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Your Questions & Answers

Following the example set by the question-and-answer columns in the early Journals, when Mary Baker Eddy was Editor, this column will respond to general queries from Journal readers with responses from Journalreaders. You’ll find information at the end of the column about how to submit questions. Readers are also encouraged to go to Chapter III ofMiscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, by Mary Baker Eddy — “Questions and Answers.”

Could you please explain two statements in Science and Health that seem contradictory?

From the June 2012 issue of The Christian Science Journal


Q: Could you please explain: “Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind” (Science and Health, p. 1)? To me this seems to contradict another statement Mary Baker Eddy made later in the book: “The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man” (p. 284).
—A reader in California, US

A: Sometimes humans think they think thoughts that are real when they’re actually only bubbles of fantasy, or even nightmares such as disease and sin. These carnal, or mortal, thoughts do not come from God and are not communicated or known by God.

Whatever is a good thought, a loving one, a supportive thought, a thought desiring good—one that heals in any one of infinite ways—that is a real thought. That thought has substance and has the essence and power of the eternal, divine Mind. It reflects God, or good, and in some way makes the reality of being more visible and definite in our experience.

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