Article October 9, 1926 Issue

Uncovering Error

FREDDA R. GRATKE

Those striving to follow the example of Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in the overcoming of sin, disease, and death by spiritual means, cannot study too earnestly the Scriptural account of the healing ministry of the Master. Throughout his entire career, while showing unmistakably the inevitable connection between sin and disease, Christ Jesus made no more of a reality of the one than of the other. His method is a rebuke to those of his followers who, while striving to free a sufferer from disease, permit themselves to uncover error in the spirit of unrighteous condemnation, holding it as a reality.

The truth is that divine Love, rightly understood, wipes away both sin and its effect, disease; and the Christian Scientist's work is to unsee and thereby to heal both by the realization of the perfection of God and His idea, man. True, Mrs. Eddy teaches that error must be uncovered, and that in the process of uncovering it is partly destroyed. But what does the destroying and the uncovering? On page 542 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy says, "Let Truth uncover and destroy error in God's own way." When, therefore, the truth of being is unfolded rightly, sin and disease lose their hold in consciousness, and Truth, not the human so-called mentality, does the work. A mental probing about in the debris of human thinking for a so-called cause of a discord finds no support in the instruction Jesus gave his disciples. When asked, "Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus' answer, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him," proved that he meant them to understand that error is always impersonal, belonging neither to person, place, nor thing.

So when an error is uncovered in the consciousness of a patient, should it not always be seen as an unreality? We are never justified in thinking of it as more of a reality than the disease, fearing it or condemning it as though part of a person. Is the one to be healed to make no effort, then, to overcome human error? Yes. The one who comes to Christian Science for healing has his work to do in the purification of his own consciousness, but this purifying process concerns the practitioner only in so far as his scientific work assists it; and it must never be forgotten that a practitioner's office is not a confessional. It is not so-called mortal mind that is to be made perfect through human effort, but the false mortal sense of man that is to be laid aside for the apprehension of the spiritual, perfect, real man, in proportion as divine Love is permitted to operate in consciousness. Jesus did not wait for the one who appealed to him for help to become humanly perfect before he relieved him of his suffering: he saw both the sin and the suffering as no part of the real man.

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