The tendency of human thought, even when instructed in Christian Science, is to vacillate between the spiritual fact of man's eternal perfection as God's idea and the mortal sense of existence with its sin and disease. We cannot permanently destroy any error of sin or of sickness without coming to terms with this tendency. Recurring errors will plague us so long as we base our perception of being on a false estimate of man's origin and nature.
The spiritual awakening that brings healing is the clear realization of the unreality of sin and sickness, a conviction that these errors have never been true, or God-sent, and that the real man, whose origin is in God, has never experienced them. This is the law of Truth that corrects and heals so-called chronic ills, as well as habitual wrongdoing.
Christ Jesus touched the heart of the issue when he declared, "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him."Matt. 5:25; Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, throws further light on this statement with: "Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin." Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 390;
Christian Science cuts through vacillation with the clear perception that mortality is itself a supposition, without foundation. The man God creates in His image is the only real man. To acknowledge this man to be what we really are is to agree with our adversary quickly, while we are "in the way" with him. The Master's reference to being "in the way" with the adversary emphasizes the demand that we dismiss as unreal every claim of mortality even while we are, or seem to ourselves to be, in that condition. To meet this demand quickly relates not so much to time as to consistency.
The story is told of a cowboy who walked into a blacksmith's shop. Moments before, the blacksmith had removed a horseshoe from the fire and placed it on the bench to cool. The cowboy absent-mindedly picked up the shoe and of course immediately dropped it.
"What's the matter?" asked the blacksmith. "Too hot?"
"Nope," replied the cowboy, "it just don't take me long to look at a horseshoe."
If this story is analogous to human life, we may not always avoid picking up and dropping injurious claims of the material senses. We may believe this tendency to be inherent in the human condition. But such a conclusion overlooks an important point: that the ability to perceive the possible hotness of the horseshoe also lies within our capacity. Had the cowboy been alert to this possibility, he would not have made the mistake in the first place.
This is not intended to suggest that we are to deal with the errors of material sense on a human level, with only human capacities to protect us. The spiritual understanding of man's perfection, harmony, and dominion, and the immediate capacity to apply this understanding, are already within us. Spiritual sense never leaves the realm of Truth but holds consistently to it.
Christian Science reveals Christ as the true idea of God and the true selfhood of every individual. Jesus presented the highest expression of the Christ in human form. The Bible tells us he "was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." Heb.: 15; Jesus recognized the claims of sin and disease without attributing reality to them. By holding consistently to his spiritual identity in Christ, he proved for all time that the human self is not inescapably bound to mortal failings.
In Christ, we are not subject to the testimony of the material senses. Paul acknowledged this when he declared, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Rom. 8:1. In Truth, man has no capacity to sin or be sick. This is the freedom that belongs forever to man as a child of God.
You and I may seem at times to flounder between this absolute standpoint of Truth and our day-to-day struggles with error, but the strength to prove our spiritual dominion and freedom is always with us. This strength is from the Christ, within us.
Error does not become real by attaching itself to memory. The suggestion that what has happened once may happen again belongs to supposition. The divine Mind never repeats itself, and it is continually bringing to light inexhaustible good. The appearing of God's ideas brings us an enlarged assurance of God's overflowing love for us.
We don't have to endure chronic ills or the agony of repeated mistakes. Rather than wonder if a pain will return or an unhappy experience have to be faced again, we should look out from every encounter with error fortified by renewed courage and the expectation of a higher good. However tenuous our grip on Truth may seem to be, it is stronger than the error it disproves. The victory belongs to God and cannot be reversed.
We can here and now acknowledge the power of the Christ to heal every ill. We can lift our thought to the understanding of spiritual being and hold it there. In this way Christian Science deals effectively with the belief in recurring errors.
