Article January 30, 1926 Issue

A recent issue of your paper contains a report of a lecture...

Mrs. Gudrun G. Jensen, Committee on Publication for Norway,—Bergen

Morgenavisen

A recent issue of your paper contains a report of a lecture on "The Form and Color of Our Thoughts" in which the lecturer intimated that suggestion and Christian Science are one and the same. May I therefore ask space for a correction of this misrepresentation of Christian Science? When the lecturer starts from the point that thoughts have their origin in the gray mass which is believed to form the human brain, this utterance is enough to show that the lecturer's meaning about thoughts and suggestion is wholly different from the teaching of Christian Science. Christian Science starts with one perfect, unchangeable Principle, one cause, named God. Consequently, it must be admitted that there is only one effect or creation that always has been, and always will be, exactly like that cause. Christian Science, therefore, declares that the eternal facts of being, from which alone one can logically reason, are perfect cause or Principle, and perfect effect or existence.

What is called mortal existence is a false sense of existence, based on wrong thinking, and it expresses much that is erroneous, together with a great deal of hate and fear, which are the opposites of divine Love. This state of thinking is not something to be desired, but something to be put off. Christian Science teaches that whatever is worth having, whether it be health, holiness, happiness, strength, or wisdom, must exist as divine thoughts or ideas, because God, the only cause, could only create ideas or divine thoughts. Is man less real because he is in reality divinely mental and exists as a divine idea or as one of God's individual thoughts, and because he obtains and retains his health, holiness, happiness—all that is necessary to his well-being—by way of divine ideas? Or is it better to believe that man cannot gain health, holiness, or happiness by way of indestructible divine ideas, but by way of an illusory material condition, which is constantly at the mercy of false human laws?

God operates through His ideas with infinite power and intelligence. When man is thinking right thoughts about his brother, understanding that in reality man exists and always has existed as God's true likeness, as a perfect idea, perfect as the Father who created him—surely, such understanding must emanate from God, the one and only Mind; for if it were not so, then there would be more than only Mind. Can man think a true thought or conceive a divine idea which God has not already thought or conceived? Knowing and understanding this, the Christian Scientist acknowledges that it is God alone who operates through His idea, man, to heal and to save mankind from every false, mortal condition. Christ Jesus said, "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them." This must mean that when we pray, we must understand the actual facts of being, the perfect cause or God, and the perfect effect or idea; and this understanding will operate with infinite power. It is only as we follow Jesus' example, overcoming belief in a selfhood apart from God, that we can succeed in any line of righteous human endeavor; because the healings which are done through Christian Science to-day are accomplished entirely through the activity of the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus." Christian Science cannot be confounded with any sort of suggestion. All systems of suggestion hypnotism, et cetera, are wholly material, dependent upon belief in the efficacy and power of the so-called human mind. Christian Science practice, depending alone upon the activity of Spirit, God, is known by Christian Scientists as the only true spiritual method of healing. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 482): "Christian Science is the law of Truth, which heals the sick on the basis of the one Mind or God. It can heal in no other way, since the human, mortal mind so-called is not a healer, but causes the belief in disease."

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