How we begin something matters, whether it’s a new project, a job, or a relationship. When we start out on the right foot, so to speak, and our activities are rooted in integrity, honesty, and unselfishness—in spiritual understanding and living—we are contributing all we can to their success.
Likewise, the basis for a Christian Science treatment has everything to do with its success. “To begin rightly is to end rightly,” Mary Baker Eddy says in her textbook on healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 262). And later she explains the standpoint for prayerful treatment: “The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,—that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle” (Science and Health, p. 275).
When we pray for ourselves, or for another, from this spiritually scientific starting-point, we’re beginning “rightly,” and we can expect success in healing. Yet the physical senses would have us begin from a faulty, material starting-point—with what seems to be irrefutable evidence that life is material and that God is distant, or even absent, and unable to heal and meet our human needs. These senses would also have us believe that man is separated from divine Love, and therefore capable of being sick and sinful.
