No one can study Christian Science without becoming aware of the radical nature of its teachings. It states the truth about God and His creation, and deviates not at all from that truth. Many may come disappointingly short of the demonstration of it; but, as Christian Science reveals, it remains unalterable. And as with the truth itself, so all the deductions logically drawn from it are likewise definite, unchangeable, radical. Thus Christian Science, declaring that God is perfect, that God is infinite good, maintains that what men call evil has no reality. Evil may seem to mortals to be real, may claim to exist under many forms of disease and sin; but, as Christian Science asserts, it has no real being, no identity, no real place, and no real power, since God, good, is infinite.

Now, unless the student of Christian Science keeps these facts before him, he is liable to find himself falling far short of the results expected in his practice; for it is sheer futility to try to destroy the errors of mortal belief with thought divided between Truth and error, good and evil, Spirit and so-called matter. If such an attempt be made, there is the danger of falling back upon the efforts of the so-called human mind, efforts diametrically the opposite of Christian Science. The danger is sometimes very subtle, since it is easy to talk of a claim or of a belief of sickness or sin, and to leave it there, as if a claim or a belief were really something.

Mrs. Eddy is most instructive on the question. In "Unity of Good" (p. 54) she writes: "To say there is a false claim, called sickness, is to admit all there is of sickness; for it is nothing but a false claim. To be healed, one must lose sight of a false claim." Then she adds: "To regard sickness as a false claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called fact of the claim. In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every claim of error." Could there be plainer writing than that? Does not our Leader analyze the situation perfectly? Sickness is "nothing but a false claim," a false belief. To recognize that it is a claim "is to abate the fear of it;" but the Christian Scientist must go farther than that, — he must realize that the so-called claim itself has no reality, and handle it mentally as nothing. Unless he does that, his mental work is incomplete, and proportionably inefficacious.