Articles

Regardless of our present perception of things, the spiritual facts of existence remain unshakable. A glimpse of this can be greatly reassuring.

The Gospel of Mark tells how Jesus restored mental soundness to an insane man, a Gadarene. No sooner did Jesus accomplish this than he crossed by ship to the opposite shore of the Galilean Sea, where he was approached and implored to heal Jairus's daughter, who was at the point of death.

In general usage the word "mind" denotes the matter-based consciousness and source of thought that are believed to belong to every human being and that give him identity. But in Christian Science the word assumes a higher meaning.

Wouldn't we all like to have access to an infinite remedy for evil? An infinite remedy—measureless, limitless, endless! There could be no place where this remedy would not apply; no error could escape its encompassing, correcting power. Indeed an infinite remedy must actually be a preventive, disallowing the presentation or development of error, of sin and illness.

There's no time for weeping over death. There are lessons to learn—lessons of real life and love and dominion over mortality! There is the requirement of Life, God, to find man in Himself, in divine Mind, instead of in frail dust.

Christian Science proves the impossibility of God being man, or man being God, because it declares God's idea to be the expression of His nature. Yet the divine Mind, which creates and supports spiritual ideas, is distinct from the ideas themselves.

The healing practice of Christian Science might be called restoration to oneness. For all our problems come from the belief of separation—our separation from God, infinite good! And their solution comes from the recognition of man as actually spiritual, the infinite, individualized idea of God, eternally embraced in and expressive of His love.

Recently I uncovered some photographs taken many years ago. Scanning them thoughtfully, I asked myself, "Can it be this once was me ?" I remember correcting my grammar to "once was I"; and this "I," this nominal symbol of identity, promptly alerted me to the erroneous trend of my thought.

"How large is your church? How many members does it have on its rolls?" An implication in questions like these is that somehow one can measure an organization's impact on the world or its influence in people's lives simply by counting the number of members and then calculating some ratio of membership size to extent of influence. However, such a ratio misses the point, particularly when we refer to the spiritual influence of our church or the wide-ranging impact of even a single instance of healing brought about through the application of its teachings.

If you found yourself in court, on trial for a crime you had nothing to do with, would you plead guilty or innocent to the false charges brought against you? Certainly you would plead innocent! It would be absurd to plead guilty to a crime you did not commit and then have to suffer the attendant penalty. Stop and think though—how often have you done just this; pleaded guilty to completely baseless charges against you and then suffered for it? We may catch ourselves making statements similar to these (either mentally or audibly): "My head aches"; "I just don't have enough time"; "I don't get along well with that individual.