Editorial October 31, 1936 Issue

"Truth cannot be reversed"

George Shaw Cook

When confronted by the suggestion that the effect of their healing work can be reversed, or that a disease which has once been healed can recur, students of Christian Science have often been helped by the following passage from "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 442): "Neither animal magnetism nor hypnotism enters into the practice of Christian Science, in which truth cannot be reversed, but the reverse of error is true. An improved belief cannot retrograde."

The law of God, the law of infinite progression, is proved in human experience to be a law of progress which admits of no retrogression. The healing of disease by spiritual power, through understanding and demonstrating the utter unreality of disease, includes no provision for or expectancy of recurrence relapse. "Affliction shall not rise up the second time," is the dictum of Scriptures. This declaration of the prophet Nahum referred to the affliction visited upon Israel by its enemies, but it applies equally to affliction of all kinds, including disease and pain, imposed by mortal mind on those ignorant of how to resist its evil suggestions.

Sickness, sin, lack, failure, loss, and unemployment are afflictions, and it is good to have the Scriptural assurance that they "shall not rise up the second time." And Christian Science explains why this is true. The belief in disease, having once been destroyed through the power of Christ, Truth, is proved unreal. If its symptoms should seem to appear again, it would not be disease per se, but merely the suggestion of animal magnetism that there will be a return of a diseased belief. "A false belief is both the tempter and the tempted, the sin and the sinner, the disease and its cause" (Science and Health, p. 393). These errors, then, are all one and the same thing, that is, mortal mind, of which Mrs. Eddy has said that it is "nothing claiming to be something" (ibid., p. 591). Therefore, mortal mind, with all that it believes, is nothing; and it should be admitted without argument that there cannot be a return of "nothing"; hence the baselessness and powerlessness of the claim of return or recurrence of disease.