evidence from the physical senses. To dissolve this deep conviction and the material falsities on which it is based, still deeper, more convincing truths are required. Human thought is not enough. We must penetrate to an entirely different level of consciousness. We need to feel the action of divine Mind, supported by this Mind's divine logic and its wholly spiritual evidence.
Throughout several decades of the present century Piltdown man, supposed to mark a step in human evolution, was solidly entrenched in anthropology. Pictured reconstructions, based on bone fragments, were featured in dictionaries and textbooks. This face was familiar to educated people around the world. Few questioned its authenticity. Yet some twenty years ago advancing knowledge and improved methods of testing exposed Piltdown man as a hoax. The fragments had been planted, and Piltdown man had never existed. He was wiped out as quickly as possible from the anthropological record. Disease, however deeply entrenched in thought, however vividly pictured, is even more completely nonexistent. It is utterly and totally unreal.
Mrs. Eddy exposes the insecure foundation of disease in these words: "Admit the existence of matter, and you admit that mortality (and therefore disease) has a foundation in fact. Deny the existence of matter, and you can destroy the belief in material conditions."ibid., p. 368; Denying matter, we undermine and destroy the conviction of disease.
The greatest of healers, Christ Jesus, rested his thought totally on spiritual foundations, on divine logic and spiritual evidence. His demand "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect"Matt. 5:48; is a potent moral and spiritual directive. It holds up the ultimate yet attainable ideal. But it is more. It is a proposition of divine logic. It declares perfect Father, therefore perfect son; perfect cause, therefore perfect effect.
Basic to divine logic and its demonstration is the acknowledgment of Spirit's allness, of Spirit as the only substance of all real being, of Spirit as the only cause, with all its effects spiritual. Mrs. Eddy writes: "Disease is more than imagination; it is a human error, a constituent part of what comprise the whole of mortal existence,—namely, material sensation and mental delusion. But an erring sense of existence, or the error of belief, named disease, never made sickness a stubborn reality."No and Yes, p.4; So disease, the "solid conviction" that is more than fancy or imagination, is still only erring belief, still more illusory, more utterly nonexistent and unreal, than Piltdown man. This erring, unreal belief, together with its insecure foundation, matter, is swept away in proportion as the reality of infinite Spirit is acknowledged.
Ideas of divine Mind are the exact opposite of material concepts. All ideas of divine Mind reflect the perfect intelligence of the Mind conceiving them. All creations of infinite Spirit reflect the perfect substance of the Spirit creating them. Infinite Spirit and its creations cannot be and are not affected by matter or material conditions. A conviction based on matter has no foundation. It cannot bind or hold us when we acknowledge Spirit as our sole substance and origin.
"Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord," says the Psalmist. And later, "With the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption."Ps. 130:1, 7. In whatever deeps we find ourselves, the potent facts of Spirit are already there for us to lay hold of. They can lift us up and out, and they can heal us.
