Higher Understanding Essential

Christian Science brings to men the understanding of God which destroys evil. This understanding is based on the absolute supremacy of Mind, and the eternality, perfection, and immutability of the divine creation. As the light of spiritual understanding dawns upon human thought, a transformation takes place,—evil beliefs are destroyed both for the individual and for the race. Usually the evils first destroyed are those that seem most obvious as evils to the human mind. Hence, people generally first desire to be healed of sickness because of the pain and fear it occasions.

As understanding of spiritual things increases, men and women see more clearly the falsity of prevailing systems of thought and are willing and eager to be freed from them. As a result crude, materialistic systems of medicine and theology begin to crumble and disintegrate when subjected to the searchlight of truth as applied through the enlightened thought of the adherents of Truth. Divine Science makes clear that there can be no unity of matter and Spirit, of mortal mind and divine Mind. Systems of thought which openly flaunt their grossness and materiality are easily detected as false by the alert metaphysical student. As a result these systems are to-day on the wane. Their false pretense of power to protect, heal, or punish is seen for what it really is and no longer deceives those who have caught a glimpse of spiritual creation. Christian Scientists generally are alert to reverse and destroy the aggressions of these crude systems, whether of theology or medicine. They no longer fear them, and they are no longer influenced by them.

Let no Christian Scientist vainly imagine, however, that evil is ended because its grosser forms no longer entangle him. Gross systems entrap gross minds; but evil is subtle,—"more subtil," we are told in Genesis, "than any beast of the field," so that when its grosser modes of theology, medicine, or mysticism fail to hold mortals in bondage to material sense evidence, this supposititious serpent, evil, to save itself from total destruction, immediately attempts to counterfeit truth more closely. Now, if the insight of metaphysical workers is not clear enough to detect this more subtle counterfeit of good, evil of course can go on indefinitely working its destructive course, and its workings will be all the more destructive if the student not only fails to detect the new counterfeit, but is so far misled by it that he thinks it is the same as Christian Science.

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Church Development
November 2, 1918
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