Chapter XII - Christian Science Practice
Real and counterfeit
368:1
counterpoise of nothingness. The greatest wrong is
counterpoise of nothingness. The greatest wrong is
but a supposititious opposite of the highest right. The
confidence inspired by Science lies in the fact
that Truth is real and error is unreal. Error
is a coward before Truth. Divine Science insists that
time will prove all this. Both truth and error have come
nearer than ever before to the apprehension of mortals,
and truth will become still clearer as error is self‑
destroyed.
Results of faith in Truth
368:10
Against the fatal beliefs that error is as real as Truth,
Against the fatal beliefs that error is as real as Truth,
that evil is equal in power to good if not superior, and that
discord is as normal as harmony, even the hope
of freedom from the bondage of sickness and
sin has little inspiration to nerve endeavor. When we
come to have more faith in the truth of being than we have
in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith
in living than in dying, more faith in God than in man,
then no material suppositions can prevent us from healing
the sick and destroying error.
Life independent of matter
368:20
That Life is not contingent on bodily conditions is
That Life is not contingent on bodily conditions is
proved, when we learn that life and man survive this
body. Neither evil, disease, nor death can be
spiritual, and the material belief in them dis-
appears in the ratio of one's spiritual growth. Because
matter has no consciousness or Ego, it cannot act; its
conditions are illusions, and these false conditions are the
source of all seeming sickness. Admit the existence of
matter, and you admit that mortality (and therefore dis-
ease) has a foundation in fact. Deny the existence of
matter, and you can destroy the belief in material con-
ditions. When fear disappears, the foundation of disease
is gone. Once let the mental physician believe in the
369:1
reality of matter, and he is liable to admit also the reality
reality of matter, and he is liable to admit also the reality
of all discordant conditions, and this hinders his de-
stroying them. Thus he is unfitted for the successful
treatment of disease.
Man's entity
369:5
In proportion as matter loses to human sense all en-
In proportion as matter loses to human sense all en-
tity as man, in that proportion does man become its
master. He enters into a diviner sense of the
facts, and comprehends the theology of Jesus
as demonstrated in healing the sick, raising the dead,
and walking over the wave. All these deeds manifested
Jesus' control over the belief that matter is substance,
that it can be the arbiter of life or the constructor of any
form of existence.
The Christ treatment
369:14
We never read that Luke or Paul made a reality of
We never read that Luke or Paul made a reality of
disease in order to discover some means of healing it.
Jesus never asked if disease were acute or
chronic, and he never recommended atten-
tion to laws of health, never gave drugs, never prayed
to know if God were willing that a man should live. He
understood man, whose life is God, to be immortal, and
knew that man has not two lives, one to be destroyed and
the other to be made indestructible.
Matter not medicine
369:23
The prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the prevent-
The prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the prevent-
ive and curative) arts belong emphatically to Christian
Science, as would be readily seen, if psychology,
or the Science of Spirit, God, was understood.
Unscientific methods are finding their dead level. Lim-
ited to matter by their own law, what have they of the
advantages of Mind and immortality?
No healing in sin
369:30
No man is physically healed in wilful error or by it,
No man is physically healed in wilful error or by it,
any more than he is morally saved in or by sin. It is
error even to murmur or to be angry over sin. To be