When Pilate, in the hall of judgment, gave utterance to his hopeless and helpless question, "What is truth?" the Greek text of the New Testament makes it clear that he was not alluding to absolute Truth, but to the mere human sense of what stood relatively for the truth in the world about him. The prisoner before him had appealed from the procurator's blundering and cowardly effort to administer justice in Jerusalem, without imperiling his favor at the court of Cæsar, to the fact that Truth was absolute, and consequently realizable. Pilate's reply, half weary, half cynical, was really an ejaculation rather than a question. "What is truth?" he asked, meaning, What do we actually know about anything in this world of relative values? It is just this Pilatian unwillingness to face facts which gets the man in the street into so many of his difficulties. He is forever satisfied with measuring Truth by some relative standard, but get him to accept the absolute Truth you cannot. If he is a bishop and a Berkeley, he insists upon the unreality of matter, and then if you are sick prescribes tar water. If he is merely a bishop, he preaches the infinity of God, and then handicaps this with the ubiquity of the devil. It was, surely, in the vocabulary of Huxley, such "mired logicians" and "common-sense philosophers" whom Mrs. Eddy had in mind when she wrote, on page 410 of Science and Health, "The Scriptures say, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,' showing that Truth is the actual life of man; but mankind objects to making this teaching practical."

In the degree in which mankind does make it so, it substitutes ideas for material phenomena, and then all sorts of things begin to happen. It begins, for instance, to be comprehensible how divine Mind controls the universe, so that it may truly be said that it bringeth forth Mazzaroth in his season, and guideth Arcturus and his sons; in other words, that the power of Principle is dominant in the counterfeit material universe, as in the spiritual and real one. Divine Mind, that is to say, necessarily governs its own system of ideas, which constitutes the worlds created by it, just as its counterfeit, the mortal mind, governs the system of material ideas which constitutes the physical universe. But though ignorance may insist that two and two are five, a knowledge of the truth overcomes and corrects this ignorance; and, in the same way, the human belief in the reality of a mortal mind and of its creature, the physical universe, can be corrected and overcome by a knowledge of the spiritual fact that in reality nothing exists except divine Mind and its infinite manifestation. When first, however, a man begins to grasp something of the truth of being, the immediate effect is to substitute harmony for inharmony in his physical being and surroundings. This is what Paul means by the expression seeing in a glass darkly. But as this vision of the Christ, Truth, strengthens, he begins to see realities face to face, till in time he grows into the stature of the Christ. In doing this he must gradually put off the flesh until nothing but the Christ is left. The whole of this process is what Christ Jesus was referring to when he said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

It is obvious, then, that the cause of a case of sickness or of an epidemic, of a street fight, a riot, or a war, of any apparently physical action at all, from the growing of a blade of grass to the destruction of Herculaneum, lies in the claim of the human mind, set down in the Jehovistic document of the book of Genesis, to a knowledge of good and evil. This knowledge of two opposites means a constant swinging of the pendulum of material expression between the two, because this expression is nothing but the subjective condition of the human mind. Then as the balance of human mentality swings to, or away from, a riot or a war, the sickness of an individual or an epidemic, there follows peace or war, sickness or health. Exactly what this means, and how it works, is explained by Mrs. Eddy, in dealing with the effect of poison on a person unconscious of having taken poison, in a passage on pages 177-178 of Science and Health: "In such cases a few persons believe the potion swallowed by the patient to be harmless, but the vast majority of mankind, though they know nothing of this particular case and this special person, believe the arsenic, the strychnine, or whatever the drug used, to be poisonous, for it is set down as a poison by mortal mind. Consequently, the result is controlled by the majority of opinions, not by the infinitesimal minority of opinions in the sick-chamber."