A PERSON falsely accused of wrongdoing would be likely to deny the accusation at once. And if the accusation were made in a court of law, the accused would deny the charge by a plea of not guilty. Without a denial the false accusation could appear to be true and could be accepted as true until its falsity was discovered.
Many people in the world today accept as true the belief that man is a corporeal mortal and that the five material senses testify truly to his condition. But Mrs. Eddy discovered the testimony of the five material senses to be false. Through deep study of the Bible, she discovered rules for demonstrating the falsity of the claims of the five senses and brought to light spiritual healing as it was practiced by Christ Jesus and later for nearly three centuries by his followers.
In Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 242), "Denial of the claims of matter is a great step towards the joys of Spirit, towards human freedom and the final triumph over the body." The denial of the claims of matter is based on the true nature of man and his relationship to God as set forth in the first chapter of the Bible (Gen. 1:26, 27): "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
Man in the likeness of God must be spiritual, but the world generally ignores the spiritual identity of man and holds before our gaze the mortal, material, imperfect model and calls it man. In Christian Science we learn that unless denied and cast out, this mortal, material, imperfect model may be accepted as real and in some cases may be believed to be God-given. Hence the importance of conquering this error of belief by a denial of its actuality. The consciousness filled with carnal, material beliefs must be emptied in order to make room for the truth of perfect God and perfect man.
Healing in Christian Science is not the action of the human mind, but the result of the action of divine Principle. It evidences the spiritualizing and regenerating Christ, the spiritual idea of God, working in human consciousness. It cannot be the product of the carnal mind, "because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be" (Rom. 8:7). Man—created, constituted, and governed by God—is subject to the law of God, but that which is not subject to the law of God can only claim to be real. Since matter and its claims are not subject to the law of God, they are not real, and we can shut them out by denial.
"The scientific statement of being" on page 468 of Science and Health begins with a denial that the claims of matter to life, truth, intelligence, or substance are true. It reads: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual."
This statement indicates that man is not both spiritual and material, for matter is Spirit's opposite. Spirit, God, is All-in-all; hence matter, alias mortal mind and material beliefs, has no real existence. But unless we deny matter's claim to real existence, many of error's so-called little claims may be scarcely noticed and may seem to be quite harmless. They may be such claims as a feeling of indifference toward an acquaintance—hardly dislike but certainly not love; a lack of joy when another receives a blessing, especially a blessing we believe would have been more appreciated if we had been the recipient; a fleeting sense of envy; a little justifiable self-righteousness; a tiny bit of self-pity; or the acceptance of an imperfection in another.
The writer found an awareness of many of these small claims of mortal mind in an unusual way. At one time she accidentally put her hand on a bee's nest. Instantly her hand and arm were covered with bees. Endeavoring to turn away from what seemed to be the material experience, she found herself thinking, "There is no hate," and because of the urgency of the situation she declared the words aloud. Immediately every bee left her hand and arm, but she was aware that both hand and arm were swelling rapidly from stings already inflicted. She vigorously denied the claim of pain and swelling in matter, but the one thought that predominated was that God, Love, is All; therefore hate is unreal. Soon she forgot all about the contact with the bees and was completely free.
In the weeks that followed, the writer searched her thought and studied Mrs. Eddy's writings hoping to understand this healing. She was unable to find any active hate in her experience. Gradually she realized that as a result of her prayerful denials of hate, she was seeing clearly little dislikes which presented themselves to her thought: vague, half-formed suggestions of envy, resentment, prejudice, criticism, and many other tendencies, which she had previously ignored. Now she faced these suggestions, stripped off the mask—the pretense of being too unimportant to be dealt with—denied their claims to reality, and established in consciousness the reality of man as God's reflection, untouched by mortal beliefs.
As this kind of work went on, several chronic ailments which heretofore had not yielded to Christian Science treatment dropped away. She experienced a much warmer feeling of love; a greater sense of appreciation of the capabilities and accomplishments of others; a freer action of the physical body; and a far greater joy of living.
Dislikes are really small hates. When we deny hate by declaring the truth of Love's allness, undesirable and unworthy emotions and beliefs are brought from under cover. Mrs. Eddy says in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (p. 13), "To lose the sense of sin we must first detect the claim of sin; hold it invalid, give it the lie, and then we get the victory, sin disappears, and its unreality is proven."
