Article January 5, 1935 Issue

It Cannot Endure

WILLIAM R. RATHVON

THE mission of Christian Science is to heal sin by destroying it. Sin cannot be healed in any other way than by spiritual understanding, even as darkness cannot be dispelled by anything but light. Error of every kind is the belief of God's absence, just as darkness is the absence of light. (See Science and Health, p. 215.) So when the omnipresence of Truth, Life, and Love is realized, the intruding error is not merely pushed aside or driven away, but is destroyed, just as the darkness of the night is annihilated when confronted by the light of day. It does not hide or move itself away to some other place; it no longer seems to exist. Error cannot endure; for, as Mrs. Eddy says in "Unity of Good" (p. 24), "Spirit is all that endureth."

The healing of sickness in Christian Science rests on the correction or the destruction of a false belief about a man being sick. It is accomplished by bringing into human consciousness the eternal fact that man made in the image and likeness of God is not sick, never was and never can be sick, but is always well; not impaired but complete; not discordant but harmonious. Arrayed against this fact is a group of five witnesses or senses whose testimony is impressive, and, according to their own standards, irrefutable; but their testimony is false and their standards are spurious and illusive. The five senses have no standing whatever in the realm of Spirit, where the real man lives, moves, and has his being. Reality is never sensuous.

How, then, are we to proceed in a case wherein the senses are presenting a sick man whom we are expected to change into a well one? A first step is to disconnect the delusive evidence from the actual fact—in other words, to "make the separation." This significant phrase was first used long ago, by some of Mrs. Eddy's students of wide experience, to express the mental process whereby sickness is seen to be a thing apart from the one who is manifesting it, a false belief which is as imponderable as darkness, and as formless and colorless, without inherent power of self-expression or self-perpetuation. That which is not is no part of that which is.

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