There is a Why? of desperation: why has this happened to me? why am I frustrated? why doesn't opportunity ever knock at my door? And there is a Why? of intelligent curiosity; it sparks the child's endless questioning, the astronomer's nightlong researches, the explorer's impatience for the trail. Either way these questions and their correct answers provide the successive footholds and handholds by which mankind climbs out of ignorance and limitation.
The answer to a Why? requires an understanding of causation. So no wonder Mrs. Eddy emphasizes the need for rightly understanding causation. She writes, "Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress." Science and Health, p. 170; That's a strong statement. Her phrases "the one question to be considered" and "more than all others" are without reservation. Whoever is interested in promoting human progress, both into knowledge and out of frustration, needs to place spiritual causation at the top of the agenda.
In Christian Science, God is identified as infinite Spirit. Because He is infinite Spirit, God is also the one Spirit; since God, Spirit, is infinite, there can be no second or opposing spirit. This one infinite Spirit, God, is infinitely good; spiritual causation, then, is wholly good causation. Since God, Spirit, is also the one power, spiritual causation, good causation, is the only causation; therefore, there is no secondary causation, whether calling itself remote, predisposing, or exciting, able to produce or occasion evil.
So when we meet the Why? of desperation by starting to consider cause as spiritual, we find right away that the trouble or frustration making us ask the question had no cause at all. To this Why? there is no answering because. And without a cause there can be no effect.
Since it had no cause and since there cannot be an effect without cause, what becomes of the condition that has been troubling us? Sometimes our alertness to spiritual causation shows us that the good we believed ourselves to be deprived of or debarred from wouldn't have turned out to be good. The job we thought so promising is seen to have been a dead end. The line of research we wished to follow would have led nowhere. The individual we'd picked out as a good colleague or life partner is revealed as totally unsuited to us or we to them. Attention to spiritual causation and its unfailing presence has shown it in action on our behalf, saving us from a mistake, producing not a bad but a good effect.
But what if the condition is disease, suffering, injury, or a roadblock to right action? These can't be effects of the one infinite, all-powerful, all-good Spirit. Are we to believe the suggestion that besides the one divine Spirit there are evil spirits, evil causes, capable of producing evil effects?
Christ Jesus had a short way of dealing with this kind of suggestion. In the wilderness his response to it had been, "Get thee hence, Satan." Matt. 4:10; And this continued to be his response. When it claimed to afflict a child brought to him, he commanded, "Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him." Mark 9:25; Before Jesus' clear understanding of true causation, of the wholly good power of God, the false claimant to causative power withdrew; and the child was healed.
Today, through an understanding of this same Christ, Truth, it is possible to dismiss with similar forthrightness the suggestion that causation can be evil and produce evil effects. Thereby we can dispel the apparent evil effects. Mrs. Eddy explains the Christly scientific method in these words: "Maintain the facts of Christian Science,—that Spirit is God, and therefore cannot be sick; that what is termed matter cannot be sick; that all causation is Mind, acting through spiritual law." She concludes the paragraph like this: "When you silence the witness against your plea, you destroy the evidence, for the disease disappears. The evidence before the corporeal senses is not the Science of immortal man." Science and Health, p. 417; Whatever form the false witness, the false evidence, takes, it can be dismissed by this same method.
So when apparent evil effects present themselves, we don't have to admit they have a cause. They have no cause. By refusing to allow them a cause, we isolate and then destroy them. We can do this, because so-called evil cause and evil effect, though appearing to be external and self-existent, are actually mental. Both are no more than misconceptions of material thinking, of a supposed mentality outside the infinite Mind, God; but in reality there is no such mentality.
But doesn't ignorance of spiritual truth or fear or wrongdoing produce its fruit of suffering and frustration in human life? Isn't there some cause and effect relationship here?
So long as we believe ourselves or others to be physical, limited mortals, ignorant, fearful, or sinning, we submit to mortality's supposed conditions and its supposed laws. These conditions include the suggestion first that we are mortals, ignorant, fearful, sinning, and second that we therefore suffer and are frustrated. But the belief that we are mortals is a lie. Jesus healed simultaneously both sickness and sin. Our need is to acknowledge Spirit and its immortal creation as the only reality and spiritual causation as the only causation. So doing, we expose and destroy the supposed evil cause and with it the supposed evil effect.
There we have it: perfect God and perfect man, perfect spiritual causation and perfect spiritual effect, and no evil cause or effect anywhere—these are the facts that, acknowledged and lived, bring healing demonstration in "the Science of immortal man." The Psalms put it, "Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house." Ps. 65:4. Why can we expect this goodness? Because God, Spirit, is the one and only true cause.
