Chapter XII - Christian Science Practice
Real and counterfeit
368:1
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.
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, 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.
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 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 disappears 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 disease) has a foundation in fact. Deny the existence of matter, and you can destroy the belief in material conditions. When fear disappears, the foundation of disease is gone. Once let the mental physician believe in the reality of matter, and he is liable to admit also the reality of all discordant conditions, and this hinders his destroying them. Thus he is unfitted for the successful treatment of disease.
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 disappears 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 disease) has a foundation in fact. Deny the existence of matter, and you can destroy the belief in material conditions. When fear disappears, the foundation of disease is gone. Once let the mental physician believe in the reality of matter, and he is liable to admit also the reality of all discordant conditions, and this hinders his destroying 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 entity 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.
In proportion as matter loses to human sense all entity 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 disease in order to discover some means of healing it. Jesus never asked if disease were acute or chronic, and he never recommended attention 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.
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 attention 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 preventive 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. Limited to matter by their own law, what have they of the advantages of Mind and immortality?
The prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the preventive 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. Limited 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, 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
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