Imagine an individual who believes that past events over which he had no control—a war, say, or a depression— have ruined his prospects for a happy life. He feels victimized by his past and wishes he could start his life over again. If he were to turn to Christian Science for help, he would learn that Life, in the fullest sense of eternal Being or consciousness, is synonymous with God. He would develop a new understanding of reality, in which the quality of life is entirely dependent on God, not on a tangle of forces—physical, cultural, psychological—acting and reacting through time. This spiritualized sense of life would inevitably cancel the effects of past troubles, which were never more than phases of a mistaken mentality.
Whenever an individual seeks through Christian Science freedom from bonds of the past, he is conceiving of history in a unique way. When he challenges the notion that man is a material being and holds to the fact of God, Spirit, as the source of all reality, he is implicitly challenging the conception of history as the record of a physical mankind moving chronologically in a physical universe.
Part of the general belief that life and intelligence are rooted in matter is the conception of life as swinging constantly between good and bad, peace and conflict, achievement and catastrophe, happiness and trouble. But Christian Science reveals the mental nature of all experience and demonstrates that the apparent life struggles going on between good and evil are being played out only in human consciousness. Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health, "The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love." Science and Health, p. 288; The sweep of human history, with all its turbulence and inconsistency, might be thought of as this human mental warfare writ large.
