Shortly after Mary Baker Eddy’s passing in 1910, a member of her household found a signed, handwritten note pasted in the back of a personal copy of her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the textbook of Christian Science. “Whenever there seems to be a need or lack in your experience,” it read in part, “this simply indicates the scientific fact that this seeming need is already supplied by God’s gracious abundance” (Reminiscences of Adelaide Still, p. 28, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library).
The point must have been of great comfort to Mrs. Eddy, and it speaks directly to an engaging paradox that is central to the healing practice of Christian Science: that the seeming presence of error, or any misperception of reality, does nothing more than indicate the actual presence of the Truth that destroys it. Thus, what appears to be error’s greatest strength is, in fact, its greatest weakness. Science and Health defines error in part as “. . . a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter” (p. 472).
Error comes in an endless array of guises: poor health, lack, discordant relationships. But it exists only as the hypothetical opposite of Truth. Its aggressive claims can therefore be turned to advantage by the Christian healer who takes them for what they really are: reminders, and nothing more, of Truth’s infinite ever-presence. Without Truth, there would be nothing for error to simulate. Understanding this, the metaphysician can use error to destroy error—that is, to recognize what error is trying to do, to see that only its opposite is true, and thereby to stop error in its tracks. Error’s apparent greatest threat thus becomes not a hindrance, but an aid to healing.
