Article February 1, 1913 Issue

BETTER BELIEF

JULIA C. LEONARD.

Are personal sense and mortal mind never to be redeemed and never to be saved? In reply to this question we need but refer to Mrs. Eddy's writings to become acquainted with the fact that all which is mortal and material is not the reality of existence, but an illusion from which there must some time be a great awakening. This awakening through the realization of the truth of being is the yielding of personal material sense to spiritual understanding, by which erroneous beliefs are destroyed in the appearing of a better belief, until the belief of a material existence apart from God, of life and intelligence in matter, yields to the understanding that all life and intelligence are included in God and His manifestation.

In Science and Health (p. 485) Mrs. Eddy says: "Emerge gently from matter into Spirit." Mortals cannot expect to advance from sin to holiness at one bound, and faithful students of Christian Science have learned that it has been only by gradually overcoming the old beliefs, and having in their place better beliefs, that they have been able to reach that understanding which enables them to go to the bedside of the sick and suffering and speak the word which brings deliverance. From the beginning, material existence has been a struggle to get rid of sin and sickness, and Christ Jesus showed mortals that they were to overcome these ills, not by reliance upon material remedies, but by the power of Spirit. Of evil he said: "When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

Respecting this declaration by the Master, Mrs. Eddy says: "Jesus treated the lie summarily. He denied it, cast it out of mortal mind, and thus healed sickness and sin" (Christian Science vs. Pantheism, p. 5). Jesus thus proved that all evil is unreal; that it is not true, for it is not of God. The understanding of the scientific fact that God is the only cause and creator, is the basis of Christian Science healing, and it enabled Jesus and his disciples to heal the sick. The creator of good could not be a creator of evil, and the Bible tells us that "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." When mortals cease believing that there is a creator of evil as well as of good, they will cease believing in evil and gain a better belief, and thoughts of sin and sickness will become less and less real.

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