The noted American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure."The New York Public Library Book Twentieth-Century American Quotations (New York: Warner Books, 1992), p. 161. Perhaps there is a helpful message here in how to approach the practice of Christian Science. To this end we might look more closely at one of the most fundamental points in this practice, a point we may assume we know but to which we can really never give enough attention.
Christ Jesus taught, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."John 4:24. The basic truth that God, Spirit, is All, and that man is Spirit's image and likeness, underlies all Christian healing; and we need to be thoroughly clear on this point or we greatly limit our prayer's effectiveness. Even if we feel we have accepted God's allness, just how deeply have we searched the meaning of that concept? And how far have we been willing to go in squarely meeting that which would deny Spirit's all-presence— namely, the carnal mind's obdurate claim that matter is true substance?
One of the basic points in Christian Science is that God is the only Mind. Divine Mind expresses itself in a universe of spiritual ideas, all of which are infinite, eternal, and incorporeal, without a single element of materiality. Matter cannot truly exist, and never has existed, because it has never had a consciousness to know or express it. Since it has no creator, no source, there has never been a time when it could have come forth in the first place. In God's universe, the only real universe, the corporeal, or fleshly, sense of man has no record. Here man shines forth as Spirit's own image and likeness. Here there is not an ounce of matter, not a single square inch of skin, not a single material organ or structure of any kind. Spirit and its perfect reflection, man and the universe, constitute the totality of being.
