SOME YEARS AGO, I was living in Berlin and had to take the subway almost daily. At one point there were posters all over the subway stations and inside the cars calling attention to a spreading flu epidemic.
One day as I was standing in a crowded subway car, I felt the beginning of the well-advertised symptoms of flu. Although I had previously simply rejected this picture of disease as not pertaining to me, I realized that I should have followed up with prayerful reasoning based on spiritual truths taught in Christian Science. I recalled a passage in Science and Health: "Treat a belief in sickness as you would sin, with sudden dismissal" (p. 218). Another passage shows how to accomplish this dismissal. The entire statement reads: "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. You have no law of His to support the necessity either of sin or sickness, but you have divine authority for denying that necessity and healing the sick" (p. 390).
I knew I needed to pray vigorously to put a stop to these symptoms right then and there. The human mind with its built-in fear mechanism would expect these symptoms to follow their usual, predictable course, but I knew I didn't have to buy in to that scenario. Even a wide occurrence of a certain disease, reinforcing the appearance of inevitability, could not make me believe in the legitimacy of this disease—or any other. I knew from past experience that I had to enter a determined mental protest.
